Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47929
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47929
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

If I understand your question correctly, you're asking to which extent the [Rule of Cool](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool) trope would let you get away with things in a relatively realistic story.

The answer to that is, **distinct story elements have to match the overall tone of the story.** Otherwise, they stick out like a sore thumb. **If an element "doesn't fit", then you can't insert it.** No matter how much you might want to.

You do get some leeway. For example, a story element might be hinged on contrived coincidence. It _could_ happen, it's just unlikely. Consider, for instance, Victor Hugo's novel _Les Misérables_: in all of Paris, Marius just happened to rent a room next to the Thénardiers, with Marius's father believing his life had been saved by Monsieur Thénardier. And Marius is in love with Cosette, who had been a ward of the Thénardiers. Not very likely, is it? But the story can hardly be considered unrealistic. In fact, it's power is derived from the fact that readers felt this could happen, this was happening all around them.

You also get away with inherent illogic of core story elements, without which there is no story in the first place. For example, Tolkien's legendariun is not a pastiche or a travesty, it's not a humorous work, it doesn't suffer from lapses in logic. But it contains dragons, and immortal elves. Tolkien doesn't have to answer how dragons breath fire, how they fly, how comes elves don't get old - those are axioms, on which everything else is built.

A simple rule of thumb: if something feels to you like it doesn't make any sense, don't write it. If you can't make yourself believe in a story element, there's definitely something wrong there. If something makes sense to you, but not to your beta readers, address it - either provide the story framework for the element to make sense (as @Mark Baker points out: mention tornadoes, so the appearance of one isn't "out of the blue"), or change the story element. If it took for your work to get printed before someone spotted an inconsistency - you got away with it, but try to do better next time.

Original score: 4