Ideal Realism

During a recent conversation about the sorts of stories I enjoy, I was accused of holding a double standard for desiring realism, but not grittiness.  The view that these desires are mutually exclusive is a common one, enough that I deemed it justification for its own post.  It comes from a belief that reality is by nature gritty and grim, a view that what separates fact from fiction is the onerous shackles of mortality, that reality is fundamentally burdensome.  This is an unfortunate way of thinking, and it colors the stories that we tell.

Fantasy is often accused of being an escapist genre (as if that were a bad thing, even if true), but there is a modern trend of increasingly dark and gritty fantasy.  Probably the most famous example is Game of Thrones.  I read…I think the first four? Game of Thrones books many years ago, because they were there, and they were, well, good.  Not great, and I never sought out more of them (or watched the shows).  Two main reasons made the books lackluster for me: characters died off before I could invest in their fates, and the overall tone was, well, gritty.

In this sense, I am using gritty to mean terse, unornamented language with a focus upon commonplace bodily functions that polite people don’t discuss in public, and which do not further the plot, the characters, or some other aspect of the story.  I have no issue with including such details when they are relevant, but they are often employed as gratuitous dressing to a story to convey a certain worldview that emphasizes what is simple necessity as notably unpleasant.  This is a matter of taste, and seems to please a certain segment of the audience, but my issue is not with that – I can avoid the stories that do it if they are not to my tastes – but with the conflation of this idea of gritty detail with realism.

One of my least favorite recently created words is “adulting,” or rather, the use of adult as a verb.  It irks me, because of both how it’s employed, and because it shouldn’t be necessary.  The things that people use it to refer to are just part of living – no additional verb is necessary.  Depicting basic expectations and requirements of life as burdensome will make them seem burdensome, and it is this mindset that permeates the gritty realism perspective.  It focuses, and makes seem toilsome, simple realities.  It is the casting as toilsome that makes it different from realism.

Realism need not be presented in such a way.  Rather than grittiness, I see realism in how long it takes to walk from point A to point B, or in the equipment and technologies to which the characters have access and can carry, or the odds that they can reasonably face.  Even some of the details that are presented as gritty can be included, but presented in a less negative light.  In other words, this is perhaps less a post about grittiness, and more a post about how pessimism, optimism, and so forth can color our writing.

As with most things, these end up as tools that we can use, as writers, to manipulate our audience and change the story that we are trying to tell.  I do not care for this permeating gritty pessimism in my writing or my reading, but it can be a tool to use in certain instances.  More important than choosing one mode or the other is the choosing itself, being conscious of the choice you are making and how it affects the story you are telling.  We all have our defaults, and the more we are conscious of those defaults and assumptions, the more control we have, and the better stories we can tell.