interest in its construction and continuity. They want the story to make sense and to form a satisfactory whole, and will welcome anything you do towards that end—but they also want the story to be exciting, and will be sympathetic to any device you use to enhance its excitement. Because readers like stories to keep moving, and eventually to arrive somewhere interesting, you have a license to engineer all kinds of opportunities and coincidences without regard to matters of probability. In the worlds within texts every decaying rope-bridge is certain to hold together just long enough—or, if it breaks, will allow the hero to clamber up the limp remnant to safety—and every honeymooning couple whose car breaks down at night is sure to find that the one lighted window they can see in the distance belongs to a haunted house. The unlikelihood of such occurrences is no threat to plausibility.
The readers’ willingness to accept improbabilities that serve to keep the plot moving is more than matched by their willingness to accept improbabilities that make a contribution to the integrity of the story, binding its parts into a whole. For instance, literary dreams usually serve this sort of purpose.
If real dreams serve any purpose at all, we have no idea what it is; in spite of our perennial tendency to search them for insights and omens, their meanings remain stubbornly unclear, and they remain obstinately devoid of any prophetic power. Literary dreams, on the other hand, are always meaningful and sometimes uncannily prophetic; if they were not they would have no place in the story at all. Literary dreams must be revelatory, at least so far as the reader is concerned, and most readers are only too happy to overlook the fact that real dreams are not like that. Even in known world fiction, dreams invariably serve this kind of integrative function, but in fantasy and science fiction dreamlike visions can be granted much greater powers, and routinely are.
The most elaborate attempt to account for the meaning of real dreams was, of course, advanced by Sigmund Freud, who attempted to read them as symbolic accounts of his patients’ anxieties and neuroses. Whether this kind of analysis has any use in clinical practice is unclear, but its utility in constructing and decoding literary dreams is considerable. Nor is it only dreams that can be symbolic in stories; the predicaments of the characters can be mirrored in all kinds of ways: by the weather, by the presence and fate of significant objects, by the blooming and fading of flowers, by the strange behavior of animals, and so on. In a story, everything observed and everything that transpires may have a meaning within the story’s scheme, which objects and events rarely, if ever, have in the real world.
When readers detect the symbolism of objects or events within a plot, or perceive patterns made by the recurrence of particular motifs or events which echo earlier events, they are not offended by the improbability of such contrivances. They like to discover such links and unities, and their pleasing qualities are more likely to add to the plausibility of the tale than detract from it. All these devices are available to you for use in securing the coherency of your stories, in addition to the logic of extrapolation.
* * * *
The Moral Order of Worlds Within Texts
The fact that readers are so very willing to entertain improbabilities in the stories they read informs us that the most important aspect of the coherency of imaginary worlds is not a matter of logical consistency. The principal reason why readers are so happy to entertain improbabilities within the stories they read is that those improbabilities usually work, at least in the end, to the advantage of the heroes and the disadvantage of the villains.
The real world does not distribute its rewards and punishments according to any discernible moral order. As Saint Matthew and everyone else has observed, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. The wicked are no more likely than the good to be struck by lightning or devoured by cancer, and the virtuousness of the good offers no perceptible protection from suffering and misfortune. Many people insist that there must be a further life after death where the moral account-books will be balanced and we will all get what we really deserve, but not everyone can believe that—and in the meantime, we must seek what solace we can in stories where things work out differently.
As the writer of a story, you always have the power to make things come out right: to make the guilty suffer and to reward the innocent. You might have good reasons for not wanting to do that, and your readers might sympathize with those reasons, but you do need to bear in mind that the decisions you make in constructing your plot have this kind of “moral weight.” In much the same way that the world of your story requires a certain logical coherency, the events that occur there require a certain moral coherency. This does not mean that you must always operate as a benevolent creator, but it does mean that you must bear the responsibility of the benevolence you refuse.
It is because of their relationship to moral order that the events in stories matter so much to their readers. We are joyful when the heroine of a story achieves her heart’s desire because we feel that she deserves it—and we feel that so strongly that we experience a sharp sensation of sorrow if, instead, the unfolding logic of events within the story brings her to despair or destruction. Your power to move your readers—to make them happy or sad—is based in their willingness to care about your characters, and that willingness is rooted in their desire to see justice done. However remote the world of your story is from the known world in terms of its physics or geography, and no matter what kinds of magic or superscience operate there, it is as tightly bound to our notions of moral order as the most accurate reflection of the known world.
Our capacity to “identify” with characters in fiction is not at all dependent on similarity. Anyone who has been part of an audience watching Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. or J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan must have seen large numbers of people reduced to tears by the plight of imaginary characters who do not resemblance us at all—so little, in fact, that the part of E.T. is played by a plastic doll and the part of Tinkerbell by a spotlight.
The reason why we have such considerable sympathy for these non-human characters, while we righteously loathe the all-too-human foes who threaten them, is purely a matter of moral compatibility. The simple fact is that we love the good guys, whoever and whatever they may be, and we hate the bad guys. When E.T. finally goes home and Tinkerbell is applauded back to life after drinking the poison that Captain Hook intended for Peter we feel uplifted—so uplifted that we might weep with joy in a way we very rarely have occasion to do in response to real events.
We feel uplifted, too, whenever the villain in a story goes bloodily to his destruction, although in those instances we are more likely to cheer than weep. We do not cheer because we are sadists, who revel in the pain and ignominy of others, but because we recognize the moral propriety of the villain’s consignment to a Hellish end. (This fact is unfortunately overlooked in most discussions about the role and effects of violence in the media, which is why so many of those discussions are futile.)
Once we have recognized this, we can easily understand why most people would rather read stories with happy endings than stories in which the pressure of “realism” causes writers to withhold rewards for the good or to let the wicked get away scot free. We can also understand why it is that so many readers like to read the same kind of book repeatedly. What these readers are doing is participating in a ritual of moral affirmation whose force depends on continual repetition—in which respect it is similar to all the other kinds of affirmative rituals with which we are familiar: legal rituals, religious rituals and the rituals of petty superstition.
The importance of these observations to you, as a writer of fantasy and science fiction, is that the imaginary beings that you create can always command the intense interest of readers, provided that you can make the readers care what happens to them. You can achieve that by placing them in difficulties and dilemmas that bring the readers’ moral assumptions into play. Indeed, imaginary beings operating in wholly fantastic worlds may display moral issues in a “purer” way than any real world situation could. This is why talking animals are so often used to dramatize moral advice, why the plots of fantasy novels often take the form of all-out battles
