Writing Right with Dmitri: Stranger Than Fiction, Srsly?
Created | Updated Jun 2, 2019
Writing Right with Dmitri: Stranger Than Fiction, Srsly?
Truth is stranger than fiction.
That old saying is true, if only because, when you tell something in fiction that actually happened but is counterintuitive, people accuse you of making up silly things, and you have to add footnotes.
I remember as if it were yesterday a discussion I had more than half a century ago with my English teacher, Mr Condalucci. (If you've ever wondered, teachers, yes, you have an effect.) Mr C was talking about realism in fiction. He argued that the film The Great Escape wasn't realistic, because three of the escapees succeeded. 'If it were real, all of them would have failed,' he said.
Of course, I had read the book. Of course, I had to explain that three men had, indeed, escaped. (Teachers: don't you hate kids like that?) Mr C was nice about my kidsplaining that the unrealistic part of that film involved Steve McQueen and a motorbike. Later, we went on to argue about whether the 'Maid of Athens' was a personification of the ancient city (my view) or 'just some broad Byron met in town'. Mr C, if you're there: I've been to Athens. You were probably right.
The story of The Great Escape is so odd that it comes across as too wild for fiction. Why does that happen? Because we have expectations of reality. We have models in our heads – not necessarily accurate ones – of what is most likely to happen in certain circumstances. If a fictional story meets our expectations of likelihood, we accept it as 'realistic'. Here are some real-life examples that contradict our expectations.
- We expect German businessmen in the 1930s and 1940s to go along with the Nazi regime and exploit its victims for cheap labour. Oscar Schindler didn't. Instead, he helped them escape by employing an elaborate ruse and every asset he owned. Fact, but counterintuitive.
- We expect young mothers in the 1950s to let their husbands lead in civic life. We also expect them to be fearful enough to trust their Cold War governments when they say the Reds are out to get them. We don't expect Mary Sharmat to raise a protest against nuclear air raids. We also wouldn't expect her husband to support her. Take that, reality.
- We wouldn't expect to find independent businesswomen in Philadelphia during the Revolution. We'd be wrong: Betsy Ross wasn't alone.
- We certainly wouldn't expect Britain's wartime security to depend on the likes of Leo Marks, who used one of his juvenile poems as a code for operators overseas, and who later voiced the Devil in Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ. This, however, happened.
All over human history, our expectations are confounded. Just yesterday, my Post work was derailed by the amazing discovery of Pittsburgh's history as a seaport. Yeah, I was gobsmacked, too. It was even mentioned in Congress. It seems the Pittsburgh boat builders produced a couple of galleys, one with a 24-pound gun, no less, for the Navy in 1798-99. The Navy didn't need them, after all, because we didn't go to war with the French. So they turned them into merchant ships, sailed down the Ohio and the Mississippi, and went to sea. Yes, that's a really long way.
According to the story senator Henry Clay (he was famous once) told Congress, the ship got to Leghorn with a load of Monongahela whiskey for sale. The Customs officer almost confiscated the ship and hanged them as pirates because, he said, they were sailing under false papers with a fake home port listing. Whoever heard of this Pittsburgh place? They found a map and saved their necks, but the story is hilarious.
In 1878, a man named Frank Cowan wrote a wretched volume of 'poetry' called Southwestern Pennsylvania in Song and Story: with Notes and Illustrations. Longfellow he's not. He went on and on and bleedin' on about that ship. Here's a stanza:
That he would hang them as pirates both;
For never did tongue before tell
Of the Port of Pitt, save in Holy Writ,
Where it spake of the Pit of Hell.
'The Spectre Ship of Fort Pitt'
I spare you more. But this does demonstrate that fact is often a whole lot stranger than fiction.
Where fiction is not only stranger, but also dumber than fact is when writers get lazy and expect us to swallow their unimaginative, shortcut plot devices. Take Three Days of the Condor, which I watched for the first time the other night, although it was made in 1975. No, the idea that the CIA employed mild-mannered, multilingual academics to sift information for them is not hard to believe. I was warned about the NSA in graduate school, and I believe several strange conversations I had (arguments, really) with bizarre, dodgy characters were attempts at recruitment. I cannot be sure, but these attempts may have come from both sides. That was not unusual. These people would weaponise a jelly doughnut.
It's also not unbelievable that one of these nerds looked like Robert Redford. I've known some nice-looking polyglots in my time, though the best-looking guys were usually gay. Still. It is equally not unbelievable that the CIA would then hire a hitman to assassinate the whole officeful, only to miss one because he was out buying lunch. That could happen. The idea that a language nerd, being smarter than he looks, could evade the spynerds for three days, so? Or that Max von Sydow's international hitman could regard what he did as 'just a job', and change sides easily? A no-brainer.
No, what I don't believe is that the moment the language nerd needs to score a car and camouflage driver, he manages to carjack Faye Dunaway. And that they end up in bed together. Nope, nope, nope. Reshoot that film, please. This time, he carjacks somebody who looks like Woody Allen and knows how to hack into the Pentagon mainframe.
So what's the take-home? Do your homework, and your story will be fresh, new, and unusual. You can defend your choices with footnotes. But please, please, please avoid the romance clichés.
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