The best fiction, the best novels, the best television shows, and movies all have one thing in common. They make you believe! They reel you in with a speck of truth and spin a tale that your imagination latches onto, and your heart welcomes through loss, defeat, and ultimately triumph.
That is… until it isn’t.
The key to great fiction is belief. The belief of the reader and of the viewer. Maintain that world of plausibility and explainability, and you have something great. You have fans that believe in the force, and a land far far away. Maintain that spell, and we all believe in magic!
Fiction is rooted in reality.
Unfortunately, if they bauble, if they don’t do their homework and present something that doesn’t quite make sense, that magical bubble of wonderment can burst.
These are small things in the grand scheme of things and probably only bother people like me. Still, they are often recurring and worth bringing up if only for the fun of it.
Swords are forged not cast
There’s an iconic scene in the Game of Thrones, and for that matter, the most recent Conan the Barbarian where swords are made!?!
The scene gives you a glimpse into another world, a secret world, where a technique and ability to shape metal is only known to master smiths. It is a secretive and dark profession. A crucible with angry boiling metal is poured into and flows down a channel before spilling into the shape of a sword. And voila, a sword is born!
Unfortunately, a sword is not made (never made) by pouring molten metal into a form that resembles the shape one desires. One could certainly do this and achieve the form of a sword; however, the strength of a sword lies in its grain pattern and forging techniques.
Cast metal is not as durable as forged metal. Compare forging a blade with the natural grain of wood and casting a blade with particleboard. Which is stronger?
The wood with the grain is stronger. Particleboard has its uses just as cast iron does, but no one would ever consider using it to frame a wall or make a baseball bat.
Zero gravity doesn’t exist
Did you know that the effects of gravity are everywhere? Did you know that weightlessness does not technically exist?
No matter where you are in our universe, some mass, the moon, the sun, the earth… is pulling on you. Or more accurately, there is always a force, no matter how slight, which draws two masses towards each other.
There is an equation in physics that explains it well. In layman’s terms, force (the feeling of weight) is the ratio of a gravitational constant, the mass of two objects, over the distance between the two objects.
In short, there is always a force – there is always gravity.
Gutting a deer is a bloody mess!
Wrong.
Despite the best intentions of authors and directors, field dressing large game like deer and elk does not result with a gush of blood. For that matter, it’s not an overly smelly affair, granted the animal didn’t die with a gut-wound.
This assumption is obviously made out of a creator’s own ignorance and imagination. The truth is, once the animal is dead and the heart has stopped beating, the pressure in the veins and arteries ceases.
When one cuts through skin and fur, one does not find a sea of blood and other mysterious bodily fluids. Blood flows through veins, and other fluids are contained in their respective vessels. There is no jet of blood like a Kill Bill fight scene.
Fiction is rooted in reality
So why does all this matter? Because fiction is rooted in reality.
Even though a reader may be presented with a wildly radical and new world, enough realism must be maintained to hold the illusion of truth.
The trick to fiction is to make the right lies believable.
Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash
