Where do you draw the line between what's plausible to have happen and what's compelling for the story, be it your characters' decisions or events beyond anyone's control (e.g. a rainstorm)? This is something I struggle with, as I can't stand questions like "why'd the villain wait until now to do that?", but I recognize that occasionally an unlikely scenario can be beneficial to the plot or to character development, and sometimes unlikely events do occur, and people don't always act predictably. So what do you think? How do you balance these sometimes conflicting tenets?
I try to keep things as plausible as I can without making it tedious. If I need to do something at a time when it isn't as plausible I try to give the character a reason why they did it then, so even if the reader disagrees they know why it happened. I hate it when the have something impossible happen and then just ignore it - one book I read had a portion take place on a space station where the windows are force screens and they failed due to sabotage. The main character(human) just shrugs and walks out of the room. No reason given for why he can survive a vacuum and it is only mentioned once later with 'it was cold'.
Personally I go for plausible over entertainment every time because as a reader, I hate when impossible things happen just for entertainment and it feels contrived.
Internal consistency is a must (with the sole exception of comedy) for suspension of disbelief. I don't care how silly the concept of a lightsaber is, but it best behave the same way repeatedly or I'm calling laziness/deus ex.
I'm not asking about impossibility, I'm asking about plausibility. "Shown-to-be-ruthless villain captures hero instead of killing him because the story would be over otherwise" kind of things. Just how far are you willing to push the suspension of disbelief, or do you make sure that you write to avoid such situations at all costs? Impossibility and inconsistencies I absolutely detest. I would also never knowingly put such things in my stories.
I don't really mind implausibility as long as it's entertaining and interesting. I mean, who wants a super villain who doesn't capture the hero and toy with him for long enough for him to be saved in the nick of time? I guess it depends on the type of story, though.
Especially when it comes to fantasy or Sci-fi I can accept a lot of things as plausible "in-world". If I don't know about the rules of a world, I will assume that that's how things work, until I find a contradiction. For example I could not accept the ramming maneuver in Star Wars : The last Jedi, because it broke at least a dozen of previously established rules of the universe. However, if I saw this move in a standalone movie in a different universe, I would have been perfectly fine with it. The only thing I hate is convenience. When things work out just because of convenient coincidences, that really drives me nuts. For all intents and purposes everything should go to shit, but then a character that shouldn't even be there saves the day just because. This is just lazy writing.
As far as I'm concerned, if it isn't plausible, it isn't entertaining. Granted, that means plausible within the particular universe that I'm reading. I can accept the Force in Star Wars because that's been defined as plausible within that setting. I wouldn't accept the Force in a noir setting or something similar. I could accept magic in a fantasy world but not in a science-fiction one. Once you set up your universe, don't go changing it for no good reason. I've seen a lot of writers just throwing their own rules out the window because they wrote themselves into a corner. Don't do that.
Interesting. I expected a lean towards plausibility, but I thought more people would endorse occasional stretches, seeing as how prevalent such things are in popular media. Honestly, that's a tad reassuring, in a way.
With fiction I liike to turn reality on it's head. I enjoy a little flip of the script. Sure, many of these things would never happen, but it's possible to write them in a way where they DO happen in your story. I don't see this as a form of pure entertainment by any means. A good story is a good story regardless of how plausible the events in it actually are. Your job as a writer is to make them make sense. In the world you have created for your story anything can happen. If you're not playing around with that a little, I imagine the story could lack in some ways. I like to think of something that would never happen and then figure out a way to make it happen in my little fiction world. And I tend to push that line as far as I can.
I only require something to be plausible in that universe. Basically, in Infinity War, I'm okay with the Infinity Stones having all these mythical powers. I'm not okay with there being only a single situation where Dr. Strange determined they'd win. I dunno, you could've just stopped time and taken off his head. "Oh, but Thanos could use the power stone to stop him." He can't use the power stone if time is frozen. Basically, what I'm saying is: there's lots of stuff you can suspend disbelief for. But you better damn well follow your rules, or it'll take people like me out of it. Kinda like how Captain America was somehow there at the end, even though going back in and of itself creates an alternate timeline.
Good question! A way to think about Plausibility vs Entertainment is a range. Every reader is going to sit somewhere different on this range. But then how do you know if a plot point is out-of-range (too implausible)? As a writer, you have control on how wide your story's range is through how much work you put in to explain plot points that requires your reader to stretch reality. Almost every story has an element of implausibility to them (it's one of the things that makes stories interesting), but how far you go is a matter of how well you present those points rather than whether or not those points exists. It's more about tact than fact. If the writer is able to deliver the idea well, few readers would mind or even notice, but leaving loose ends out in the open will make it seem like the writer is trying to be deceiving, lazy, or just taking the easy way out. It's important to put in the work and be creative, not only in coming up with new ideas but also in how they are conveyed.
Suspension of disbelief is something a reader will do in exchange for enjoyment . Edge of Time by David Grinnell is a book about a group of scientist that have created a min universe , that is kept in a garden shed. The scientist travel to the universe by laying the floor. It fast moving , easy read and entertaining . If you look at reviews on Good reads,it receives everything from one star to five , as most books do.
Go 100% towards entertainment. Plausibility only really matters so far as it affects suspension of disbelief, which is just part of entertaining the reader. Fiction can be informative too but that's not quite the same thing as plausible.
One of the best examples of plausibility I can think of at the moment is the opening of Dune by Frank Herbert. Instead of warming you up to the world he's created, he drops you in the middle of it and fuck your confusion, because he's not explaining any of it. But that's what makes the story so damn good. It doesn't matter that you don't know what a kwisatz haderach is, because you will and you'll find you enjoyed not knowing at first. I guess this is just echoing what others have said in the line of if it fits within the universe, then it's plausible. I think once that's established, it can be entertaining. People have mentioned Star Wars and the Force and lightsabers, and we can add any other science fiction or anything really (magic in Harry Potter, elves in LOTR, etc), but those elements all fit within the universe created.
Heinlien's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress echoes some of these same things. The language is a prison language, lacking articles, which completely throws off the reader, along with being dropped into a foreign idea where the moon is prison colony seeking a libertarian revolution from the Earth. After a few chapters of confusion, you find yourself speaking the language and it becomes completely worth the effort. This whole plausibility in science fiction plays an important role in a theory I've been developing about the "gap" in literature. In a mystery novel, we are constantly left in the dark on false leads and shady characters, gapped for information and trying to constantly fill in holes in the story. For science fiction, the series begins as a gap of information. We are tossed into a world not even knowing if the general laws of physics apply, let alone if aliens are present and active in our given universe. Everything is essentially plausible until the author establishes a sort of rules to govern their universe by, and the reader is constantly soaking up this information to fill in what is plausible. This mystery and open ended conversation between the author and reader slowly closes as the reader gleams more information from the work. A lot of entertainment can be created by the pure interest of the reader's desire to know more and understand the creation of the author.
