Choosing details is a critical part of writing a narrative. They can make or break a scene, can build a character or destroy him, can draw the reader in or break his suspension of disbelief. This is true in all forms of narrative, moreover, not just in fiction. Nonfiction narrative has its own criteria, criteria at once related to and different from the criteria for fictional narratives.

A few weeks ago, I discussed theories of truth. In that article, I laid out the rough structure of the two main theories in philosophy’s history: correspondence theory and coherence theory. Correspondence theory holds that truth is what corresponds to (matches, communicates, reflects) an objective reality outside of mere proposition; coherence theory holds that truth is what coheres with the fullness of itself. Further, while correspondence theory is the better theory, being a better summary of what people mean by truth and how Scripture uses the term, God’s nature necessitates that truth be coherent as well. The counterbalance is that we are commanded in Scripture to test truth by its correspondence to reality (1 Cor. 15:19), which includes its coherence to higher-order, more reliable truths (Acts 17:11). This warrant does not extend to constructing floating assemblies of ‘coherent’ propositions, al a Spinoza, to build systems apart from God. He is the fundamental Truth.

With all this in mind, consider the structure of truth within nonfictional and fictional narratives respectively and how we judge truth in picking what details to include. In nonfiction, a detail has two central criteria: that it helps with the purpose of the story and that it is true by corresponding to history. In fiction, a detail similarly has two central criteria: that it helps with the purpose of the story and that it coheres the rest of the narrative, in logic, causality, tone, and theology (in three of these, coherence means consistency, but coherence in tone can include massive, purposeful variance).

In other words, nonfiction follows correspondence theory of truth, and fiction operates on a coherence theory- albeit with a consciousness of fictionality. Nonfiction is true insofar as it matches what really happened, though sometimes we allow a measure of ‘that fits even if I can’t prove it’. Fiction doesn’t have that sort of truth. We know that Frodo isn’t a real person and never was, not in the sense that Winston Churchill was and is real. His reality is to ours, almost, as ours is to God’s reality, though that’s a very imperfect analogy, not loadbearing.

Yet fictional characters have reality to them. We conceive of them as true beings, if not independent, and when I say ‘Penny Scrubbins’ I’m not mouthing nonsense. Fiction is not reality, but it has reality in it. That’s what I have called, expanding Tolkien’s term, ‘secondary creation’ or ‘secondary reality’; fiction is a remix of our world, taking its facts and its identities, jumbling them up, and coming out the end with only partial correspondence to the objective reality we live in. They speak of things that aren’t as if they were, but they do not lie.

Incidentally, does this mean stories have only subjective reality? Well, no. Stories have objective reality as being part of God’s creation.

Fiction doesn’t lie, in part, because it doesn’t assert to correspond to an objective reality insofar as it is fictional (inaccurate historical fiction is a different matter, a mix of nonfiction and fiction narrative, and we’ll get to theology-lies later). More, though, fiction doesn’t lie because it tells a sort of truth. This truth is not a truth about a narrative-which-happened but a truth about the world’s nature, about human nature, about the person writing. That truth-telling is part of the reason a story’s theology is so important; it’s central to the truth that fiction tells.

Internally, however, fiction has another sort of truth. Fiction, in the idea, coheres with itself. Each detail is connected to the rest in a way which benefits the rest without contradicting it. The internal truth of fiction is a coherence truth; it has no external reality to correspond to (mostly), but each part can correspond to what the rest of it imply as necessary (coherence). In practice, this is never quite true, of course, at least not in complex narratives. Human skill has only so much perfection.

What’s more difficult is that man is sinful and thus does not yet see God perfectly. Why is this important to the internal coherence? Because of what all fiction borrows from reality, because of the soup. As Tolkien put it in On Fairy Stories, every story is made from the same great cauldron, the assembly of all the story which man has lived and all the story man has made. Every concept man has met, every moment he’s left to his posterity, every memory of the author, all of it goes into the pot, and story is assembled from the soup. Story takes a thousand, a million, parts of reality, rearranges them (to tell a particular truth about reality), and seeks to make that rearrangement cohere within itself. So a knight and a shape and symbolism and nobility and bravery and fear and a thousand other things, complex and simple, come together and we have Sir Gawain riding out to meet the Green Knight.

All of these parts, though, exist only by relationship with God and are knowable only by relationship with Him (Gen. 1:1). One part of reality is particular crucial to story: man himself. Man, if he is distinguished here from the rest of reality, is distinguished by being even more bound to Him for definition and substances: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’” (Gen. 1:26) and “‘In Him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed His offspring’” (Acts 17:28).

So in making the story from the soup of the world we live in, remixing the correspondence into a new coherence, in putting a man at the center who, in order to be a man (even fictionally) must have this reference to God, we make God a central part of the coherence of our stories. Without God, the structure of the story breaks down around us as we investigate it; when He is reflected within it, conversely, given His due in its understanding of reality (however subtly, as in The Lord of the Rings), then the story’s coherence stands, at least in this part. Thus theology is a necessary part of the art as well as the morality of writing narratives, whether to correspond to reality or to cohere with its internal humanity.

Suspension of disbelief is to take the coherence as real, to treat it as if it corresponded to an external reality in the same way as a nonfiction narrative. Included in this is a certain measure of leniency for the imperfection of that coherence, even if it is a leniency which can be later set aside in critique. The precondition for suspension of disbelief, then, is that the coherence remains; it is that the story’s relationship with itself follows the laws of logic, causality, and human nature which the reader knows and justly expects to import into the story he reads (though, again, certain deviations are generally forgiven, particularly with motivation).

This explains also why different persons break their suspension at different points. The understanding of reality which they brought to the story, the relationships which they expected to see maintained as part of coherence, were different. One saw coherence demanding a logic necessity which the other did not; one felt that logical necessity important to the point of overmastering his motivation and capability to consider the story coherent, and the other did not.

Good writing doesn’t require this sort of analysis. However, understanding how narratives work, even just a little better (for this is by no means exhaustive) cannot but be of benefit to us, if we apply ourselves. It relates writing to other parts of our thought by yet another thread, integrating it further into a coherent, reality-correspondent worldview, one which must be, if it is to last and cohere, correspondent to God, submitted to Him (Prov. 1:7, 8:15). Suspension of disbelief, coherence versus correspondence, and the nature of man, they all come together here. I believe we are richer for seeing it.

God bless.