The Tales Pensieve

Is that a flying saucer I see? Yes, saucer flies and there is nothing extraordinary about it. Does the flying saucer fit into your story? That’s a question that you ought to ask yourself before introducing the green aliens and their saucers in your story. I agree that readers like surprises. However, that doesn’t mean that they want flying saucers and meteors in the sky, or the sun shooting plasma at your characters in a romance novel. Such things are only possible in a romance novel if your characters are doped. If the sun is really shooting plasma into the space, then you are writing a sci-fi and the story is set in the future. It can’t be contemporary and flying aliens aren’t normal.

I understand that a writer’s imagination has no boundaries. He can make his characters drink air and breathe water – but that should seem LOGICAL at least in the world that the story is set in. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was hidden from the muggles because there were several spells that aided the wizarding world to live in secrecy. There is no scope for assumption here. There are spells to hide things from non-magical eyes and the magic folks use them to do just that. Here, the author didn’t ask you to assume that the muggles are ignorant of the magical world. Instead, she told you why muggles didn’t know about the wizarding world. It’s as simple as that. You just have to make your readers believe stuff.

I recently edited a novel where the characters randomly bump into each other and immediately fall in love. They don’t even look at each other or anything, and want to cling to one another (quite literally). What if you were straight and had bumped into another man? Yea, the person was wearing a dress but she could have been a transgender person. Are you writing about a man who chases skirts? Then, it seems only logical that he felt something for a person wearing a dress and he didn’t have to confirm her gender. But…if you are writing about a man who isn’t a player, and then make him want to cling to a girl when he isn’t even sure that she is a girl – you are doing it wrong. Or was he horny at that moment and didn’t matter who the other person was? …makes sense. I mean, they should at least look at the other person to fall for his/her pretty face, no? People do fall in love over the internet, but you at least get to know the person or see the person’s pictures before that love (or mostly attraction) sprouts. There must be something either tangible or intangible.

It must just feel right – Right for you story, Right for your character!