How to tell readers that I know my story is factually incorrect?
Sometimes, it so happens that I do some research for a story and find that a major plot point could never work in real life. At this stage, I can either continue with my impossible (for a non-fantasy, non-scifi setting) idea, or scrap it completely.
This happened to me earlier while I was writing fan fiction - given the informal nature of it, I simply let my character survive a wound that he shouldn't have survived, and then left a note at the bottom about what would have really happened.
How can I do this in a more formal setting, like a short story or a novel? Assume that I can't incorporate the research without reworking a lot of my story.
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4 answers
Sometimes writers make mistakes. Sometimes they didn't know something. Sometimes they chose to ignore a fact because it got in the way of their story. This is so common, TV tropes has a whole family of tropes related to the phenomenon. Of particular interest to you would be Artistic License - Medicine with all its subtropes, and Critical Research Failure.
If you choose to write something, you don't add a footnote saying "actually, this is total bull". Imagine if Dan Brown added an addendum to all his books, explaining that all his "facts" are entirely made up, wrong, and incompatible with reality. He wouldn't be nearly as famous, would he?
If you're uncomfortable with writing something that is painfully wrong, rewrite it. Correct it. Make your work something that gives you pride rather than mild shame. If you don't really care, then you don't really care.
As a reader, a mistake I notice throws me out of the story, always. It breaks my suspension of disbelief, because I know "that couldn't have happened". Depending on the mistake, sometimes I can forgive it, gloss over it, move on. The author is, after all, just human, sometimes they make mistakes, no big deal. Or it could be that they made the choice deliberately, because it works so great for the plot. Sometimes that too can be forgiven.
Other times, the author should really have known better, should have done their research. Sometimes a mistake is so bad, I feel the author is showing blatant disrespect towards their audience. Then I will put the book down and never pick up anything by that author again.
But if you straight up add a footnote and tell me that the things you wrote can't actually work, what you're saying is "I couldn't be bothered with making it right, I do not respect you, the reader, enough to write something that works. Rewriting the work after I found a mistake was more work than I was willing to put into this, so here, take this half-baked product." I'm sure you can see how I wouldn't forgive that.
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I simply let my character survive a wound that he shouldn't have survived, and then left a note at the bottom about what would have really happened.
As a reader, this would break my immersion and ruin the story, everything after that is BS, I know it, the author knows it, and did it anyway.
Change the plot point.
Change the injury to something crippling (for the moment) but survivable.
Make it so the injury isn't what the character thought it was.
Make the character recognize the gravity of the injury and do something about it, to make it non-fatal.
Invent another character to prevent the hero from dying, even if you have to write 10,000 words.
Or, as a last resort, just don't tell us. This is fiction, an entertainment, so take the liberty without apologizing for it. If 10% of readers call BS on it, you still entertained 90% of them. Stop worrying about "justification" or your "integrity" or "honesty".
Yes, I'd like my fiction to be plausible; and I would probably choose to rewrite, but I don't expect deep plausibility in fiction that will withstand any level of research. IRL I am a scientist, but I do not expect readers to take my fiction as literal truth, I don't expect my fiction to withstand close scientific scrutiny. You just need some surface plausibility, or as we call it in science, "hand-waving" justifications a reader can accept without much thought, and read on.
Don't let your ego get in the way of writing an entertaining story.
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I've read a few books that had an "afterword" section at the end, where the author would address the reader directly to talk about the work. I know Anthony Horowitz did this with the Alex Rider series; one book had him list his top 10 favourite deaths across the whole series, and I think another had him discuss his decision to have Scorpia end with
Alex getting shot by a sniper.
So you could always add an afterword at the end of your own novel, and in there, you could explain how you knew that X was unrealistic or incorrect, but you put it in anyway for artistic license. This relies on your readers actually reading the afterword and not just closing the book the minute they finish the actual narrative, but it's the best way I can think of.
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Every book is going to play around with reality to some degree, though some do it more than others.
Every case is different. Is this a story that would end up on a "I can't believe they survived!" style TV show?
In my own book, I've included one of my favorite songs. But the song didn't exist in that time period. It's in Aramaic and Aramaic and Hebrew weren't languages yet; people spoke Canaanite, the precursor language to both.
I am handwaving this away because it's a very old song and it's not inconceivable that a form of it existed even earlier. But I know that's a load of BS I'm telling myself so I can include it.
And...so...I'm including it anyway. Because it's my book and that's what I want to happen. I'm also including things that didn't happen historically, at least not in the United States. They're things that could have happened, but they didn't.
I have no idea if I'll have an afterword that talks about any of this, because that's more up to the publisher than anyone else. But I do have a blog. I can talk about all of these pressing issues as much as I want. And if gasp some readers do not care as much as I do about linguistics and liturgical history as I do, they can just skip that post.
In your situation, let your character survive and move on. If you need to, tweak the details just slightly as others have recommended, so survival is possible, even if improbable. As long as it's not too extreme (no one survives their head being cut off), readers can chalk it up to some amazing stroke of luck. You don't need to explain medical probability to the reader, just make it believable.
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