In a new post, Janice Hardy shares advice on maintaining believability in your writing. “Once you blow your credibility with a reader, it’s really hard to earn back their trust,” she says. “Readers don’t believe a character would act a certain way, or they doubt a situation would ever happen, they find details that are flat-out wrong, or they call BS about how something is handled.” Once that happens, readers will start to doubt everything in your story and may not even finish it.
So, how can you maintain believability? Hardy shares a few tips:
- What’s the easiest or most obvious thing for your character to do? “If something is obvious and simple and the protagonist doesn’t do it, that’s a credibility issue in the making,” Hardy says. If your hero pops a button on his shirt, the obvious response is to grab another shirt, not drive to a tailor’s, even if you need your hero to be at the tailor’s at a certain time. If you must avoid the obvious response, make the second choice reasonable. “Tweak it so that obvious thing can’t work, or it’s not a viable option,” Hardy writes. “Remove all the obvious options until the thing you need your protagonist to do is the best choice they have.”
- What are the character’s motivations for it? People do awkward things, including actions that are out of character, but they have a reason to do so. The same is true for your characters. “No matter what your characters have to do, make sure their reasons for it make sense to them,” Hardy writes. “The reader can still think they’re idiots, but as long as they can see that, yeah, they’d do it that way too if they were in that character’s shoes, they’ll go with it.”
- Avoid the circle of (bad) plot. Unless your antagonist is the Riddler, your villain shouldn’t draw the protagonist’s attention to something they wish to keep hidden. How many tough-guy stories begin with a thug telling a private investigator to keep away from something the PI wasn’t investigating in the first place? “Actions to prevent something that ultimately causes the effect to happen feel forced,” Hardy notes. “Bad guys need solid motivations same as the good guys. Situations should feel as though they couldn’t have happened any other way and this was inevitable, and the actions of both sides led to this.”
- Be wary of contradictions of character. Characters can change – this is the whole point of the character arc – but their new behavior should still be believable. “Make sure your characters have reasons to change,” Hardy writes. “They learned a lesson prior to that change that made them realize they had to do things differently.” Show them making the wrong choice multiple times, until the right choice seems both safe and obvious, and provides a reward.
- Don’t break your own rules. Science Fiction and Fantasy stories need internal logic and rules for their technology and magic. Readers will suspend disbelief when you establish the rules, and will notice if you break them.
- Watch out for silent reasons. Sometimes, you have a good reason for a character change or a rule break, but you haven’t laid the groundwork for the reader. “Maybe the character did act exactly right, but the problem occurred five pages earlier when you didn’t make it clear why they’d have to do it,” Hardy explains. “It’s not always the action that’s the issue, just them doing it without proper motivation that feels off.” Make sure every character choice and action has a reason that makes sense.
