In the United States, university students often pay enormous sums for creative writing degrees, only to have professors ban them from writing what they came to write. Some professors even pull a bait and switch on their students. They’ll write class descriptions that sound like popular or speculative material will be covered. Once students show up, the professor will reveal the real focus is narrative nonfiction. Students can expect to hear from a few professors that any books straying from real-world experiences are meaningless trash.
This happens because academic culture has a strong strain of realism. The influence of this aesthetic ideology reaches beyond our universities to impact the way we view and discuss stories. Commonly repeated phrases such as “write your truth” and “art holds a mirror up to nature”* are used to tout realist values. And when content creators want a reputable source of information about literature, they go to realism-touting academics.
When we encounter realism, we should call it out and push back, because this mindset is inherently toxic to any fiction medium.
What Is Realism?
Realism is an art movement or aesthetic ideology that espouses art is valuable to the extent that it imitates or accurately depicts reality, especially contemporary and personal experiences. This might mean notable accuracy, a gritty atmosphere, or a focus on everyday experiences. In essence, realists insist that all creative works should be as realistic as possible.
Realism as we know it today started in France around the 1848 Revolution. It was largely a backlash to the aesthetics of Romanticism, which focused on idealized depictions of nature, the unreal, and the historical. In fact, painting everyday people in their normal clothes was controversial. Realists of that era were understandably eager to break this taboo and depict the lower classes living their normal lives.
Because Romanticism was so focused on picturesque and idealist aesthetics, realism carried the assumption that realness is equivalent to grittiness, ugliness, and even edginess. Realists describe their depictions of contemporary, commonplace, and unglamorous moments as “truth.” This meant anything departing from reality was considered “lies,” regardless of whether the material was presented as fictional.
There’s nothing wrong with art that has a realistic feel, but this became not only one color on a diverse palette, but also a mandate. While later art movements popularized experimental or “avant-garde” works, they did so by creating exceptions or additions to realism, not by fundamentally revising the value system.
Today, realism has been largely dismantled in commercial spaces, because those spaces are accountable to consumers. As the taboo against speculative fiction has softened and demand has risen, studios and publishers can’t afford an out-of-touch ideology.
But realism is still common in the literary genre so loved by academics. Literary academics are paid for writing time as part of participating in their field, so their books don’t have to sell. This allows them to spend their time creating niche works while maintaining the guise of superiority. In fact, they need their illusion of superiority to justify why their work is important in the face of mass disinterest. Their attacks on other genres are the desperate flails of a drowning tradition, but they are still doing harm.
Art Doesn’t Exist to Be a Mirror
To break down what’s wrong with realism, let’s start with the basic premise that art exists to mirror, or imitate, reality. This definition of art is much older than realism. In particular, Plato defined art as an imitation. Not at all coincidentally, Plato didn’t like art very much.
Presenting art as mimicry isn’t giving art enough credit, because imitations inherently fall short of what we wish them to be. For instance, if we created an imitation of a priceless historical artifact, of course we would swap it for the real thing if that were feasible. If an imitation’s value ever surpasses what it is imitating, it becomes celebrated in its own right and ceases to be an imitation.
Similarly, no matter how true to reality our works are, they will never actually be reality. Imitations are by their nature false, not true. Even the act of choosing what pieces of reality to depict in art distorts it with personal bias. Some realists asserted their art would bring forth the truth from reality, but that just contradicts the basic premise of realism. In the end, packaging realistic depictions as truth or objectivity only conceals an artist’s personal bias.
Besides, the imitation model fails basic scrutiny. At the risk of sounding macabre, I wouldn’t exchange a portrait of my mother for a copy of her head, even though that would be a much better imitation. The purpose of the portrait is not to imitate her, but to evoke pleasant feelings and memories associated with her. By presenting a flat image instead, is it “lying”? My mother is not two-dimensional; how dare the portrait say she is!
Similarly, we already understand that photo-realism isn’t inherently superior to other types of visual art. A classical orchestra is not trying to imitate the sounds we hear in nature. Storytelling is no different. Holding a mirror to life simply isn’t the purpose of art.
That’s because imitation is a technique, not a goal in itself. Even as a technique, it is optional and only useful in moderation. For instance, writers try to make dialogue feel real enough to create a smooth experience, but not so real that readers are annoyed by all the false starts and filler words that litter real-life conversation. In most cases, making dialogue too realistic would only destroy what we’re trying to achieve.
Because the logic behind realism can’t stand up to even a superficial examination, realists today have very little in the way of argument. Some of them reflexively deride non-realist works without offering any philosophical backing. Others make up reasons that are as flimsy as realism itself. For instance, they might insist that highly realistic works are somehow more character driven or political. Not only are those characteristics completely independent of how realistic a work is, but this assumes that every story must be either character driven or political to be valuable.
Realism Is Antithetical to Fiction
Many students sign up for creative-writing programs expecting that they’ll spend most of their time on fiction. In contrast, many professors insist students write only creative nonfiction, retelling real moments of their lives with a little artistic license.
This is a natural extension of realism. If we say that works are only valuable when they reflect real life, then we should never write fiction at all. Instead we should only write accounts of real events. Also, no more paintings – photos are better at imitating life precisely. And why should we watch movies when we can watch documentaries? So while speculative fiction bears the brunt of realism-motivated derision, that’s only because it’s the most fictional fiction. Under the values of realism, all fiction is on the chopping block.
Fiction is, by definition, imaginary. That’s what makes it special and different from other works. Abandoning reality allows us to philosophize on hypothetical scenarios, speculate on where we lack knowledge, and better fulfill goals that do not require accuracy. Realism inherently opposes all of this.
To use a musical analogy, let’s take the piano. The piano is a fantastic solo instrument because a player can strike ten notes simultaneously, not even counting techniques that play notes in rapid succession. This gives the piano and similar keyed instruments a unique value. Now imagine musicians started adhering to an ideology that said music was better if it included fewer chords and, ideally, only one note rang at a time. While a piano piece adhering to this ideology could be lovely, the ideology itself denies the piano its greatest strength. It would be a terrible belief for piano players to hold.
Yet fiction writers have allowed proponents of realism to claim they have some moral high ground, as though portraits would be better as cloned heads. Regardless of how much we use imitation as a tool in our work, we should never accept realism as a value system for judging what we create.
Realism Distorts Our Priorities
When we think of imitation as an end rather than a means, it impacts the quality of our writing, our instruction, and our media analysis. Of course, the most obvious distortion is the way writers are discouraged from writing fiction, speculative fiction in particular. In spaces where realism is a mandate, creativity is confined to the assemblage of words, where it cannot threaten mundane ideas.
However, realism has influence outside these spaces, where its reach is widespread but subtle.
Write Your Truth
Let’s start with the phrase “write your truth.” This is often used in instruction to encourage writers to focus on their own feelings and experiences instead of something further afield. Is it helpful? It certainly can be. People are often knowledgeable about their own experiences, and they may have life events they are highly motivated to write about.
But just as often, this mentality sabotages writers by insisting they write things they have no interest in. It can even become exploitative by pressuring people to share their personal trauma.
The problem with “write your truth” is that it misplaces what’s actually important: passion. When a writer is passionate about something, they become knowledgeable in the topic and motivated to write about it. While many people are passionate about personal experiences, it is the passion, not the experience, that matters the most.* However, “write your truth” continues to be used because it allows realists to equate mimicry and meaning.
The Real-World Fallacy
Mythcreants uses this term to refer to any logical fallacy that treats fiction as though it is reality. Generally, someone employing the real-world fallacy presumes that mirroring reality is the goal of storytelling. As an extension of this, they’ll ignore the manufactured origin of fictional worlds, defending storyteller choices as though those choices are natural occurrences.*
A typical use of the real-world fallacy looks like:
- I think it’s fine that the villain of the story was incompetent, because there are evildoers in the real world who are incompetent.
- The rape in the story was fine because historically rape occurred in similar situations.
- It’s not racist if the Black characters die first because death just happens; it isn’t always fair.
Remember that in art, accuracy and imitation are a means, not an end. Simply mentioning how similar a depiction is to real events is not an adequate defense of that depiction. To weigh realistic elements correctly, we have to ask:
- What constructive purpose does a story serve by using a realistic element?
- Does this element also have disadvantages, including harmful real-world effects?
- Is there another way to serve the same constructive purpose while minimizing negative effects?
Then we have to acknowledge that art is not, and never will be, objective truth. It doesn’t matter if something can be naturally occurring in the real world, because it’s never naturally occurring in a story. That’s why stories need foreshadowing for believability, yet real life does not.
Equating Dark Content With Realistic Content
Because of the history of realism, we tend to think of dark content as somehow being more realistic. The problem is that these are completely separate factors. Life isn’t just suffering; we have good moments too! By equating dark stories with realistic stories, we’ve created a situation where storytellers add graphic violence that doesn’t serve the story, and they defend it by saying it’s “real.”
Accurately assessing how realistic a work feels is essential, because it sets audience expectations. If one of your characters gets in a fist fight and ends up in the hospital, that establishes that problems will come with very realistic consequences. Then if a protagonist shrugs off a bullet wound, that won’t look good.
This is also important to a setting’s theme. Let’s say your story includes characters struggling with relatable problems at their workplaces. The story may be fairly light, but it will still feel realistic. Then if you add in aliens from Mars that look like little humans with big bug eyes, it could clash simply because your Martians aren’t very realistic. They are much campier and cheesier than the struggles at work.
If we think our stories need to be gritty whenever we want them to be realistic, we’re losing opportunities to tell a variety of stories.
The fiction industry is full of misinformed but very confident people. Because writers often feel unsure about their work and method, it can be easy to assume that whoever speaks the loudest must be right. But that only leaves us feeling lost and confused. To navigate all the voices we’ll encounter, the best thing we can do is learn about the different influences on our culture. That way, we can think through our own positions and come to recognize when someone espouses an ideology we don’t believe in.
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“Yet fiction writers have allowed proponents of realism to claim they have some moral high ground, as though portraits would be better as cloned heads.”
To cite Ewan McGregor: “I wish I had a dollar for every time someone told me I had the high ground.”
I think the problem is that literature (in the sense of its science or its ‘best form’) had forgotten why we write or consume stories – to be entertained. The best stories to entertain us usually are the ones which are not all realistic.
When I want to read for fun, I’d rather grab a mystery story, a fantasy novel, or perhaps some sci-fi (okay, Star Wars at the moment, as I’m still diving into the Legends continuity). Realism isn’t always fun – especially not if the author equates ‘dark’ with ‘realistic.’
Good article, I just don’t agree with the “harmful real-world effects” argument on all its assumptions because in some cases it’s used to justify sanitizing stories, especially gritty and provocative queer content. The pushback for sanitization of art will always target primarily stories that are transgressive, counter-hegemonic or politically uncomfortable. It’s not a coincidence that fascist regimes go after subversive, dark and “degenerate” art. This kind of fascist censorship policy has always been accompanied by the classic pearl-clutching, hysterical and fatalistic mindset that all forms of fiction leads to direct real-world changes. Well, it’s not that simple.
Ooh, you’ve got an OMORI profile pic! That’s cool.
Thank you! I love him sm.
The “harmful real-world effects” Chris is referencing are things like perpetuating oppression. You are absolutely right that censorship is typically used to target marginalized folks and something to be concerned about. However Chris isn’t supporting censorship, but suggesting people reflect more about what messages their stories are actually sending.
I think you do have a point that “harmful real-world effects” is broad and something people can and have used to target the art of queer folks and other marginalized groups. I think this is a situation where more specific language specifically mentioning oppression would be useful and powerful, such as “perpetuating oppression.”
For the record, all this article says about harmful real-world effects is that we should consider what they might be. Discarding that simple baseline would mean we’d have to accept everything from Harry Potter’s slavery apologia and Narnia’s Islamophobia all the way up to the genocidal messages of Atlas Shrugged and Camp of Saints because they’re all (technically) fiction.
There will always be places where reasonable people disagree on what a given message is and whether it’s harmful, but I haven’t yet met anyone who actually thinks we should just not consider it because of fiction.
(this is all from a progressive or leftist view, but of course the right does this too. They’ll say that fiction can say anything because it’s fiction, then throw a fit over a Black stormtrooper.)
This is probably a bit off the subject, but Narnia and Harry Potter are great examples of how harmful messages have ended up, and keep ending up, in childrens’ stories.
It’s rather worrying how even in this day and age, creators of stories meant for the young, those who need to learn the most, have such bad messages.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Classism
Steven Universe: Poor advice on how to deal with abusive parents
Miraculous Ladybug: Ableism
Encanto: Sexism, ableism, and oppressed mage for good measure
I could probably go on forever.
It’s true that modern stories are not free of problems, but it’s important not to overstate them either. Otherwise, we risk creating meaningless noise where nothing matters because everything is equally problematic. Whatever issues are present in She-Ra, Steven Universe, or Encanto (I haven’t seen Miraculous Ladybug), they’re small potatoes compared to Harry Potter and Narnia, which are in turn not nearly as bad as other stories I’d prefer not to give any search traffic to.
This. This states my feelings about the whole situation perfectly.
Oh?
Well, I guess there can be too much of anything…
I’ll keep that in mind.
I think there is something to be said about the question, “Does this element also have disadvantages, including harmful real-world effects?” being open-ended in a way that puts bigotry on the same footing as people fighting oppression. That is because it is all down to each person’s interpretation of “real-world harm.”
In contrast, a question like, “Does this element also have disadvantages, including causing real-world harm by supporting oppression?” is less neutral and puts priority and value on fighting oppression.
I’m not sure if this is part of Alex’s point, but I think this difference is part of what they are reacting to. That open-to-interpretation statements have this inherent danger.
I understand what you’re saying Fay, but oppression is not the only kind of harmful real world effect. For instance, take medical misinformation.
There is simply nothing that can guarantee discussion of real world effects will only go in a positive direction. People can and do appropriate concepts like oppression to serve their own ends.
We fight oppression by educating people about oppression and its appearance in stories. Arguments against considering the impact of stories are just a derailing tactic that gets in the way of important discussion.
Regardless of whether the person is progressive or reactionary, arguing against something as broad as discussing harmful real-world effects is usually a reflexive reaction to something, and it isn’t well thought through.
Well, I’m not arguing against considering the impact of stories or implying that we have to accept reactionary positions in art because “they are all fiction” though.
Art can both affect and reflect reality, it is the fundamental relation between social superstructure x substructure. This means that all art comes into the world stamped with ideology – the dominant ideology specifically. There is no such thing as art for art’s sake or art that stands above politics. It is in the very nature of art to reflect the material conditions of a society, as well as to justify and legitimize it in some aspect. In this sense, we must fight against everything that is bad in it.
However, the way in which this process occurs is not always so obvious. Which can confuse progressists into believing that all art with “problematic” content are inherently and universally harmful or that it must be sanitized into a certain mold of purity. Note that I said “purity”, not “wokeness” or some other reactionary drivel. There are many ways in wich a story can be harmful, especially against minorities, but there are also many examples of transgressive and dark stories being incorrectly labeled as “malicious” or “socially harmful” by unwary people.
I live in a semi-colonial, semi-feudal and largely christian country, in recent years several bills have been presented in the congress with the aim of criminalizing “violence inducing” video games, the justification being that “violent video games allow, concomitantly, a new access to obscene material, incitement to crime and indoctrination” and that “children and adolescents are very malleable to the influences they receive, whether they are good or harmful”. Would it be correct to claim that these medias are directly responsible for violence, ideology and domestic terrorism in a country terrorized by imperialism and fascism? Is this how fiction affects reality?
So we don’t actually disagree on anything, that’s good to know.
I remember, a little kid in 4th or 5th grade and we got to write a story, we had to write what we know and base it on something we had experienced. We were barely 10 and I had a sheltered upbringing! What was I supposed to do?
The idea of everything needing to be based on real life was the most annoying thing ever and put dampeners on what I was able to do.
I’m 18 now and still couldn’t make anything interesting unless you’re really into carpentry. That’s pretty early to indoctrinate kids into the idea that nothing fun and fantastical can exist, even in fiction.
Bleah, I’m sorry you had to deal with that at 10 years old. Though for what it’s worth, if you have a passion for carpentry, I’m positive you could use that to create some very cool arboromancy stories.
When I was young, I earned some money helping kids with their homework and your story reminds me of that. I wanted to encourage a kid to think of reading and writing as fun and we were playing a sort of improv game where we told a story together. He included all sorts of fantastical elements of course. I tried my best to go with his ideas and form some kind of plot out of them (which he wasn’t good at but that was also not the point). Then he asked: “You’re not going to end this by saying it was all a dream, are you?!”
It was sad that he was so used to having fantastical story elements written off like that. Needless to say I did not undo everything he had invented.
I don’t remember any specific moment of having realism pushed on me like that as a child but I do remember that the first stories I wrote in school were about a real-world political conflict and about ancient greek myth. Maybe coincidence, maybe the result of this kind of literary elitism affecting me. It definitely existed all around me and especially at school, including in the stories we read and analysed.
A couple years ago I was helping a younger friend from my D&D group through his English homework. He had been given a short story about the narrator as a young boy going through a childish approximation of a date with an older neighborhood girl to read and analyze. Having an English degree myself, this kind of story was woefully familiar, but he was so intensely bored by the thing that he broke down while I was walking him through the analysis and asked why anyone would write something like this in the first place.
I told him that waxing off about how incredibly meaningful and innocent and important childhood was is basically crack to literary authors, and this article has further crystalized that realization:
Literary realism has become so over the top (or maybe under the bottom?) that it’s looped back around to being Romanticism, but strictly applied to mundanity. The mark of greatness in modern academic fiction is now how hard you can insist that being boring is actually super, super interesting. And since most people can’t actually pull that off, mostly we just get lots of really boring stories that think they’re way more meaningful than they are.
That and misery porn. Lots, and lots of misery porn.
Oof, that does not sound like a fun homework assignment.
The continuing popularity of realism as a genre is a disaster for the arts and discourse surrounding them.
Like, on some level, all fiction is fantasy, and it needs to be in order to function as fiction. A story needs structure, with a beginning middle and end, and a clear thematic through-line. Reality is chaotic and unsatisfying and intolerably bleak. Emotional investment requires sympathetic characters, which are inherently unrealistic.
A lot of fiction claims to be realistic, but has the worst of both worlds, screwing over their own plot and structure without gaining any of the alleged benefits the lure of realism promises. This is part of why I bounced off of Game of Thrones. It talked a big game about being dark and gritty and realistic, enough to become simple misery porn, but still fell short of any semblance of ‘reality’. Like, Cersei Lannister is to good of a person to actually exist in the real world.
Faux-realism is bad, m’kay?
Give me more. You can write a story about literally anything, so go wild. Give me a world I would actually want to live in, or else tilt as far the other way as you can, into a dystopia that is interesting and bizarre instead of bland and banal. Give me characters with unusual or even genuinely alien psychologies in equally bizarre societies. Maybe even toss realism, logic, and coherence to the wind altogether; let me sink into a sea of raw imagery and vibes, where the authors every id-ridden impulse is raw and unbound. I’ll take a spectacular missfire over bland competence any day.
Thankfully, we are seeing a pivot away from dark realism in recent years. Game of Thrones crashing and burning the way it did made a lot of people rethink their plans. Wheel of Time and Rings of Power, while far from perfect, feel like a deliberate response, a pivot away from dark grit to something higher, brighter, and cleaner, which I would say is the right move. One of the bigger sleeper hits of 2022 was Legends and Lattes, a novella about a retired adventurer and her girlfriend opening a coffee shop. Low stakes, almost aggressively wholesome and saccharine, and about as sharp a departure from the last thirty years of genre trends as can be made.
Sci-fi (at least the short-stories in the anthology I am subscribed to) seem to be shifting from bleak dystopias to something else. Not ‘hopeful’, per se, but ‘cautiously optimistic’. Is this a whitewash of reality? For sure. But no literary dystopia has ever prevented what it predicted, so perhaps a new approach is needed.
Do you know what work comes closest to The Real, in the ‘mirror to the world’ sense? Sartre’s ‘No Exit’. The three characters are all angry, miserable people who hate and hurt each other incessantly for no real reason. This is, in metaphor, as perfect an encapsulation of life as I have ever seen. The Real World is more or less the Room Without an Exit, just with eight billion people instead of three.
This is the part that really bugs me: To focus on realism is to fundamentally miss the point of fiction. I know, the world and it’s people are horrible. I get it already. I read to be distracted from this, not reminded of it. Empty escapism is not a flaw, it is the most difficult and most worthy task a story can set itself; to be an oasis in the wasteland of reality.
Because there is one key difference between Sartre’s Hell and the Real World. Because the World DOES have exits. A billion tiny windows, called ‘stories’
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying about radical realism, and I do think the arts in general are a big part of what makes life satisfying, but I *really* don’t think it’s accurate (or healthy) to label the real world as uniformly bleak outside fiction. Life is difficult and chaotic, yes, and many people do terrible things, but people do help each other, learn lessons, and work toward a better future. My opinion only counts for so much, but I doubt you’d find many other people who would say the idea of a sympathetic human is unrealistic, that no real person is as morally good as traitorous, nepotistic, murderous Cersei Lannister, or that no piece of fiction should draw attention to real events. Socially-minded works have absolutely contributed to real social change. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, brought attention to American abolitionism, and I don’t think I can accept an argument that banning slavery didn’t make the country a better place.
Stories may often be an escape from the stress and banality of the real world, but ultimately, they are written by humans who live in that world. Even if they include the wildest fantasy worldbuilding, they’re still derived from real experiences which shape people’s minds. I haven’t read Legends and Lattes, but chances are several moments were inspired by the author’s genuine good times with friends in coffee shops. Are these moments more sparse and less dramatic in real life than they are in fiction? Absolutely. But they’re also more visceral and personal experiences that can’t be fully captured in mere words. To dismiss good in reality is to dismiss the source of good storytelling.
I feel like theres a difference between realism as a genre which is fine if limited provided you want to tell stories which belong there, realism as a storytelling and world building technique where things should as must as possible and provided they serve their place in the narative by being that way consistently realistic and ‘realism’ as an art style which can be enjoyable but many people get militant about it so it isn’t
this is particularly unfortunate because not only is it the wrong choice for many stories but in many cases its not any more realistic than others, I like ASOIAF and the early seasons of GOT but its grimdark medivalist misery-porn no more realistic than Star Wars or Transformers in terms of being true to the real history and culture of high middle ages to late middle ages western europe.
I teach at a small Canadian University and in my introduction to Religion Worldviews and Identity class I start by having the crew read the opening pages of Pratchett’s Witches Abroad where he talks about Narrative Causality, and how the stories, once started, have to come true. I use it to highlight how people create their worlds by the stories in their heads, that are, at least in part, created by inherited religious narratives. I’m a fan of J. Z. Smith, who argued that religion is actually a mode of human creativity. Narratives (e.g. myths) often exist not to mimic reality to but to be juxtaposed with it, and the difference between lived experiences and the narrative creates space for thought and social adaptation and transformation. “Realist” fiction I think, is just another way of doing that, with the conceit that the fictive world is real. The claim is part of the dissonance the fiction has with our own experiences that generate reactions and thought.
How exactly would this article apply to hard science-fiction? The things you can do with realism is the main appeal there.
Or arguments against a story because of inherent absurdities? (e.g., Seasons 7 & 8 of Game of Thrones, particularly the battles.)
There is a difference between realism as a literary tool and realism as a literary movement (specifically, the movement that emerged after romanticism which the article is targeting).
Hard science fiction and GOT are both SFF and thus opposed to the realist movement just by existing.
For Hard SF, you’re applying technique of realism to the science of the story
Keep in mind Chris is not saying that realism is BAD, just that it’s not the only technique out there. Use it when it’s appropriate, ignore it when it’s not
As for your second question, that’s about believability, which is related to, but not identical w/ realism:
https://mythcreants.com/blog/why-should-fiction-be-believable/
Total Realism is for writers who have no imagination!
One of my biggest peeves is when reading/watching a review of some media and the reviewer praises it for “reflecting the arglblargl whatever we see in our everyday lives” as though that’s something inherently desirable and not a matter of personal preference. As someone who loves big, epic fantasy adventure specifically because it gives me things I can’t see in everyday life, nothing immediately turns me away from a story faster than that.
I also hate the related notion that “stories exist as a window into our true selves”, or “we love stories because of their ability to show us things about real life” or whatever. Don’t get me wrong, I think stories CAN do that, absolutely, but I don’t at all believe that they inherently ARE that.
Also, reality can be super weird sometimes. I think writers can often have a very narrow view of what is realistic.
Very true. There’s plenty of weirdness in the world that would be derided as unbelievable tosh if it were presented as fiction.
Mark Twain said it best: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”
Without such a fetishisation of realism, I wonder if there would be a fall off in stories that claim to be not like those other stories.
You know that might very well be related. We can only hope!
A pet peeve of mine is when people say “oh, X would never happen in real life,” or “X only happened to move the plot along,” as if authors are trying to replicate real life exactly and they are the consumer who is too smart for them. Real life isn’t a narrative. I don’t consume stories for real life. (Unless it’s a memoir)
Maybe I’m being off topic here but man, did the “Tell your truth” hit the sore spot! I had a teacher who said things like “Your story must be Meaningful and you must pour your soul into it!” and then shot down things I was passionate about because they weren’t That Deep.
Well, sorry that I am passionate about fantasy adventures and characters smooching each other! I would have came to deeper meanings when I actually started working on the stories! This kind of demand for True Story From Your Soul But Not Like That made me feel like I’m dumb and boring and not worth of telling stories.
Ugh, that’s the worst! Hopefully we can provide some better advice than that.
Heck, yes, I identify with this so hard.
Speaking as something in the neighborhood of a literary academic (I teach writing, but not primarily creative writing, and my own training was primarily in literary history)…
Personally, I tend to be other-than-strictly-realist in my own sensibilities, I’m sympathetic to a number of the arguments that you make here. Respectfully, however, I’d suggest that your account of literary realism is reductive on several levels.
1. Literary academics. Do I run into people like the ones you’re talking about in my line of work? Sure, and they can definitely be a drag, but the picture you’re painting here is a caricature of a type that hardly represents the profession as a whole.
Moreover, while the “write what you know” thing may not work for you (and to be frank, it’s not really my bag, either), my experience has been that writing from experience can be enormously empowering for many students.
2. The influence of naive/doctrinaire realism in the world of literary academia today. Do most literary academics adhere to the kind of realism that you’re caricaturing here? No. Do they base their approach to literature on Plato’s theory of mimesis? Also no. On the contrary, academic literary study trains students to be highly aware of the fictive dimensions of texts, whether they’re designated as “fiction” or “non-fiction.”
(And yes, it also trains people to be alert to the social and historical entanglements of stories, but that’s an important part of the serious study of storytelling, and it’s also something that underpins much of the commentary on this site, no?)
3. The influence of naive/doctrinaire realism in modern literature more generally. Yes, it’s significant, but is it or has it been dominant to the exclusion of all else? Again, no. Many of the authors who have had the biggest influence on modern and contemporary literature have had strongly other-than-realist tendencies. Not infrequently combined with strongly realist tendencies, but so it goes. (See, for example, Dickens, Melville, Joyce, Garcia Marquez, Morrison, Murakami…)
4. The interest and value of realism in literature. Again, I’m speaking as someone with fairly strong leanings toward the fabulist side of things. But how we engage with lived reality in art is a compelling, fascinating subject. In place of the reductive account of realism that you offer here, I’d encourage people to search out Erich Auerbach’s old-but-still-exceptionally-awesome book “Mimesis”, which shows how realism can be considered not merely as a way of imitating the world, but of discovering it, and discovering it in many different ways.
I get the appeal of snarky rants, but this one seems to be whaling away at a bit of a straw man. In doing so, moreover, it seems to be falling into the very trap it preaches against, namely, turning aesthetics into ideology (in this case, an anti-realist one).
In a world where actual hatred of books and learning is a growing threat, maybe we booklovers could encourage each other in our enthusiasms, different though they may be, instead of going scorched earth on them?
It did feel like they were attacking a straw man of realism. The straw man, unfortunately, does exist, but what they’re criticising isn’t realism, it’s the misunderstandings of it and its misuse.
I love what you said with realism as a way to explore the world and discover it. That’s what I want the realism in my books to do — make the characters relatable and interesting, show that even regular people living regular lives are utterly fascinating, and give insights about the human world even though my characters are aliens.
Thanks! Realism becomes much more interesting when we start with the question, “What is reality, anyway?” This is what I found so fascinating about Auerbach’s book: it shows us that realism is not just one thing, but many, and that different ways of telling a story can open up into different ways of understanding reality.
What you’re doing with realism in your own books sounds very cool. One of the great things that imaginative fiction can do is encourage us to enter into lives and worlds other than our own, and in doing so, lead us to look at our own lives and our own worlds in a new way. (The old trick of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.)
Thinking about this a little more: One of the things that I find curious about this article is that much of the commentary on this site, and much of mainstream SFF in general, is predicated on a particular kind of realism. Specifically, a realism that stresses the importance of immersion, internal plausibility, and narrative and world-building consistency. The “what” of the story may be fantastic, but the “how” tends to be pretty conventionally “realistic.” (In the “represent this as if it were actually happening” sense.)
I offer this less as a criticism than as an observation and illustration of the way that “realism” can take on different meanings that are not necessarily easy to resolve into one another.
My mom writes literary non-fiction, and she doesn’t look down on spec fic, so I can see why this article could seem harsh and even unfair.
However, the fact that *any* people honestly hold these views means that by definition it’s not a straw man. And for the people who have run into a teacher with these views it can be very frustrating.
On a tangent, this is the problem with challenging a lot of reactionary views. A challenge to X is often dismissed as attacking a straw man (well, *obviously* no one actually thinks X) when plenty of people are, in fact, spreading X idea. It’s a major part of what makes the current trend of reactionary messaging so insidious – messages that are extreme to the point of seeming parody can be presented in broad daylight, being accepted by the receptive while being ignored and left unchallenged by many others, until enough people support the message to give it legitimacy.
People who challenge such messages can expect to be accused of strawmanning, until said message is established enough for many to see it as something that needs to be challenged. This, in turn, pushes the baseline, allowing more extreme views to develop.
Editor’s Note: I’ve removed a few comments because they continued to claim that this post is making a “straw man” argument despite several commenters explaining that isn’t what “straw man” means. If the idea being attacked is real, it isn’t a straw man.
The comments went on to claim that the article is saying *all* literary academics hold this view, or that realism is *always* bad, which the article is very careful not to say. Ironically, this argument was in itself a straw man, and no longer producing any useful discussion.
As a student who’s run into multiple creative writing professors who hold these views, and countless others who will allow creative essays in their classes but only if they’re creative nonfiction, this isn’t a niche view. I’ve had a creative writing professor who never allowed “genre fiction” (speculative fiction) because it wouldn’t get published in literary magazines (never mind that that wasn’t most of her students’ goal). Many of my friends have had the same or similar experiences at completely different colleges and sections of academia. And lots of critics and reviewers online fall prey to misconceptions like the Real World Fallacy, which can do actual harm. It’s not hard to find those who tout realism like it’s the only way.
This article isn’t an attack on academic freedom or particular realist books or anything like that, it’s an attack on a flawed ideology that really does hinder students and limit learning. Which shows that it’s definitely not a hatred of learning — in fact, the article is more or less arguing that teachers should *expand* what they’re teaching, not continue to put an inane focus on realism.
“I’ve had a creative writing professor who never allowed ‘genre fiction’ (speculative fiction) because it wouldn’t get published in literary magazines (never mind that that wasn’t most of her students’ goal). Many of my friends have had the same or similar experiences at completely different colleges and sections of academia.”
And I mean, never mind that there are plenty of literary magazines that do publish genre fiction. (Though I know that wasn’t really your point.)
I can totally understand why your professor’s restrictions would be exasperating. I probably haven’t been as clear as I should have been in saying this, but I know and acknowledge that the ideology you’re talking about is prevalent among a significant subset of (primarily) creative writing professors, and I agree that it can be a problem.
(As an aside, my experience is that some of the people who prohibit students from writing genre fiction in their classes do so on the grounds that if they don’t, they will end up getting stacks of bad, e.g., Twilight fanfiction. Why they would apparently prefer to read stacks of bad, e.g., Jonathan Franzen fanfiction is beyond me. But I digress.)