Verisimilitude

The working definition of verisimilitude is, “the quality of appearing true or real”.

I’ve long been a believer that an author’s work is only made better the more verisimilitude there is to a given work. The logic goes that, if the world of the story is more believable, the audience will be drawn into it more strongly and will develop a stronger investment in the story and characters, and so far this has held true for everything I read. I make it a personal goal to include as much of it into my own writing as possible, in ways great and small, from the micro to macro level. But something as personal as writing is going to vary between individual authors. I also wish to develop a broader, more complete knowledge of the subject.

So, what does verisimilitude mean to you? What works have it, in your opinion? What works lack it? What are the key features of its presence in a work, and how specifically do they add to it to make it seem like that work takes place in a world that could be real?

I also prefer verisimilitude or internal consistency in fictional works.

I'll put up with One Big Lie or two, provided there are consistent rules and I don't get WTF moments throughout the story - Magic A Is Magic A allows me to accept magic, FTL Travel and other fantastic science are permissible provided the author shows signs of having thought out the ramifications of the technnology and applies things consistently and is accurate in application of other known physical laws.

For me, verisimilitude trumps Rule of Cool.

Larry Niven's works are brilliant - he's got FTL Travel, short-range teleportation, gigantic artifacts but he makes them believable and no matter when they are set I always feel that I'm dealing with an extension of our own universe.

One thing he does that I really like is making it clear in place names that humans were involved - like the official name of the planet is "Plateau" as the only inhabitable region is a large plateau sticking up out of the dense, unbreathable lower atmosphere into the breathable upper atmosphere but the mountain itself is called "Mount Lookitthat" because that's what a crew member said when he spotted it, or the fact that the planet on which the settlers crash-landed is called "Wemadeit" and the inhabitants are generally called "Crashlanders".

Star Trek is just pure pulpy drek written by people who "cannae understand the laws of physics" that throw meaningless technobabble around to "explain" the plot convenience of the day.

I aim to have verisimilitude in my own works (and will drop them if I can't make them plausible enough), no matter how fantastic the premise (anything from Werewolves and Vampires to Post-Cyberpunk to Portal Fantasy).

So I guess that for me "verisimilitude" is pretty broad - a consistently applied FTL Travel mechanism seems "realistic".

edited 18th Jan '15 2:26:07 PM by Wolf1066

I really want to challenge that stuff about Niven, but I feel like it would be a derail.

Not that I feel like I have anything meaningful to say on the main topic - I think "verisimilitude" is too broad and subjective a term to really be that useful in considering what makes a "good" setting.

Verisimilitude is a word that is juicy that I have not yet heard used before. I like it.

However, real world application of most story themes destroys them in the process. The chemistry, physics and biology of most stories tends to be impossible to apply if you are not well educated in those fields.

Well, for me, verisimilitude means ... verisimilitude.

Not very helpful, I realise. The point is, for me verisimilitude means that which the origin of the word implies. The origin of the word being a combination of Latin words veris and similum, which can be translated to similar to truth. However, the words that make up the word are not translated that way in this case—as it tends to be the case with words created in such a way—and a more accurate translation would be "[a] simile of [that which is] real".

Those who happen to already know the word "simile" and those who'd just spent some time to check what it means probably already know what this means. To the rest of you, I can tell that "simile" means "explicit comparison", and the only way for the translation I'd used is if "[a] simile of [that which is] real" means "an explicit comparison between real [world] and that which is presented as real", the latter being the world of the story, the rules, the characters, and anything else that is of any significance.

So ... what sort of comparison is it supposed to be? After all, if it's not real, it's not real, right?

Well, not exactly. Verisimilitude isn't about the world of the story being exactly the same as our world, nor is it about people having exactly the same skills, nor is it about laws of physics (and whatever else) of that world being the same as we can observe. It isn't about available and used resources, level of technology, or anything else of that sort.

An example, if I may. Imagine that there is a world on which there isn't a single drop of petrol nor anything similar. Imagine that it is a whole world on which technology evolved differently, maybe is on a different level, mayhap higher or mayhap lower than what we have, that they could never even synthesise anything like petrol. And now imagine yourself as one of the denizens of that world, someone to whom that other world is real. And you happen to be reading a story describing our world, a world in which a "magical" resource that is petrol exists, and technology had evolved differently.

For someone who had never seen anything like it, that "petrol" thing will seem like a Phlebotinum of sorts, because undoubtedly without it everything would have been different. And yet, as the person reads, they realise that no matter how hard they try to find some inconsistency in how this substance works, they can't, because it clearly follows a set of defined rules that does not allow for exceptions for the sake of Rule of Cool, and if they ever are any exceptions those are explained by different rules which do not break the other rules but rather add to them.

In that situation, for those people, this "petrol" substance is something that does not break verisimilitude. It is something that follows consistent rules and doesn't do anything weird "just because". It's something that has the effect that, had someone created a universe in which this "petrol" existed, could realistically be seen as something that would follow the rules laid down in the story.

Well, okay but ... how does the above answer it at all? There was also the bit where this "verisimilitude" was about characters, right?

The thing that I had hoped to demonstrate with the above bit is, verisimilitude is not about something being identical to what we know. It is about that which is shown being a possible state of things in a world of the story, in a world which could be created by taking our world at its beginning, changing that which differs between our world and the world of the story, and rebuilding the world from there.

In other words, it means that for something to have verisimilitude, it would have to be believable in everything it is if we look at it from the perspective of our world with the filter of the differences between the two worlds.

Another example, a realistic painting has verisimilitude in spite of the presented image being only a two-dimensional facsimile of a three-dimensional world, because is presents what is a plausible representation of said three-dimensional reality in its own two-dimensional reality, and what it shows is what we would have gotten if we had filtered the three-dimensional reality via the filter that is this one experience (two dimensions rather than three).

The same is about characters. No matter the world presented, the characters have to behave in a way that is consistent with how the world presented in the story functions, with the changes inflicted upon that world, with the culture present within. If you had a story in which magic existed and was a fairly powerful tool or even weapon, for example, but only women could use it, then for the world to have verisimilitude the social hierarchy would have to be rebuilt to account for that change, and so would culture and the way people act towards others depending on their sex.

For individual characters, it is no different. Every character has to behave consistently, in a way that is also consistent with how people, those of their culture and all people in general, behave. This is where it is easiest to break the verisimilitude, but also where it is the hardest to notice it for most people. And that is because many people base characters on themselves because they only lived as themselves, which makes it very easy to make mistakes when writing characters who are unlike us; a simple to understand example, a man who writes a female character or a woman who writes a male character, in both of those cases they most likely do not have any practical experience as the person of the other sex and/or gender and thus risk making mistakes when writing characters fundamentally different from themselves in such a way, or in any way really. And it is the hardest one to notice for the same reason, because some things simply aren't noticeable for people who had not experienced them themselves; so if a woman wrote a male character wrong, for example, most women wouldn't notice, but many men would do.

And, of course, there's also the fact that even though those individual characters do change over time—if they don't, that also breaks verisimilitude, as humans change all the time and it's just that most people only notice the overt changes and overlook the subtle ones—and those changes also have to be believable. Yes, humans can be random, and it had already been proven that one of our prominent abilities is one to quickly connect our actions and make an excuse that would show that there is some reason behind a string of semi-random actions taken on a whim. For the most part, though, humans generally have triggers to which they react in certain ways, under certain circumstances, and those triggers and responses have to be believable or the character will be nothing more than a one-dimensional mannequin (which is not very plausible).

Ugh, my brain hurts ... short version, please?

Hmm ... in short, for me, verisimilitude is the ability of the story and every single one of its elements to remain consistent and believable in the frame of the story from the first to the last page. Because that's what it is.

Or, in other words, for something to have verisimilitude means that every change inflicted on that thing has an effect that could be a possible effect of this change had this change been applied to real-life counterpart of the thing in question.

Or, in yet other words, Magic A Is Magic A that applies to all elements and not only made-up ones, plus characters being actual characters and not Styrofoam cut-outs.

edited 18th Jan '15 11:06:20 PM by Kazeto

I think we're done here.

& Um. Yeah. Um. That's pretty complete. I've read it over several times and cannot find a single major problem with it. Well done.

Still, part of the point of this thread is to gather multiple perspectives. I can only hope other contributions will be as thorough as that.

Also, citing examples of specific works that you think contributed to a work's sense of verisimilitude would help a lot. Having a set of practical examples to reference is sure to help.

edited 19th Jan '15 9:33:48 AM by Gault

Verisimilitude is grossly overrated.

I strongly disagree. Now, unless you have any decent arguments for why you think so or have anything that actually answers the question posed in the opening, you might as well not bother to reply.

That's a strong statement, and it kind of needs support.

I think verisimilitude is not only a matter of internal consistency, it is also a matter of sync between the author's mindset (context, culture, values, vocabulary, voice, attitude...) and the reader's capacity to exploit it for its own excitement.

For example, the verisimilitude of te beach scene in 'Saving Private Ryan' might be unbearable for war veterans, while teenagers could consider it pompous. Or the other way around... anyway, I think you get the point : Your Verisimilitude Mileage May Vary - a whole lot!

Pulp litterature from the fifties with their old-fashioned sex habits won't appeal to the most of us as does contemporary manga, but, hopefully, over-emotional bitches with big eyes won't be fashionable anymore by 2050.

I also beleive this impact of the mindset / cultural references /context... on verisimilitude extends to the very fabric of your writing : your words, your language and your metaphors will sound more realistic to the people who are similar to you.

edited 20th Jan '15 8:33:15 PM by Michelange

I think verisimilitude is the most important thing in fiction.

Of course by that, I don't mean that doesn't mean that things have to be realistic. What is important is that it feels realistic. Without that, suspension of disbelief is hampered.

Also, the form that verisimilitude takes can differ depending on the work. For example, consider something like The Simpsons with wacky unrealistic situations as the plot demands, Negative Continuity, etc. I think the verisimilitude is that the characters feel like people that the viewer can identify with.