Does everything have to be accurate?

Generally, @MichaelKjörling and @HenryTaylor are right. Let me, however, look at the issue from a slightly different perspective.

If you explain something, it has to make sense. If you don't explain, it can be accepted as a black box.

Consider, for example, Asimov's Robot series. The robots have a "positronic brain", and obey the Three Laws of Robotics. The Three Laws are logical - there's plenty of stories to be had through playing with them. What on earth is a "positronic brain"? A black box, a catchword. If Asimov had attempted to explain how this brain actually, technologically, works, scientists and engineers would have been all over him, explaining the impossibility of it. But he doesn't explain, so he can get on with the story.

Similarly, Ursula Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness doesn't explain in detail why Gethen is cold: no mention of axial tilts, distance from the sun, whatever. Gethen is cold, let's get on with the story, and explore the effects of it being cold along the way.

Now contrast with Larry Niven's Ringworld; Niven went to great lengths to explain how the Ringworld is stable. In come the nitpickers to prove that no, it's not.

If I spot a mistake in something I'm reading, it breaks my immersion, shatters my suspension of disbelief. "Mistake" can be an internal inconsistency, or something that is overtly wrong. But if you don't give me enough information to find that something is wrong, everything's alright. I mean, I don't know exactly how things I use in RL work either, do I? The common USB flash drive, for example, is, to me, a black box: I store data on it, but I have no idea how, physically, the data is written, read, stored. Nor do I care.

posted over 6 years ago

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Galastel‭

1885 reputation 81 551 319 3

You appear to be a nonfiction or science fiction writer, attempting to create a work of fantasy. In either of the former disciplines, critics will come out of the woodwork to spotlight every inaccuracy. In the later, the call of logic is a little more complex and the criticism more subtle.

In fantasy literature, consistency trumps factual truth. Your magic doesn't need to make sense in relation to our known physical laws, but it must make sense in relationship to itself. If simple spell casting is difficult and leaves a caster debilitated and prematurely old, you cannot later have the same wizard hurling fireballs like candy with no apparent negative effect. Whatever rules which you establish in the early pages of your story need to still hold sway on the last page.

You can make your rules out of nothing but dreams, but once they have been dreamed into being, they cannot be casually destroyed.

posted over 6 years ago

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Henry Taylor‭

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I kept coming back to this passage in your question

I keep feeling the need to explain everything in hyper detail

Please, consider just not to.

There's a saying along the lines of that the author's ability to use magic is inversely proportional to the level of detail to which that magic is defined or explained. To a first order approximation, we can just as well say "technology" as we do "magic".

There's also Chekhov's gun.

Basically, the more detailed the explanation, the more you box yourself in. Unless you actually want to do that (say, because you're working within a universe defined by others and used by multiple storytellers where the stories need to be consistent with one another), it's usually better to limit yourself to what's actually needed. Especially do not explain things in the text of your work that don't need to be explained for the reader to understand and enjoy the story!

The worldbuilding is for you, not for your reader. (Except insofar as that a self-consistent story tends to be more enjoyable to read, because it makes the reader go "wait, what?" less often.)

Anything that goes into the text the reader sees should be there to serve a purpose. Most often, that purpose should be to advance the story. Does the reader need to know how the molecular frobulicator works, or do they simply need to know that when it goes boom, which it's going to in short order unless the engineers work their magic properly, it will blow a large hole along the entire length of the hull of the pressure vessel of the space station?

What you write down but which doesn't go into the text that the reader sees doesn't need to be very polished. Imagine all the notebooks kept by famous authors in order to keep the details of their stories straight; I doubt those would have made good bedside reading! I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if, especially before the widespread use of computers for writing, those were full of barely intelligible scribbles, cross-overs, different colors of ink, margin notes, and whatnot.

If you put a detail into a story, readers will expect that detail to serve a purpose, either now or later. That's Chekhov's gun; if there's a gun hanging above the mantlepiece by chapter one, it must go off by chapter four (or thereabouts). This, by the way, goes for every prop introduced into the story, not just firearms.

Use that expectation to your advantage, instead of being limited by it, or worse yet, limiting yourself by it.

posted over 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Canina‭

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