Keep it real, or make it out-of-this-world weird?

[nekobara]

I'm just curious...as writers, do you tend to make your writing as realistic as possible in an attempt to make your readers feel as if your story world were reality? Or do you like to go all out, shoot for the stars, and be as ridiculous, outrageous, and over-the-top as possible to make your reader laugh out loud while having a little fun yourself? And how about getting creative and mixing the two a bit?

I'm eager to hear all your different answers.

Oh! I almost forgot. As readers, what type of reading material do you prefer? Do you like the story to keep it real and not differ too much from the norm? Would you prefer the story to be something so incredibly impossible that it couldn't possibly happen in real life? Or do you enjoy a good mixture of the two?

Also, why did you answer the way you did? And if you enjoy a good blend, what do you want more of?

[Kuiper]

The classic essay "The Strange Attractor" by Terry Rossio has kind of been the starting point for a lot of discussion on this topic starting around two decades ago, so maybe give that a read.

Speaking more broadly, people want a blend of the strange and the familiar. Make a story too familiar, and people will be bored by its predictability. Make a story too strange, and people will find it difficult to understand or connect with. Portal fantasies like the Chronicles of Narnia blend the strange and familiar by taking a familiar character (children from 20th century England) and transporting them to a fantasy land that is unfamiliar (Narnia). Fish-out-of-water stories like Crocodile Dundee do the opposite, by taking a strange character (Dundee from the Australian outback) and planting them in a familiar setting (New York City). Some superhero movies do this too: there's a reason that Superman spends his time defending Metropolis instead of exploring distant planets: it gives us a blend of strange character (Superman and the villains he fights) in a familiar setting (Metropolis is a facsimile of New York City). There's a reason that so many movies are explicitly set in major cities like New York or Los Angeles that will be familiar to most audiences.

Sometimes, genre works can appeal to the "familiar" by embracing genre conventions. When Tolkein first created the elves and dwarves and orcs of Middle Earth, they felt new and strange. Now, when a game like Dragon Age has elves or a game like Warcraft has orcs, this is actually an appeal to the familiar. So while a lot of secondary-world fantasies seem like they are nothing like our world, I'd say that most modern fantasies set in Tolkeinesque worlds are around a 50/50 blend of strange and familiar, just based on how they appeal to genre conventions. Some fantasy settings get away from the faux-Medieval Europe setting, though.

Ultimately, it depends on what your audience wants. People who pick up a regency romance novel are probably looking for something that is 95% familiar, with the 5% "strange" part coming from seeing new characters that are in some way distinct from the Jane Austen novels they've already read. Genres like teen paranormal romance and urban fantasy are probably more like a 75/25 blend: familiar settings (high schools) and character archetypes (teenage stock characters), but with a bit of a unique "edge" to them (Edward from Twilight in a lot of ways behaves like an "ordinary" person even though he's a vampire). Most "trope-ish" speculative works like Tolkein-esque fantasy or heroic or space opera are probably like a 50/50 blend, and on the weirder end of the spectrum you have more unusual sci-fi stories and unusual fantasy settings (I'm thinking like Zeno Clash levels of strange) that are like 25/75 familiar/strange. And then you have niche genres like "weird" that are more like 90% strange and only 10% familiar.

To be clear, none of the above percentages are intended to be in any way scientific, but I find them to be a useful mental framework when thinking about how "strange" a story should be based on its genre and target audience.

So, long answer short, it depends on the type of story I'm writing.

as writers, do you tend to make your writing as realistic as possible in an attempt to make your readers feel as if your story world were reality?

Within speculative fiction genres like fantasy and sci-fi, you tend to have a spectrum between "hard" (realistic and restrained) vs "soft" (malleable and undefined).

For example, The Martian is very "hard" science fiction. It's about an astronaut on Mars, which is a frontier that humanity has yet to explore, but it's based on "real" science. The author Andy Weir actually did the math to figure out what the dates of the flight from Earth to Mars would be, how much fuel it would take. Real science is the basis for much of the conflict in The Martian: the main character is trying to figure out how to do things like create a chemical reaction to produce water with the materials he has on hand, how to grow enough food to survive with a makeshift potato farm, and so on. It feels like a "real story" and it's very hard science fiction.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Star Wars. Star Wars is "sci-fi," but the rules of the setting are pretty much made up. Jedi are basically wizards who get to carry around cool laser swords. How does "The Force" work? I dunno, it just does. It kind of lets characters do almost anything if they're powerful enough, from lifting up heavy objects with their mind, to shooting lightning out of their hands. Star Wars is not a story about science; it's a story about a struggle between good and evil, and the conflict is not based on things like chemical reactions or the number of calories in a potato, but things like being tempted by power and triumphing over your foes by mastering your own emotions. It's soft sci-fi.

You can observe the same thing in fantasy, where you have some "soft fantasy" works like The Lord of the Rings, where most of the magic is very mysterious and it isn't even entirely clear exactly what Gandalf's powers are, and then there's hard fantasy like Brandon Sanderson where the rules of the magic are made explicit to the reader and almost treated like an invented form of science. Brandon Sanderson wrote an essay about this (it's actually the first part in a series) and I'd recommend giving that a read. For a manga/anime example, I'd put Death Note in the category of "hard fantasy," as Death Note has very specific rules that govern how its magic works. Also, in a weird way, I'd also put some sports anime in the category of "hard fantasy," like Kureko no Basket, for example. The characters in Kureko no Basket have abilities that are basically superhuman: one character can make a shot from anywhere on the court as long as he has enough time to prepare the shot; another has the ability to perfectly imitate another basketball player's move after seeing it. These abilities might as well be magic, but they're hard magic in the sense that the series very clearly explains what powers (and weaknesses) each of the players has beforehand, and then consistently sticks to those rules throughout each arc.

There's a large category of shounen action manga/anime that mostly pretends to be hard fantasy, but they actually behave much more like soft magic systems. They usually do this by technically having rules, but they generally make up the rules as they go, so the anime still has the feel of "anything can happen" even though it's constantly trying to explain why its magic is rational. This leads to situations where heroes are constantly getting surprised by new forms of magic that "monster of the week" villains spring on them, and the anime then tries to explain the "rules" of this new magic so that it can maintain the fiction that it's a hard magic system. I personally dislike this approach a lot, but at the same time it also seems to be very popular, and what I'd conclude based on this is that most people like hard magic in the nominal sense (they like to be told that their are rules, these serve as the basis for their own speculation about the universe of the series) while also maintaining the sense of awe and wonder and the unknown that basically comes from giving the writer a "blank check" to do whatever they want as long as they cobble together some sort of perfunctory explanation for it.

Or putting it even more broadly, it seems like a lot of manga/anime for more mature audiences tend to be hard magic, while a lot of manga/anime for younger audiences (think elementary school kid-friendly stuff, like Shounen Jump fair) often tends to be soft magic masquerading as hard magic. Ergo, if you're making a visual novel and trying to hit the enfranchised weeaboo market, maybe it's a good idea to try and make your story seem like hard magic (even if it really isn't). That's almost not even being disingenuous, since pretending to be hard fantasy when you're not seems to be a hallmark of shounen anime. (Okay, maybe I'm being a little bit facetious here.)

Or do you like to go all out, shoot for the stars, and be as ridiculous, outrageous, and over-the-top as possible to make your reader laugh out loud while having a little fun yourself?

Even comedy has to have rules. That's the basis of "character humor": a character has an established pattern of behavior, and when the character behaves in a way consistent with that established pattern of behavior, we recognize it and laugh. Even if you are trying to make your reader laugh out loud, simply being "as ridiculous, outrageous, and over-the-top as possible" is usually not the way to do it. For example, take the classic Monty Python sketch "dead parrot." On its face, it seems absurd. A customer comes in with a dead parrot, and the seller insists that no, the parrot isn't dead; it's merely "resting." The customer then responds by yelling loudly at the parrot to try and wake it from its slumber. Outrageous!

However, if you look at the flow of this sketch, you'll see that on a certain level, it's logical. For example, when the shop owner insists that the parrot is alive and its total lack of movement can be attributed to the fact that it is "tired," it's sort of logical, because a sleeping bird would be immobile. And when the customer then responds by screaming at the parrot to try and wake it, that's sort of logical, because that's exactly the kind of thing you'd do to try and rest a sleeping bird. But if the customer instead responded by saying, "Alright, if the bird is really resting, then I'll set it on fire," that would be completely illogical, and actually be less funny while being more absurd. By the same token, if in the middle of the sketch, the customer became frustrated and took out a gun and shot the store owner, that would also be less funny because it would be logically disconnected from the argument being made. So while the sketch is "ridiculous" and "outrageous," it does this in a very restrained manner.

Even when Monty Python resorts to complete non-sequitur, it still does its non-sequiturs in a consistent manner: every time the Spanish Inquisition comes out, they are wearing the same attire, they make the same type of abrupt entrance, and they deliver the same classic line: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" Well, yes, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but when they do show up, ironically somehow everyone in the audience knows exactly what line they're going to hear next. At a certain point, the joke is that everybody does expect the Spanish Inquisition, and the punchline hits when they don't show immediately show up.

[Mammon]

Kuiper has made a very good and well-explained point, I wholeheartedly agree with it. The only thing I could add is the level of 'campy' that one may implement into the story. For those who don't know what a campy story is: it's one that doesn't have a very serious tone or doesn't take itself too serious. By being rather silly, it can get away with certain plot holes.

Take for example the Superman movies. The ones from before 2000' were campy and not serious at all. In one of the movies there was absolutely no super-human fighting at all and the only actual combat was a man shooting Superman in the back, after which Superman laughed about this and bended the barrel of the gun. And I think we all remember the rediculousness of Superman spinning around the earth to reverse time. The stories were silly, but they were more liked than today's movies (although not by a lot). That's because today's Superman movies try to have a dark and serious tone, and brooding Superman doesn't work. It's not campy at all, and that's what ruins the show.

While being closely connected to the familiar/strange ratio, campy isn't exactly the same. Things with soft fiction that don't explain everything can still have a serious tone (f.e. Suits) while things with hard fiction can still be campy (f.e. Dragonball Z, there's a surprising amount of rules there that most fans don't even know about). Campy is the amount of thought and realism that the authors suggest the reader should expect about the story. If they make high stakes, they'll lose their campiness and cannot call upon this to dismiss some plot holes. Only a rare few stories (like One punch man) can raise the stakes and remain campy at the same time.

What would this be in practice? Take for example vampirism: Vampires cannot walk around in sunlight because they'll burn to a crisp. By either keeping it campy or never really giving the reader a solid idea of the rules(soft fiction), this will work. However, once the authors solidify the rules or try to create a serious vibe, this may not work. The movies from the Blade series screwed this up: 'If wearing thick clothes and a biker helmet protect a vampire from light, why don't they all just wear that during the day?' or 'If sunscreen can stop the sunlight, why aren't all vampires walking around during the day?' were some thought that the audience had after seeing this exmplained. Had the movie been campier, it wouldn't have mattered as much. By trying to make the story serious rather than campy they made their hard-soft fiction ratio screw itself over.

Kuiper's next post gives a good example of this as well: Clifford can certainly kill a person according to the rules that they themselves impose, but no one is going to wonder why this hasn't happened yet. The book being for children, and therefore immediately being campy rather than serious, makes it so that no one would wonder why Clifford hasn't been contained or put down, and how it's possible that he never killed anyone before. The same goes to why the military hasn't caught him yet to experiment upon and make bio-weapon attack dogs. The people know that's not part of the book ever. If someone were to make a Hollywood reboot of Clifford that's a lot more serious and edgy, it might be.

Stories that shouldn't be taken too seriously like Guren Laggan, Guardians of the galaxy or Monty Python have this campiness. It doesn't neccesarily decide the level of fiction you can implement into your story nor does it actually need to be a silly story, but it does allow just randomness in exchange for the serious tone. And every non-biographical story has a modicum of campiness, whether it's noticeable or not. Either campy or serious can be preferred by people, personally I care more whether it works.

[Kuiper]

Mammon's post about camp gets at a larger point which I think is pretty important, which is that tone is part of being internally consistent.

Part of what makes hard magic or hard science fiction is an internal consistency in the way that the fiction's universe behaves: the story establishes that the world works a certain way, and then it obeys those rules. That's logical consistency. However, there's also such a thing as tonal consistency. Comedian Louis CK has a hilarious bit about Clifford the Big Red Dog (warning: NSFW language) which plays with this concept. For those who don't want to watch the clip, the gist of it is that there's a series of children's books called Clifford the Big Red Dog, which all fixate on a dog who has all of the attributes that you might assume based on the title of the book. He's massive (so big that they need a flatbed truck to transport him), and his massive size causes him to get into all sorts of mishaps, some of which involve comical yet catastrophic property damage. The problems Clifford causes often revolve around him stepping on something like a children's toy and destroying it, but Louis CK constructs a hypothetical scenario in which Clifford steps on a policeman, fatally injuring him, and leading to a painful process of mourning in the community.

Now, to a certain extent, this kind of story would actually be logically consistent with the canon of the Clifford universe, as we know that Clifford is large and massive enough to crush a car, so he's certainly physically capable of stepping on a person and fatally injuring them. However, this kind of story would be completely tonally inconsistent with Clifford. Clifford the Big Red Dog is a series of children's books, and as such it mostly tells whimsical stories where the worst trouble that Clifford gets into is inconveniencing people. So in a way, having Clifford step on a person and kill them would be "against the rules." There's no almighty force within the Clifford canon that magically intervenes to stop people from dying, but all the same, having Clifford kill a person would violate what we understand about the world he lives in.


Without getting into too much detail, there are certain genres like surrealism and magical realism that are all about being logically inconsistent with the world that we live in, and sometimes these genres even do things that contradict their own internal logic. However, these kinds of works can get away with it, because fundamentally they are not built around things like plot which require logical progression; more often they are focused more on creating a certain tone or feeling or atmosphere, and oftentimes they'll do "illogical" or magically arbitrary things entirely for aesthetic reasons. For example, a magical realism story might give a certain character flightless wings and a beak in place of a nose. Why? Because it makes them look like a bird, and the author thought that the visual of a character who physically resembled a bird would better communicate the tone and "feel" of the story they were trying to tell.

A lot of people tend to struggle with genres like surrealism and magical realism, and as such you'll find very few modern examples of them, as most western audiences (and eastern audiences too for that matter) tend to prefer stories that are a bit more grounded in some version of reality. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing, but most of the magical realism stories I'm aware of are Latin American in origin. If you want to see modern examples of surrealist storytelling, David Lynch might be a good place to start (the film Eraserhead if you want something super surrealist, or the TV show Twin Peaks if you want something that is a bit "easier" to get into).

[Parataxis]

I think Mammon is right that the OP seems to be talking more about the tone of the writing than the content. Which is interesting because I fall in very different places on those two spectra. On the one hand I tend to have very grounded character writing, only funny because the characters are funny funny people. On the other hand my story features, as important plot relevant characters, a Giant Cricket in a trench coat, a living marble fountain who speaks entirely in faux Shakespearean dialect and a talking Cat. So I guess I am one of the brave mixers in that way.

Ultimately, though, I think the goal of most fantasy is to create a world that could be real despite its fantastical elements and my writing reflects that. For my particular story I am aided by the fact that the premise has a parallel spirit world existing beside our own, so I can keep all of the "unrealistic" fantastical elements sort of in their own sub world of the story while allowing the human characters to pass between.

[Mammon]

I think Mammon is right that the OP seems to be talking more about the tone of the writing than the content. Which is interesting because I fall in very different places on those two spectra. On the one hand I tend to have very grounded character writing, only funny because the characters are funny funny people. On the other hand my story features, as important plot relevant characters, a Giant Cricket in a trench coat, a living marble fountain who speaks entirely in faux Shakespearean dialect and a talking Cat. So I guess I am one of the brave mixers in that way.
Ultimately, though, I think the goal of most fantasy is to create a world that could be real despite its fantastical elements and my writing reflects that. For my particular story I am aided by the fact that the premise has a parallel spirit world existing beside our own, so I can keep all of the "unrealistic" fantastical elements sort of in their own sub world of the story while allowing the human characters to pass between.

Looking at your story plot synopsis Parataxis, I'd say that your story isn't campy though. The idea of someone trying to find the murderer of their partner immediately adds a serious notion to the story which excludes a lot of the campiness. There can be campy characters in it, mixing camp and serious is definately possible (also known as the comic relief character), but the overall story isn't. At least, unless you're not actually planning on making it an actual revenge. 'So you are the one who killed my partner? Eh, I don't care anymore or think a slap on the wrist is enough.' A campy story can still be very defined (hard fiction) and be any kind of realistic or unrealistic. However I can see the possiblity in it being campy despite the serious plot idea.

Take for example Highschool of the Dead. The zombie apocalypse, the suffering, the social panic and the inadequacy of the government in such a tale, it's quite a serious plot. Is it a serious plot? I think everyone who has seen the show knows the answer to that.

[Parataxis]

This is sort of precisely what I was getting at in my Post actually. There has been some conflation in the thread between subject matter and tone. And my writing tends to go rest on completely different ends of those two scales. I am writing a story that has a lot of quite ridiculous and fantastical content but without any "camp" as you say. I write realistic stories that take place in fantastical settings. So by the Op's initial intent I would say I am writing "realistically" but in terms of the familiar vs Fantastic metric being thrown around I am closer to 50-50. The main character is a person dealing with understandable emotions about losing a friend, but they are also battling physical manifestations of these negative feelings while making wise cracks with a talking stop sign. Realistic tone does not need to be limited to realistic "familiar" content. Nor the reverse.

[nekobara]

@Kuiper
Thank you for your input! You have given me a lot to think about. I think I shall have to read what you have written a few times over. You really went into detail in your answer, and I thank you greatly for that. I'm sure the information you have provided will be useful in helping me to improve my writing. Again, thank you for taking the time to reply! I really appreciate it.

@Mammon
I'm grateful for your response, as well. As with Kuiper's, I will most likely have to read over it again. I must engrave all of this into my brain. Anyway, thank you for answering my question!

@Parataxis
Thank you for contributing to this thread, and I also happened to read the thread for your game-it sounds like it should be pretty interesting and I'm sure it will turn out to be a fantastic game!