Improbable doesn't mean Impossible.
Dec. 23rd, 2018 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gridloreI'm watching the 49ers play the Chicago Bears, and shaking my head at just how implausible reality gets to be. My beloved Niners should be a non-entity at this point, 1-14 and in the running for the first pick in next year's draft. Our season sucked. We are down to our third-string quarterback, have lost three of our top receivers, and everything is held together by twine and fervent prayers.
Yet the team has won its last few games, including breaking a ten-game losing streak at home against Seattle, and that benchwarmer quarterback is looking like the second coming of Steve Young. We're playing a team that has already won its division, and we're keeping the game close! People talk about Cinderella stories in sports all the time, but Cinderella had magical assistance. How do you explain this team?
You see the same thing in the news. Madam Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently fell and broke some ribs. Not unusual for an 85-year-old woman. But x-rays of the ribs revealed nodules on her lungs, which turned out to be pre-cancerous. Would you accept that as a plot point in a novel? It's ham-handed railroading, is what it is! Ridiculous that this convenient fall reveals a potentially fatal condition early enough that it can be taken care of in one operation that didn't even stop the Notorious RBG from voting in a Supreme Court case from her hospital bed.
Halford's Stompy Boots, when I'm in the hospital, it's all I can do to read a book! Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a totally unrealistic character, in my humble opinion. but she's real. Likewise, the orange buffoon currently desecrating the office of the President of the United States is a caricature of a cartoon villain. Try to sell him as a fictional character, and the rejection letter will show up ticking. But there he squats.
There are a dozen sayings about how fiction has to make sense as opposed to reality, which is allowed to violate those laws of logic as it feels. But I beg to differ. If a story hinges on a low-probability event, or a series of coincidences, go for it! So long as it doesn't pass into farce (unless you're writing face, that is,) twist the laws of probability to your liking. After all, the entire plot of "Casablanca" hinges on Victor and Ilse walking into Rick's Cafe Ameican. "Of all the gin joints in the world . . ." indeed!
Think about the Lord of the Rings, where the plot hinges on the One Ring being found by the only creatures in Middle Earth able to resist it for decades. That low-probability event sets the entire epic in motion. In my own gaming, I ran a Champions campaign where metahumans, super-science, and magic existed on Earth solely due to a war in another dimension that involved the use of "improbability generators." Those weapons sent the target world skipping around the multiverse, and because it was highly improbable, dozens of the beams hit Earth over the eons. Aliens are terrified of Earth because the rules don't apply there!
So even though that use of the improbable is in the deep background (and a tip of the hat to my sister Cathy and her college friends for creating this odd universe in their spare time) it colors the entire setting. You can use big twists of fate to set things up.
Take the very real story of the RMS Titanic. Here are a few of the factors that led to the ship hitting an iceberg and king:
- the binoculars for the lookouts had been left behind in Southhampton.
- under pressure from the line owner, Captain Smith ordered increased speed through the night.
- there was no wind, meaning no waves, so it was impossible to spot icebergs by the waves crashing on them.
Change one of them, and the RMS Titanic sails into New York harbor.
Writers, or any stripe, should not shy away from using coincidences or improbable events if it moves the story along. Just make sure that the coincidence works in the story. Running into an old friend in an airport lounge in Istanbul is a happy chance meeting. Running into the same friend in a yurt in western Mongolia requires a little more work to make it fit in.
Meanwhile, the 49ers have reverted to the script and are playing stupid football. Stupid penalties and bad decision making. Maybe Joe Montana will suddenly appear and lead us to victory? Nah, nobody would buy that one.
Yet the team has won its last few games, including breaking a ten-game losing streak at home against Seattle, and that benchwarmer quarterback is looking like the second coming of Steve Young. We're playing a team that has already won its division, and we're keeping the game close! People talk about Cinderella stories in sports all the time, but Cinderella had magical assistance. How do you explain this team?
You see the same thing in the news. Madam Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently fell and broke some ribs. Not unusual for an 85-year-old woman. But x-rays of the ribs revealed nodules on her lungs, which turned out to be pre-cancerous. Would you accept that as a plot point in a novel? It's ham-handed railroading, is what it is! Ridiculous that this convenient fall reveals a potentially fatal condition early enough that it can be taken care of in one operation that didn't even stop the Notorious RBG from voting in a Supreme Court case from her hospital bed.
Halford's Stompy Boots, when I'm in the hospital, it's all I can do to read a book! Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a totally unrealistic character, in my humble opinion. but she's real. Likewise, the orange buffoon currently desecrating the office of the President of the United States is a caricature of a cartoon villain. Try to sell him as a fictional character, and the rejection letter will show up ticking. But there he squats.
There are a dozen sayings about how fiction has to make sense as opposed to reality, which is allowed to violate those laws of logic as it feels. But I beg to differ. If a story hinges on a low-probability event, or a series of coincidences, go for it! So long as it doesn't pass into farce (unless you're writing face, that is,) twist the laws of probability to your liking. After all, the entire plot of "Casablanca" hinges on Victor and Ilse walking into Rick's Cafe Ameican. "Of all the gin joints in the world . . ." indeed!
Think about the Lord of the Rings, where the plot hinges on the One Ring being found by the only creatures in Middle Earth able to resist it for decades. That low-probability event sets the entire epic in motion. In my own gaming, I ran a Champions campaign where metahumans, super-science, and magic existed on Earth solely due to a war in another dimension that involved the use of "improbability generators." Those weapons sent the target world skipping around the multiverse, and because it was highly improbable, dozens of the beams hit Earth over the eons. Aliens are terrified of Earth because the rules don't apply there!
So even though that use of the improbable is in the deep background (and a tip of the hat to my sister Cathy and her college friends for creating this odd universe in their spare time) it colors the entire setting. You can use big twists of fate to set things up.
Take the very real story of the RMS Titanic. Here are a few of the factors that led to the ship hitting an iceberg and king:
- the binoculars for the lookouts had been left behind in Southhampton.
- under pressure from the line owner, Captain Smith ordered increased speed through the night.
- there was no wind, meaning no waves, so it was impossible to spot icebergs by the waves crashing on them.
Change one of them, and the RMS Titanic sails into New York harbor.
Writers, or any stripe, should not shy away from using coincidences or improbable events if it moves the story along. Just make sure that the coincidence works in the story. Running into an old friend in an airport lounge in Istanbul is a happy chance meeting. Running into the same friend in a yurt in western Mongolia requires a little more work to make it fit in.
Meanwhile, the 49ers have reverted to the script and are playing stupid football. Stupid penalties and bad decision making. Maybe Joe Montana will suddenly appear and lead us to victory? Nah, nobody would buy that one.
RMS Iceberg
Date: 24 Dec 2018 21:53 (UTC)Moreover, if helmsman R Hichens had said, “There is no spoon,” and simply smashed bow-on into the glacier, icebreaker fashion, Titanic would have survived that also! The bow would have been crushed in, her streamlining destroyed and thus her top speed significantly reduced, but she’d have made port a day or two late with an amusing story to tell…
It was that grinding sideswipe that did for her.
- the which is totally aside from your main point, but I thought it was interesting. As you say, that was a very improbable disaster.
Re: RMS Iceberg
Date: 27 Dec 2018 04:58 (UTC)https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/world/europe/titanic-coal-fire-iceberg.html
Re: RMS Iceberg
Date: 27 Dec 2018 05:40 (UTC)“the fire would have damaged the ship’s bulkhead, a wall of steel within the ship’s hull,
and made it more vulnerable after it was pierced by an iceberg.” [emphasis added.]
See, that was the “body of bronze, feet of clay” irony revealed by the analysis of the hull section Woods Hole salvaged: The hull plates were the best quality steel. Ichiban, A-#1. The rivets, on the other hand, were cheap brittle pig iron. Against the grinding pressure those tough high-ductility steel plates merely flexed like aircraft Fiberglas - and all those rivets popped like so many snap fasteners. Uh oh… +
The coal fire is news to me, and I thank you for that further information, but it wouldn't have mattered without that nasty irony of materials engineering - no pun intended.
+ “Uh oh” - the last words captured by the cabin recorder aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, 28 January 1986
Re: RMS Iceberg
Date: 27 Dec 2018 07:57 (UTC)Re: RMS Iceberg
Date: 27 Dec 2018 14:21 (UTC)Yah, it happens. Speaking of Challenger, would it have killed them to wait until warmer weather? How much does a standard O-ring cost? We know what it cost that day…
[That, too, was a very improbable disaster, as it happens, and could very easily have turned out far better, but that’s a subject for another time.]
Even before World War I made it horribly commonplace (“Was it for this, that the clay grew tall?”) R Kipling wrote of just such irony in “Arithmetic on the Frontier”:
A scrimmage in a Border Station --
A canter down some dark defile --
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail --
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose…
Capt Willard: Charlie didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast.
His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home:
Death, or victory.
- Apocalypse Now
no subject
Date: 25 Dec 2018 09:56 (UTC)Life is a series of unlikely events. After all, think of what happened to create intelligent life.