Realism in Fiction
Nov. 22nd, 2021 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorThere's a sense where I think 'realistic' is used to mean something very different than 'could be real' when discussing writing. Now, I'm referring here to interactions between people more than just some particular type of world, so whether the story is scifi or fantasy or set in our real world makes very little difference to this analysis.
In fiction there's a purposeful filtering of some behavior and a purposeful emphasis on other behavior. This is because there's something the author is interested in exploring. Usually this ends up exaggerating behavior in ways that don't correspond well to real life at all. In real life we are unshackled from constraints like 'being interesting' or 'being pleasant', one or the other of which may be what an author wishes to emphasize in a story.
In fiction there's a purposeful filtering of some behavior and a purposeful emphasis on other behavior. This is because there's something the author is interested in exploring. Usually this ends up exaggerating behavior in ways that don't correspond well to real life at all. In real life we are unshackled from constraints like 'being interesting' or 'being pleasant', one or the other of which may be what an author wishes to emphasize in a story.