Is Your Story Believable

Although you might be writing fiction, it is still important that your story is believable. This is one of those things I really look for in a project when I am deciding if I want to see more of it, or if I want to sign the author. This is also something that I work extensively on with my authors. It is important to understand that even if you are someone writing fantasy or science fiction, if a story is not believable, you will lose your readers quickly.

So, what are we talking about when it comes to a story being believable. Again, this comes down to the basics of any story - the characters, the plot and the setting. Let's look at each.

THE CHARACTERS:
This is the element that your readers truly connect with. If you are successful as an author, you will find a way to get the readers so immersed in the story the feel every emotion of the characters. Stephen King talks about this with horror movies that if you do a good job creating a movie or horror story, the readers can safely go through experiences that in real life terrify them. To do this requires you as an author to make sure the characters, are people that really could exist in the world.

This means that what they do and what they say have to be things real people would do. If something bad happens in their life, their reactions have to be consistent with real people and who they are as a character. This last part is really important and connects in with that idea of Goal Motivation and Conflict we talk about so often.

If you have someone who is raised to be a truly "good person" the odds are that person is not going to be swearing or cheating on other people. Ethically, it is not in their genetic make-up.

I was working with one of my authors recently and we were talking about just this. Her character is a single mother and the author had a plot element where she was going to head off to her work on a day when she normally wouldn't. The question was, when the hero showed up and asked where mom was, would the kids know? Her first instinct was to have the kids not know, but, this would have not been consistent with her character. She was a strong mother figure so she would have told the kids.

Consider also those stories where the characters go off and start a new career. Would someone, who has worked entirely in the corporate world throw it all away and decide, out of the blue to open up a bakery when they never did any of that cooking on their own? Probably not.

The easiest way to edit for this is to put yourself in the story. What would you do?

PLOT ELEMENTS
This is one where a lot of really mess up. They know what they want to happen in the story, but too often, the authors have created things in the plot that simply would not happen, either due to the way things work in the world, the way jobs work, or even how time works.

Time is a big one. How much time does it take to get from Point A to Point B? My historical authors really do a great job of this one. Ann Lethbridge has talked to me in the past about her research to literally know how long it would take to walk from Whites to any number of locations in London? Bronwyn Scott has done the same thing of tracking down the time and route of a carriage ride from one location to the next? Why is this important? You simply cannot have a character suddenly find out a piece of information, if it would really have been a 24 hour turn around.

In romantic suspense stories, I often see authors who have the law enforcement characters doing things that simply cannot happen logistically. Knowing the law is crucial. Again, one of my authors was looking at doing a story about mining issues. On the surface, it sounded great until she got into the to the research to discover this type of issue would have taken years to resolve and not something possible in 75,000 words.


The take-away from this is simple. Realism is crucial. What happens in the story and what your characters do really does make a difference. Small little issues like this, although you might think are petty, really can make or break your story.