Real or fake - do your characters behave like people?

[RX-79G]

Fiction writers frequently ask questions about "believability" - whether their plot, characters and devices go too far doing the rather incredible things that go along with SFF. I think a related but slightly different question we should stop and ask ourselves now and then is if what we are reading/writing is real or fake - a much more binary question that can't be rationalized away by reference to other parts of the text.

Most of the time, if I stop reading a book the reason I stop has a lot to do with whether the people and world seems real or not. Which is not to say ordinary or familiar. It is usually more like "Given the way this SFF world works and this character's background, do they seem to be acting like a real person would?" OR "Given the technology and economy of this world, does it make sense that the majority of people are peasant farmers, or that a villainous queen can control everything?"

The danger of SFF is that it is a top down approach of supposing something speculative and then fitting the ordinary into it. In so doing, our individual units of believability - human characters - can become so distorted by the demands and strictures of fitting into this synthetic universe that they no longer bear much resemblance to real people. This may happen on an individual scale with a hero whose motivations and fears don't balance out right, or to a society whose economy or institutions don't take into account the amount of magic or robots or whatever that are implicit to the story.

 

[Susan Boulton]

Your characters should be, "believable", within the framework of your story. i.e. if you are creating a world, then, even if you don't write every detail of the said world, your characters must act within the framework. If they act outside it, it must be a logical divergence that can be explained in the logic you have used in your world.
By using elements of normal life and the range of human emotions, even when applied, to non-human characters you give your reader something to latch onto and guide them into accepting the fantastic elements in your story.
It is not a matter of real or fake, you are writing fiction, no matter what genre you are writing in. You need to catch the reader's interest. Reader's need to become invested in the characters' fate.

 

[MWagner]

Most of the time, if I stop reading a book the reason I stop has a lot to do with whether the people and world seems real or not. Which is not to say ordinary or familiar. It is usually more like "Given the way this SFF world works and this character's background, do they seem to be acting like a real person would?" OR "Given the technology and economy of this world, does it make sense that the majority of people are peasant farmers, or that a villainous queen can control everything?"

I'm the same way. When I think of the literary merits of fiction, plausible behaviour is an essential element. If I don't believe character behaviour, I don't believe the fiction. I frequently set aside books in disappointment when characters in a world dramatically different from ours think and behave like modern people (more specifically, modern Western educated middle-class people).

The problem is that A) Depicting characters who are psychologically and poetically 'truthful' is one of the most sophisticated and difficult techniques in fiction, and B) It doesn't seem to matter much to most readers, who care more about whether a character is sympathetic and inspires wish-fulfilment than about whether she's truthful. The problem is especially tricky in speculative fiction, where readers want to journey to exotic worlds, but most still want familiar and comforting characters. The thoughts and behaviour of someone who grew up in a violent pre-literate feudal society would be alien to us. Perhaps even repellent. Same with a character in a technologically advanced culture set 200 years in our future. Their values and modes of thinking, shaped by their environment and social structure, would be very, very different from ours.

So where does that leave the writer? Make plausibility and truth your lodestone, and you'll craft something that might have literary and intellectual appeal, but little popular appeal. Make sympathetic characterisation guide your choices and you're work will likely be broadly appealing, but superficial. I suppose it's up to every writer to decide where to aim their work on that spectrum.