thebaconsandwichofregret:

words-writ-in-starlight:

dainesanddaffodils:

One of my favorite phrases my Creative Writing professor had for when you’re writing fantasy is ‘giving your story a Flux Capacitor’.

Because it’s not real, it doesn’t exist. But the way it’s thrown into Back to the Future, at no point does it throw the audience off or suspend any more disbelief than time travel would. You believe Doc when he says he created the Flux Capacitor – the thing that makes time travel possible, because the universe never questions him. 

So it essentially means like, there are going to be elements to your universe that are just not gonna make any sense, even if you set up a whole system based on it. And the only way to make it work is completely own it. You cannot second-guess your system or else the reader will too. You can give it the strangest explanation, but write it like you own it.  

Either you’ve got to follow the rules of reality and physics and shit TO THE LETTER, or you have to say “naaaaaah” and fuck off with your magic/sci-fi/whatever to have a marvelous garden party where reality isn’t invited.

As long as the story always obeys the fake rules you’ve set then it can break the real laws of the universe.

Lots of writers take this too far and break their own rules and that devalues the story.

Take the Weeping Angles from Doctor Who. We are told the rule that if they are being looked at they stay as stone and the first time we meet them the heroes use this to defeat 4 of them by tricking them into looking at each other. It’s a great crescendo moment for the plot.

But then the next time we see them they can apparently move just fine while looking at each other and while this makes them more powerful by removing a key weakness it also makes them less scary, because it’s less real if the very clear rules we were given no longer seem to apply. Because that makes suspension of disbelief harder.

So go to town on making shit up, that’s always amazing fun, but if your plot requires you to go against the stuff you made up then either the plot point or the rule needs to change.