Masterclass IV: Verisimilitude
To create verisimilitude in writing is, essentially, to create something that gives the appearance of being real or of reflecting reality. It's a concept that is better illustrated by thinking of a stage or a movie set: what you see looks very real and functions for whatever purpose it needs to, but it has been deliberately constructed to do so. It looks real, but it's made of plywood and the backs are missing. It exists only as it is needed in order to fulfill its artistic purpose.
In writing, things are very much the same. We do not write directly from life when we write fiction, because real life is frequently boring and we run the risk of ending up with a heap of extraneous details that don't serve the story we are trying to tell. The trick is determining how much reality you need in order to convince your readers--much as a team of set builders will put in enough work to fool everyone from the front row back, but not get overly concerned with the detail work.
Part of the reason I say this is because verisimilitude is highly dependent upon stylistic choices, and "style" is a nebulous concept that would take all day to review comprehensively. If you're reading this, I assume you like Man From U.N.C.L.E., and so should be able to understand one of the key points of the relationship between style (or genre and tone) and verisimilitude: that "realism" need not always be a factor in creating believability. If you are writing something that is deliberately campy, or a piece that is based in fantasy, it’s not as necessary to force it to conform to real-world expectations. What you look for, then, is internal consistency and cohesion. In real-world or semi-real settings, it is often acceptable to fudge details or make alterations in order to make a plot work or create a more believable scene. Remember: you only have to convince the first row. So your description of a crime scene, of surgery, of flying an airplane isn’t going to convince a detective, a doctor, or a pilot? So what? It’s not a big issue, unless all of your readers are detectives, doctors, or pilots-then you might consider that you are writing for the wrong audience.
A general audience, however, will buy into damn near anything, so long as you say it convincingly. (I believe that it’s “seventy percent how you look, twenty percent how you sound, and ten percent what you say”-thanks, Eddie.)
The factors that go into creating a believable physical space are multifarious: you are considering things like setting, props, elements of plot, background characters, etc., etc. Setting is a more complex subject than you might think, since creating a setting involves the creation of whatever indoor and outdoor spaces your characters may be using. In a Man from U.N.C.L.E. story, common settings are things like the U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters in New York, Napoleon or Illya’s apartment, a hotel room, or a Thrush cell. Those are all what I tend to think of as “small” settings; a large setting would be, oh, “New York” as opposed to “U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters in New York.”
The difference between the two is that you should know a fair amount about the large setting before you begin working in the small one. If you’ve never been to New York, well, you are at a disadvantage. I won’t lie to you. But that should never put you off of writing about a place. The common writers’ fallacy is that you should “write what you know,” and it’s the reason why I’m stuck in class after class of college-aged students who write about breaking up with their boyfriends and living in student housing. You can imagine how dreadfully boring that is to have to read. This is why the adage should be: “Know a lot about the things that interest you and that you want to write about.” It’s not as pithy, but it’s more accurate.
Again, no one expects you to be perfect. For example: there is a wealth of information available about my hometown (and, incidentally, that history made watching “The Cap and Gown Affair” a little, um, creepy). Someone who had never been there could easily write a story that was set in the area. Hell, it could probably be done using only Wikipedia for information. Would that story really ring true to me? It depends on how well it was written, how much research went into it, and how detailed the author chose to be.
One thing, in my opinion, to stay away from is the listing of facts or landmarks or even street names if they aren’t important. This is kind of a loose rule, and one that is heavily dependent on your setting. In a story set in New York City, for example, you’re expected to use street names and other specifics, because that’s how New York is commonly talked and written about. For other locations, that level of specificity can be jarring and detrimental. Settings are more evocative for readers if you concentrate on creating characteristic sensory images throughout the story. This holds true for when you’re concentrating on, say, a hospital room or an apartment as your setting, as well for a large city.
For example, if I were going to describe Kent, I would probably begin with the railroad tracks and the sound of the trains coming through; I would move on to the Cuyahoga River, the number of trees, the black squirrels, the Masonic Temple, the schools I attended, the homes I lived in, the rich district and the poorer district, the University campus and how students interact with the town’s permanent residents, the traffic, the stores that are downtown, the towns that border Kent-as you can see, there’s a wealth of material there that could be used to create a setting. But most of the details would be tedious for readers who had never been in the area. So what writers can do is extrapolate from their own lives and distill the details into something that is manageable. In effect, what I’m saying is that I can take my experiences growing up in a smallish college town in Ohio and use them to write about small and medium-sized towns in places that I’ve never been to before. Part of the goal of writing is to tap into the commonalities of experience, but let’s face it… you won’t be able to get the same reaction out of everyone. The goal is to write so that, say, the city-dwellers can imagine what life is like in a small town (or vice versa), but it’s obviously going to ring more true for people who have had similar experiences. (One book I’ve read that happened to capture the small American farm town malaise quite well is Still Life With Crows by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, in case anyone has any interest in that subject.)
So, how does one write about a place they’ve never been? Well, for Aching Like Birds, I began by reading about India and Mumbai on Wikipedia. Of course, there’s a major discrepancy to be noticed right there: what is now known as Mumbai would have been Bombay in the 1960s. Time period is as much a part of your setting as anything else, but unfortunately you will very rarely find articles entitled “A Guide to [Place Name] in the [Time Period You Want].” I mean, it’s great when you do, but you won’t always be so lucky. (I sure wasn’t.) So, basically, you do your best and just try to avoid anachronisms.
Additionally, I looked at maps of the city and read articles online. I also tried the local campus library, but was actually unable to find much material I could use. I read some texts about poverty in Calcutta, but that was more of an education for myself than it was specifically useful to the story. A lot of my research ended up with a focus on prostitution and child prostitution in India and specifically in Mumbai. (This is because the rather brief scene featuring Napoleon and the girl was initially an idea that was separate from the one that featured Dr. Boucher.) In a way, I find that information like that is often helpful whether or not I end up using specific details, since I absorb a lot of the material subconsciously and it helps to give me a background to draw from as I write. Even if that background is a patchwork one, it’s better than nothing at all. If I’d had more time and been super-enthusiastic, I might also have rented a few Bollywood movies.
Of course, the best resource is having a friend or acquaintance with direct experience whose help you can solicit. But it’s good not to rely on completely on someone else, and also to know how to use other resources you have at hand. Luckily, if personal experience is not available to you, you have the Internet. If you know how to search for things on Google, you are halfway to whatever it is you are trying to find out.
Still, you can do all that research and have it not turn out the way you would like it to. I wish “Aching Like Birds” had turned out better in this regard, but at some point I had to give myself points for trying and move on. (If you find yourself in a similar place, I suppose you can always go back a few months later, should your heart desire it.)
But now I’m going to move on from concentrating on aspects of setting, to the far more difficult subject of achieving emotional and social verisimilitude. The two go hand-in-hand, in my experience, since a writer should know what a character is feeling emotionally in order to write his or her behavior in a social context. But the ability to understand characters on an emotional and social level is a skill that is best honed through conscious observation-not only of the people-watching variety, but also observation of how other writers handle all types of characters.
Happily, you can people-watch in any number of ways. There’s the ever-popular method of staking out a spot in a busy area and just, well, watching people. But with media being what it is today, television and movies and books and magazines are all acceptable sources. What’s important when observing commercial media, of course, is to ask yourself what the goals of the production are and where characters or individuals might be embellishing or lying or trying to manipulate viewers. An excellent exercise is to watch reality shows, pick out the characters you like and the characters you hate, and then determine what characteristics are most endearing and irritating to you. Then, switch it around. Why might someone disagree? What good qualities do the characters you dislike have? What irritating qualities do your favorites have? Irritating characters can be such excellent characters, and the good news is that everyone is irritating in one way or another.
I also recommend keeping a journal of observations, not just of people but of sensory images as well. What you write down may never come in useful, but it will be excellent practice and over time you should find that you are more able to isolate character and setting details that will be useful and interesting in a story.
The Internet is another excellent place to observe people, in any number of different ways. You can observe a wide range of people interacting by lurking on messageboards and communities here on Livejournal. And not only can you gain access to a lot of other media online, but Youtube is a great resource for observing average people. I wrote Illya’s seizure at the beginning of “Aching Like Birds” after searching for “seizure” on Youtube and viewing a half a dozen videos average people had made of themselves having seizures (from mild to tonic clonic). It was an unexpected resource that was a great help to me, since I’ve never been a direct witness to someone else’s seizure.
Your experiences from real-life are, again, probably the most helpful resources you have, and are useful no matter how prosaic they may seem in the context of your own life. I used the more childish experience of being left behind by your peers for “ We Used To Be Friends,” and though I transposed it onto two adult men, I went ahead and used that childishness as an element in the story anyway. In the end, the effect I hope I achieved was a sense of fragility between the two states of development, and of the uncertainty of “growing up” when your work is (mostly) play. That’s reading a bit deeply into it, but I think it’s more or less obvious how I drew something I experienced to some degree and used it in a story in a way that people besides myself can recognize and identify with.
On a more specific note, the entire scene in “Aching Like Birds” where Illya is awakened from sedation was written after a very specific event. Here’s an excerpt:
Illya was trying to move to the side, away from Napoleon, but after that first burst of energy he had become slow and sluggish, kicking clumsily and prying at Napoleon's fingers one by one. When Napoleon failed to let go, Illya stretched his neck down to gnaw on the knuckles of the hand closest to his mouth.
Napoleon yelped and let go, although Illya's teeth had not broken the skin. Illya began crawling away, trying with little success to stand. In the meantime, Boucher had managed to place the cork back on the vial, and as Illya came close he grabbed him by the upper arm and, without restraining his movement, held him steady. "Illya," he said, his voice stern and commanding, but with none of the urgency that Napoleon had heard during Illya's seizure. "Illya, stop and look here." He caught Illya's other shoulder in his free hand, forcing him to stop. Illya's head fell back, and he regarded Boucher through heavily-lidded eyes. "Illya, my name is Dr. Boucher. We have not met before now. You and I and your friend--" At this, Illya tried to turn his head to look at Napoleon, but Boucher caught his to keep from diverting his attention. "--we are in a prison cell. Do you recall what country you are in?"
"India," Illya answered, drawing out the vowel sounds.
"Good. Can you tell me your full name?"
Napoleon snorted. "This could take all night." He nursed the red indentations in the skin around the knuckle of his middle finger. Boucher glanced his way and shook his head once as a warning. Napoleon shrugged and looked away, but listened intently as Illya struggled to speak.
"Illya... Nick--um, Nick--Nick... um, Kuryakin." He was slurring his words terribly and having great difficulty keeping his head up; his chin was nearly touching his chest as he mumbled answers to Boucher's questions until the doctor was satisfied.
This summer, kleenexwoman and I dealt with a roommate who had accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills and alcohol. (She’s fine now.) Afterwards, kleenexwoman had joked that at least I could use the event to write the scenes where Illya was still mostly sedated. At the time I hadn’t been particularly worried about having to write those scenes, but I do admit that the incident informed most of what I wound up writing. Interestingly, were I asked to give an account of what happened, I would invariably concentrate on what I experienced and my own feelings and actions during the entire thing. However, when writing, I had to transfer the focus of my memories over to her, and pick and choose details accordingly. It was a bit like being able to play a movie from the perspective of a supporting character. Basically, when writing from one of your own experiences, you may need to be able to shift your attention away from where it may naturally fall in order to get the details or information you want.
There’s a wealth of things to be said on all aspects of verisimilitude, and ways to go about creating it. Obviously, I can’t cover it all here. In a lot of ways, we don’t even think about verisimilitude until something in a story does not convince us. On the other hand, drawing attention to it as an intrinsic part of fiction writing may allow more people to better learn how to use real life and research to their fullest potentials when creating a story.
In writing, things are very much the same. We do not write directly from life when we write fiction, because real life is frequently boring and we run the risk of ending up with a heap of extraneous details that don't serve the story we are trying to tell. The trick is determining how much reality you need in order to convince your readers--much as a team of set builders will put in enough work to fool everyone from the front row back, but not get overly concerned with the detail work.
Part of the reason I say this is because verisimilitude is highly dependent upon stylistic choices, and "style" is a nebulous concept that would take all day to review comprehensively. If you're reading this, I assume you like Man From U.N.C.L.E., and so should be able to understand one of the key points of the relationship between style (or genre and tone) and verisimilitude: that "realism" need not always be a factor in creating believability. If you are writing something that is deliberately campy, or a piece that is based in fantasy, it’s not as necessary to force it to conform to real-world expectations. What you look for, then, is internal consistency and cohesion. In real-world or semi-real settings, it is often acceptable to fudge details or make alterations in order to make a plot work or create a more believable scene. Remember: you only have to convince the first row. So your description of a crime scene, of surgery, of flying an airplane isn’t going to convince a detective, a doctor, or a pilot? So what? It’s not a big issue, unless all of your readers are detectives, doctors, or pilots-then you might consider that you are writing for the wrong audience.
A general audience, however, will buy into damn near anything, so long as you say it convincingly. (I believe that it’s “seventy percent how you look, twenty percent how you sound, and ten percent what you say”-thanks, Eddie.)
The factors that go into creating a believable physical space are multifarious: you are considering things like setting, props, elements of plot, background characters, etc., etc. Setting is a more complex subject than you might think, since creating a setting involves the creation of whatever indoor and outdoor spaces your characters may be using. In a Man from U.N.C.L.E. story, common settings are things like the U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters in New York, Napoleon or Illya’s apartment, a hotel room, or a Thrush cell. Those are all what I tend to think of as “small” settings; a large setting would be, oh, “New York” as opposed to “U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters in New York.”
The difference between the two is that you should know a fair amount about the large setting before you begin working in the small one. If you’ve never been to New York, well, you are at a disadvantage. I won’t lie to you. But that should never put you off of writing about a place. The common writers’ fallacy is that you should “write what you know,” and it’s the reason why I’m stuck in class after class of college-aged students who write about breaking up with their boyfriends and living in student housing. You can imagine how dreadfully boring that is to have to read. This is why the adage should be: “Know a lot about the things that interest you and that you want to write about.” It’s not as pithy, but it’s more accurate.
Again, no one expects you to be perfect. For example: there is a wealth of information available about my hometown (and, incidentally, that history made watching “The Cap and Gown Affair” a little, um, creepy). Someone who had never been there could easily write a story that was set in the area. Hell, it could probably be done using only Wikipedia for information. Would that story really ring true to me? It depends on how well it was written, how much research went into it, and how detailed the author chose to be.
One thing, in my opinion, to stay away from is the listing of facts or landmarks or even street names if they aren’t important. This is kind of a loose rule, and one that is heavily dependent on your setting. In a story set in New York City, for example, you’re expected to use street names and other specifics, because that’s how New York is commonly talked and written about. For other locations, that level of specificity can be jarring and detrimental. Settings are more evocative for readers if you concentrate on creating characteristic sensory images throughout the story. This holds true for when you’re concentrating on, say, a hospital room or an apartment as your setting, as well for a large city.
For example, if I were going to describe Kent, I would probably begin with the railroad tracks and the sound of the trains coming through; I would move on to the Cuyahoga River, the number of trees, the black squirrels, the Masonic Temple, the schools I attended, the homes I lived in, the rich district and the poorer district, the University campus and how students interact with the town’s permanent residents, the traffic, the stores that are downtown, the towns that border Kent-as you can see, there’s a wealth of material there that could be used to create a setting. But most of the details would be tedious for readers who had never been in the area. So what writers can do is extrapolate from their own lives and distill the details into something that is manageable. In effect, what I’m saying is that I can take my experiences growing up in a smallish college town in Ohio and use them to write about small and medium-sized towns in places that I’ve never been to before. Part of the goal of writing is to tap into the commonalities of experience, but let’s face it… you won’t be able to get the same reaction out of everyone. The goal is to write so that, say, the city-dwellers can imagine what life is like in a small town (or vice versa), but it’s obviously going to ring more true for people who have had similar experiences. (One book I’ve read that happened to capture the small American farm town malaise quite well is Still Life With Crows by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, in case anyone has any interest in that subject.)
So, how does one write about a place they’ve never been? Well, for Aching Like Birds, I began by reading about India and Mumbai on Wikipedia. Of course, there’s a major discrepancy to be noticed right there: what is now known as Mumbai would have been Bombay in the 1960s. Time period is as much a part of your setting as anything else, but unfortunately you will very rarely find articles entitled “A Guide to [Place Name] in the [Time Period You Want].” I mean, it’s great when you do, but you won’t always be so lucky. (I sure wasn’t.) So, basically, you do your best and just try to avoid anachronisms.
Additionally, I looked at maps of the city and read articles online. I also tried the local campus library, but was actually unable to find much material I could use. I read some texts about poverty in Calcutta, but that was more of an education for myself than it was specifically useful to the story. A lot of my research ended up with a focus on prostitution and child prostitution in India and specifically in Mumbai. (This is because the rather brief scene featuring Napoleon and the girl was initially an idea that was separate from the one that featured Dr. Boucher.) In a way, I find that information like that is often helpful whether or not I end up using specific details, since I absorb a lot of the material subconsciously and it helps to give me a background to draw from as I write. Even if that background is a patchwork one, it’s better than nothing at all. If I’d had more time and been super-enthusiastic, I might also have rented a few Bollywood movies.
Of course, the best resource is having a friend or acquaintance with direct experience whose help you can solicit. But it’s good not to rely on completely on someone else, and also to know how to use other resources you have at hand. Luckily, if personal experience is not available to you, you have the Internet. If you know how to search for things on Google, you are halfway to whatever it is you are trying to find out.
Still, you can do all that research and have it not turn out the way you would like it to. I wish “Aching Like Birds” had turned out better in this regard, but at some point I had to give myself points for trying and move on. (If you find yourself in a similar place, I suppose you can always go back a few months later, should your heart desire it.)
But now I’m going to move on from concentrating on aspects of setting, to the far more difficult subject of achieving emotional and social verisimilitude. The two go hand-in-hand, in my experience, since a writer should know what a character is feeling emotionally in order to write his or her behavior in a social context. But the ability to understand characters on an emotional and social level is a skill that is best honed through conscious observation-not only of the people-watching variety, but also observation of how other writers handle all types of characters.
Happily, you can people-watch in any number of ways. There’s the ever-popular method of staking out a spot in a busy area and just, well, watching people. But with media being what it is today, television and movies and books and magazines are all acceptable sources. What’s important when observing commercial media, of course, is to ask yourself what the goals of the production are and where characters or individuals might be embellishing or lying or trying to manipulate viewers. An excellent exercise is to watch reality shows, pick out the characters you like and the characters you hate, and then determine what characteristics are most endearing and irritating to you. Then, switch it around. Why might someone disagree? What good qualities do the characters you dislike have? What irritating qualities do your favorites have? Irritating characters can be such excellent characters, and the good news is that everyone is irritating in one way or another.
I also recommend keeping a journal of observations, not just of people but of sensory images as well. What you write down may never come in useful, but it will be excellent practice and over time you should find that you are more able to isolate character and setting details that will be useful and interesting in a story.
The Internet is another excellent place to observe people, in any number of different ways. You can observe a wide range of people interacting by lurking on messageboards and communities here on Livejournal. And not only can you gain access to a lot of other media online, but Youtube is a great resource for observing average people. I wrote Illya’s seizure at the beginning of “Aching Like Birds” after searching for “seizure” on Youtube and viewing a half a dozen videos average people had made of themselves having seizures (from mild to tonic clonic). It was an unexpected resource that was a great help to me, since I’ve never been a direct witness to someone else’s seizure.
Your experiences from real-life are, again, probably the most helpful resources you have, and are useful no matter how prosaic they may seem in the context of your own life. I used the more childish experience of being left behind by your peers for “ We Used To Be Friends,” and though I transposed it onto two adult men, I went ahead and used that childishness as an element in the story anyway. In the end, the effect I hope I achieved was a sense of fragility between the two states of development, and of the uncertainty of “growing up” when your work is (mostly) play. That’s reading a bit deeply into it, but I think it’s more or less obvious how I drew something I experienced to some degree and used it in a story in a way that people besides myself can recognize and identify with.
On a more specific note, the entire scene in “Aching Like Birds” where Illya is awakened from sedation was written after a very specific event. Here’s an excerpt:
Illya was trying to move to the side, away from Napoleon, but after that first burst of energy he had become slow and sluggish, kicking clumsily and prying at Napoleon's fingers one by one. When Napoleon failed to let go, Illya stretched his neck down to gnaw on the knuckles of the hand closest to his mouth.
Napoleon yelped and let go, although Illya's teeth had not broken the skin. Illya began crawling away, trying with little success to stand. In the meantime, Boucher had managed to place the cork back on the vial, and as Illya came close he grabbed him by the upper arm and, without restraining his movement, held him steady. "Illya," he said, his voice stern and commanding, but with none of the urgency that Napoleon had heard during Illya's seizure. "Illya, stop and look here." He caught Illya's other shoulder in his free hand, forcing him to stop. Illya's head fell back, and he regarded Boucher through heavily-lidded eyes. "Illya, my name is Dr. Boucher. We have not met before now. You and I and your friend--" At this, Illya tried to turn his head to look at Napoleon, but Boucher caught his to keep from diverting his attention. "--we are in a prison cell. Do you recall what country you are in?"
"India," Illya answered, drawing out the vowel sounds.
"Good. Can you tell me your full name?"
Napoleon snorted. "This could take all night." He nursed the red indentations in the skin around the knuckle of his middle finger. Boucher glanced his way and shook his head once as a warning. Napoleon shrugged and looked away, but listened intently as Illya struggled to speak.
"Illya... Nick--um, Nick--Nick... um, Kuryakin." He was slurring his words terribly and having great difficulty keeping his head up; his chin was nearly touching his chest as he mumbled answers to Boucher's questions until the doctor was satisfied.
This summer, kleenexwoman and I dealt with a roommate who had accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills and alcohol. (She’s fine now.) Afterwards, kleenexwoman had joked that at least I could use the event to write the scenes where Illya was still mostly sedated. At the time I hadn’t been particularly worried about having to write those scenes, but I do admit that the incident informed most of what I wound up writing. Interestingly, were I asked to give an account of what happened, I would invariably concentrate on what I experienced and my own feelings and actions during the entire thing. However, when writing, I had to transfer the focus of my memories over to her, and pick and choose details accordingly. It was a bit like being able to play a movie from the perspective of a supporting character. Basically, when writing from one of your own experiences, you may need to be able to shift your attention away from where it may naturally fall in order to get the details or information you want.
There’s a wealth of things to be said on all aspects of verisimilitude, and ways to go about creating it. Obviously, I can’t cover it all here. In a lot of ways, we don’t even think about verisimilitude until something in a story does not convince us. On the other hand, drawing attention to it as an intrinsic part of fiction writing may allow more people to better learn how to use real life and research to their fullest potentials when creating a story.