Convince Me

So - I have failed abysmally to meet my own goal of doing daily posts. Perhaps I should just admit defeat, and try to post something when I actually have something to say. Sounds like a good idea, right? That's the way we'll proceed from here then.

Anyway, I blogged elsewhere today about how we come to believe something. I was asking how we come to accept one proposition rather than another, and what role an authority figure may have in that process. I offer no answers to this question now. I was more interested in seeing if I could spark a discussion about the nature of this whole sequence of coming to believe something as true.


This is related to writing, of course, in that if we're writing non-fiction, we have to be able to come across as credible and realistic. We have to be able to document our assertions, typically by citing other authors and authorities. Ultimately, we have a structure of assertions built on the assertions of others. So, at root, we have to admit that we somehow assume that what someone is saying or writing is true. And this requires something very much akin to faith, whether religious or completely secular.

But this doesn't really answer the question, does it?

What is there about those foundational figures that engenders that trust we award to them? That's a harder question to answer, at least for me. It generally points to events far back in our childhood, I think, and for some of us, that's a pretty long stretch through the years.

Maybe an easier question to answer would be how can we as fiction authors come across as credible or at least plausible? We can't rely on authority figures, because we're not asserting the truth of some proposition or other. We can't cite references, usually, to make our fictions believable. No, we have to create a world out of whole cloth, or at least portray a vision of our own that can draw the reader into the story we want to tell.

Science fiction and fantasy rely on the "willing suspension of disbelief." Authors who have already established a reputation will generally have an easier time of accomplishing this than new, untested authors. What about other genres of literature? What about murder mysteries? Or historical novels? Or romance?

I know one way to completely lose a reader in some of these genres. Don't do your research. If you're writing a historical, neglect to research the era that you've set your story in. Do the novelistic equivalent of having a zipper in the back of a woman's dress in an Elizabethan historical movie. Readers who read historicals will drop your book like a hot rock. And word will get around.

World-building, the art and practice of creating believable settings for fiction, is a subject that deserves far more coverage than I can give in this short post. There are plenty of good references online that teach how to do it. The art of creating believable characters is just as important, and there are good online references for that as well. These are things that have to be learned, and an author who wants to be successful needs to learn and practice them well. Critique groups, writing courses, and writing contests are good venues to try out what you've learned. You find pretty quickly that your own view of your own work isn't clear enough to show where you may be going wrong. Another set or two of eyes can really help.

Perhaps we'll deal with some of these topics in the next posts.