[story] on emotional truth

[houraipeach]

Truth is not reality. The two are related, but there's a vast gulf between them.

As I've been working on this weird little magical girl project I've had cooking, and which I really, really want to make into an actual Thing, I've been realizing that I spend way too much goddamn time constructing 'believable' worlds. Worldbuilding is often a trap for me; I get so wrapped up in making a world that's realistic and correct that I forget to make worlds that I find true. And for this project, that's fine; the worldbuilding is pretty much done and I have a bunch of detail I may or may not use, but now I enter the hard part, which is making it feel like a world you would actually care about, as opposed to one you could believe exists. Some of that is already done, because GOOD worldbuilding is not simply describing systems, but relating how those systems interact with actual people, and how they feel about those systems.

A lot of sci-fi writing stresses believability and realism, but as I get older and more mature, I realize it was never realism ITSELF I cared about. Gunbuster isn't my favorite anything ever because I'm impressed by the fact that it realistically models lightspeed time-dilation; it's my favorite anything ever because it takes a weird little fact about the way space travel works and spins it into the most gutwrenchingly beautiful finale any human being has ever put down into a work of fiction. It is not the reality of the situation that compels me; a lot of impossible, ludicrous, utterly aphysical breaks with reality occur on an episode-by-episode basis. It is not the fact itself, but that it plays up the emotional response to this cold fact about existence so hard that the emotional truth of that response burns brighter than every star in the universe.

It's a paradox I struggle with a lot as a writer. Realism is backdrop; all fiction, all GOOD fiction, is ultimately about our emotional responses. So why do I care so much about making a 'realistic' world? I don't like realistic worlds. I like worlds that make internal sense, but I never need them to be realistic, because that's not what it takes to make me buy in. I watch Gurren Lagann and Giant Robo and Steven Universe and all the rest because I like weird, inexplicable, often-unsettling and dangerous but beautiful worlds. So what must I do to create that feeling, when so much of my impulse as a creator is to EXPLAIN rather than SHOW?

I need to discard the idea that it is IMPORTANT to explain how things 'work.' I am already getting the audience to accept that magic exists; I can forget about metaphysics. What matters is that the reaction of PEOPLE is real and true, not that they things they react to are. If I say, 'exposure to this magical thing can change you in ways that are unpredictable and dangerous,' it's not important to explain the precise molecular function that makes that happen, only 'how does this person feel about this and why.' When I injure myself, I don't often understand precisely what is wrong with my body; I only know that it's painful and that it makes me unhappy. Experiential feeling is more important to the craft of writing than blunt explanations and technobabble gobbledycrap.

So what's step one for this? I suppose it's to figure out 'why would I care about this world if I were living in it?' What would motivate me, as a monster hunter, to go out and put my life on the line to save people from a threat that probably won't ever STOP existing and cannot be permanently solved? Do I feel that experience as bleak, or do I feel it as uplifting, or is it somewhere inbetween? Is a fight a performance, a show, a triumph, a tragedy? More than that, why does anybody ELSE do this? Are Slayers treated with respect, love, fear? Why? Is it a burden to me, a grim responsibility? Is it something I revel in? Why should I care?

It's easy enough, when worldbuilding, to say 'this is a fact.' When you start asking about what is true, however, a fractal of possibilities opens up beneath your feet. The ground gives way to a spinning lattice of personal choices and interrelationships and emotional baggage, and it's here that stories are made.

Comments

[buni]

I actually have an upcoming blog post about a part of this. We as a species tend to find characters "unbelievable" when they act "out of role," but we as people act in all kinds of unexpectedly inexplicable ways all the time, and yet we're usually comfortable writing those deviances from the norm -- or worse, the expected norm -- as just "people having an off day." We don't give our fictive lives the same leeway we give our lived ones.

I don't know why that is, but I've definitely observed what you're seeing.

[xyzzysqrl]

"When telling a story, effect trumps truth". I forget who said it, but it's always seemed right to ME.

[zx3]

i struggle with this, myself, particularly with my current main writing project, which takes place in an urban fantasy setting that operates on a set of rules; as i continue writing, the rule-set feels increasingly loosey-goosey at times. i feel it's most important that the setting contain consistency *within itself,* that it retains a consistent shape and feel, and if the rules aren't realistic they should at least rhyme. the end product should feel right and acceptable to the reader.

[momentrabbit]

I've always found a world's internal self-consistency to be more important to suspending my disbelief than any compliance with my external reality. As such, if something *matters* to the people living in that world, it matters to me, as a reader.