Before I got my MA in creative writing, I wrote to entertain myself. I wanted an end product that people like me would find exciting and interesting. To this end I experimented with all kinds of form and content, trying to reinvent the wheel for my reader so they’d be impressed with something new. It was a futile pursuit that only stopped once my thesis advisor told me about verisimilitude.

In this article, we’ll define this term and figure out what lessons it can teach writers.

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Key Takeaways:

• The author’s job is to play god

• Realism can be characterization

• The chain of causality is an author’s best friend

What is Verisimilitude?:

If we look at a list of our favorite books, movies, or games, we might notice a list of qualities that each favorite contains. As consumers, we might develop tastes for romance or thrillers, sci-fi or fantasy; as we settle into our niches, we begin to identify with a work’s tone, characters, form, etc.

Verisimilitude is something that all readers, ourselves included, crave to see in creative work whether they’re aware or not.

By definition, verisimilitude is the appearance of being true or real. Keep in mind one important word in that definition: appearance. Just because your novel is set ten-thousand years in the future, that doesn’t mean you can’t capture reality like lightning in a jar. Verisimilitude is something that every reader wants present, even if they don’t know it.

Achieving Realism:

Many aspiring authors question the practicality of achieving realism in their stories. What need for realism do we have when our story is about vampires and werewolves? The answer is that realism isn’t so much linked to our story’s content as it is related to how our story is structured.

When people think about realism in storytelling, they tend to think about the realism of the dialogue or how the characters interact. I won’t say these aren’t important, but before we can worry about the nitty-gritty, we need to address the big picture.

Tolkien’s classic Lord of the Rings series is an excellent example of a realistic story in a fantastical setting. Frodo’s journey obeys the traditional laws of time and space. That means that scenes occur in chronological order with the exception of flashbacks which are telegraphed to the reader. The party of the one ring also must navigate the physical world; they must walk, eat, sleep, and do all the things a living thing must to survive.

Tolkien’s mastery of realistic fantasy can be largely attributed to his relentless dedication to detail. The man invented an entire elven language on top of a detailed history of a nonexistent continent. While not everyone will have the time or energy to emulate Tolkien, you can learn from his eye for detail. Small scale scenes are enriched by the tiniest of details, we just need to remember to keep our perspective in mind when making any description. The smell of the city, the pictures on a wall, the sound of the music; any of these can be the detail that grips our reader.

The relationship between cause and effect also plays a large role in the verisimilitude of our story. In real life, things don’t happen for no reason; even natural disasters are predicated on factors that allow us to predict them with a degree of accuracy. Similarly, the reader should be able to trace past events in your story to the present moment. Authors call this practice forecasting or foreshadowing. Calling back to past events in the present is another way to indicate a causal relationship between two scenes. We want the distance between cause and effect to be as small as possible so that our reader is aware that the characters are building the story through their participation.

Unrealistic Expectations:

What happens when we fail to achieve verisimilitude in our story? You might have read such a story in the past, but it’s likely that you don’t remember.

Just as a reader might find it difficult to discern what they like about verisimilitude, they may also struggle to figure out what is wrong when it is absent. Within the first few sentences, a reader will feel that something is ‘off’ about the story. Maybe the scenes feel disconnected or time is distorted; whichever the issues are, they accumulate to produce an uncanny feeling for the reader.

We as writers of course know the issue: the reader is unable to relate with an unrealistic story. No amount of exciting action or interesting wordplay can save an unrealistic story from being unrelatable. The reader wants to be able to put themselves in the shoes of the characters on page. At the end of the day, verisimilitude relies heavily on our ability to accurately convey the human experience to the reader. It is one job of the writer to constantly scrutinize the characters of our stories. Do their actions fit their motivations? Do their thoughts align with their words? Do we supply the reader with exposition for any unexpected contradictions? These are just a few of the questions we must ask ourselves before setting out to achieve verisimilitude in our story.

Conclusion:

While our story might nope hope to achieve realism in terms of content, we can structure our story as to invite readers to engage with our characters. That way, we present our story’s world as equally valid to real life. Our readers will appreciate it, even if they can’t define verisimilitude.

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