 For Authors: April 09, 2025 Issue [#13069] |
This week: Verismilitude and the Wheft Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.
Ernest Hemingway
Wheft. (n) (nautical) A kind of streamer or flag used either as a signal, or at the masthead for ornament or to indicate the direction of the wind to aid in steering.
Webster’s online dictionary
Verisimilitude is the appearance of being true or real. It's a fundamental feature of realistic fiction. It applies to characters, plot, setting, and all other elements of the ficttional world. It's what Hemingway is talking about. |
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I can't stand watching shows on cable TV that claim to discover evidence about things like space aliens or bigfoot. Understand, I don't have anything against these shows, and I'm willing to concede that things like space aliens or bigfoot could very well exist. I just don't find the shows or their purpotted evidence credible. When they insist that a blurry photograph or a single, unsubstantiated eyewitness report is evidence, it just makes me change channels.
On the other hand, I enjoy Star trek in all its incarnations, even though I know that the faster-than-tight drives featured in the Star Trek universe are just pseudo-science jibber-jabber.
The difference between the two is something called the wiling suspension of disbelief. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the first to use the phrase in 1817 when he said that in his poetry he tried to infuse
a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure...that willing suspension of disbelief
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, from Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV
The idea is even older. For example, in Book II of Acadmica in CE57, Cicero mentions adsensionis retentio, or "holding back of assent." Both Coleridge and Ciciero were writing about poetry with a supernatural element, but the concept applies more broadly to all fiction.
The idea is that when a reader starts a piece of fiction, they begin with a willing suspension of disbelief. Readers know that what they are reading is fiction, which by definition means that it's not real. The Coleridge quote is important, because it places the burden on the author to infuse their work with "sufficent human interest and a semblance of truth" to support that "willing suspension of disbelielf."
Verismimilitude is how authors reinforce that initial willing suspension of disbelief.
I can enjoy Star Trek because, while I know warp drives are impossible, I'm willing to believe in them for the sake of the story and the characters. In fact, the very term "warp drive" is a clue, a kind of signal flag, that suggests that the idea warps our existing knowledge about the way the universe is really real.
All those UFO and bigfoot shows on the Discovery Channel, though? They present themselves as factual, so I watch them with the same skeptical eye, the scientific eye, that I use when viewing evidence. There's no "suspension of disbelief," and the presentation reinforces that it's supposed to be evidence. It's worth noting that Mr. Gene, my partnner, enjoys those Discovery Channel shows, but he's watching them as fiction. My problem is I can't believe they are intended as fiction, so I can't watch them.
That willing suspension of disbelief can be fragile. It's based on both the "human interest" and "a semblance of truth." If fictional story breaks either of those too severely, it will break that willing suspension and, thus, break the fictional dream playing in the readers' minds. A famous example is in Star Wars, where, at one point, Han says he made the Kessel run in "twelve parsecs." That sounds real fast, right? Except that a parsec is a measure of distance, not speed. It's like saying I made the "Oklahoma CIty" run in "twelve miles" when the real distance from Tulsa is more like ninety miles. It's nonsense. It's a glaring error, and an example of using a "sciency-sounding" word in a way that makes no sense. And, no, Lucas didn't "fix" his mistake later by implying Han knew a shortcut. It's an obvious mistake and, while it doesn't ruin Star Wars for me, it certainly makes me cringe.
On the other hand, the faster-than-light drives in both Star Trek and Star Wars provide, if you squint hard enough and want to believe, a sufficient semblance of truth to keep you connected with the story. In Star Trek, there's that flag, the word "warp" in warp drive, that signals that the drive is different, warped. it works to give that semblance of reality. Unless, of course, the screewriters get too specific do something stupid like saying a parsec is a measure of velocity.
I tend to have a personal problem with verisimilitude when it comes to fantasy, especially when things like magicians or fairies lurk in our everyday, real world. Heinlein wrote Magic, Inc. and related stories, but the underlying basis was, if you squnted hard enough, the general wierdness and various mysteries of quantum mechanics. He never explicitly mentions the quantum world, but it's implicit. In addition, the commercializaiton of magic in his fictional universe is entirely credible, which helps.
Recently, I've been thinking about writing a slipstream story, set in part in our modern world, but with fantasy elements that include something like "the veil" that separates the real and unreal as well as adepts who are simllar to magicians. But, I kept running into that verismimiltude problem. If I don't believe those things are possible, I'm going to have a hard time making my readers believe in them. But then I encountered an emerging theory in physics about, of all things, dark matter. It's brand new, less than a year old, and could fizzle out. But, if you squint hard enough, it might give me a pseudo-scientific basis for the things I need for my story.
At its most basic, this new way of thinking about dark matter hypothesizes a whole new array of "dark particles," similar to those of the Standard Model of particle physics. We can observe the gravitational effects of these dark particles. Gravity comes from the shape of space-time, so they must occupy the same space-time as normal matter. But, if there really is a whole array of things like dark quarks or dark bosons, the "dark universe" might have completely different laws of physics at its most fundamental levels, yet this dark universe exists inside the same space-time that we occupy. There are almost a limitless number of ways an auther of speculative fiction could use these ideas.
I was going to write about this emerging theory and how fiction authors might employ it, but that rapdidly turned into an op-ed on major unsolved problems in physics. I put that essay on my author blog , if you're interested.
One thing that I wanted was some kind of signal flag to stick in my story to mark the boundary between the real world and the dark, slipstream world, something like the warp in warp drive. I know from mathematics that boundaries are where the most interesting mathematics and physics often happens. I got the idea of calling this fictional boundary between the dark universe and the normal universe the wheft from my friend Raven  and her awesome new novel Rain, where magic floats in the weft, a term she borrowed from weaving. I like the sound of both words, of course, but I like the idea of a signal flag, too. Anyway, both weft and wheft have a nice, surreal sound to them, so either is a good choice for a surreal, slipstream story. My slipstream story, assuming I write it, will have the dark matter universe leaking into ours across the "wheft." My thought is that consciousness might also reside on the wheft, and that maybe we cross the wheft when we perish. Like i said, endless possiblities for fiction authors.
Back to the main point of this newsletter. Readers start wanting to believe in your fictional world and the characters who inhabit it. You've made an implicit agreement with your readers: you'll take them to new places and introduce them to new people, but you'll do it in a way that, if they squint hard enough, will be believable. |
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