By Janice Hardy

Why the right details can make a reader believe just about anything.

I watched The Martian again recently. If you haven’t seen it, it’s based on Andy Weir’s novel about an astronaut named Mark Watney who’s accidentally stranded on Mars and has to survive for years while NASA struggles to rescue him.

Near the end of the movie there’s a scene where Watney is driving a rover across the surface of Mars to reach a spot where he’ll hopefully be rescued, and I started thinking about how this guy was going to have so many speaking opportunities after this, and how his life would change.

And for just a fraction of an instant, I wondered if it was based on a real event.

Yep, you heard me. I wondered if the story set on Mars was real.

Luckily, I caught my doofiness right away and laughed. But honestly? That little brain-fart shows how well-written this movie was. It felt so real, so believable, that I literally forgot it was pure fiction.

And that, right there, folks, is the goal.

When you can make your reader forget they’re reading a made-up story, you’ve struck gold.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this experience, either. Years ago, I was reading Max Brooks’ World War Z about the zombie war that nearly ended the human race. I was alone, at night, during a storm, and the book felt so authentic that even though I knew it was fiction, it didn’t feel like fiction.

It felt like I was reading a narrative history of an actual war against zombies.

Which is why it’s still one of my favorite books, ever.

Believability is all in the details.

What makes both The Martian and World War Z so good is that they built a rich and deep world around their stories. They focused on the oddly specific, yet perfect details that felt too real to be made up.

In The Martian it was:

• The running jokes about the disco music Watney is stuck listening to, because it’s all his commander left behind.
• The little “fun facts” about how growing crops means you colonized a place, and how he had now colonized Mars.
• The odd combination of international laws that meant he was, briefly, a space pirate.

These details made Watney feel like a real human stuck in a crappy situation. We see him use his dark sense of humor to deal with the incredible stress he was under, and how it helps him cope with the unimaginable.

And that makes us root for him.

It’s been a few years since I’ve read World War Z, so I don’t remember the specifics as well, but it resonated with me because of:

• The individual personal stories that focused on one tiny part of the zombie war, yet when combined, they told the whole story.
• The very credible way people and governments reacted to the situation.
• The matter-of-fact details such as how there was a northern line where zombies froze, and how teams of soldiers would stick flags in the snow when they found one, so clean-up crews could find and dispose of them after the war was over.

People reacted to a fake zombie war in ways that I could absolutely see happening in real life. Some were heroic, some were self-serving and awful, and some were just plain human.

And that’s the secret ingredient.

Our humanity is universal, and every reader recognizes it, no matter how wild the premise gets.

None of us has been stranded on Mars or lived through a zombie war. But we all know exactly what it looks like when someone cracks a joke to keep from falling apart, or saves their own skin at everyone else’s expense, or does something brave when no one’s watching.

That’s the part we believe. And once we believe the characters, we’ll follow them anywhere.

Which is why you want your details to be specific and wacky and unique to your characters.

And the best way to do that, is to show readers the quirky side of your characters’ humanity.

Because generic details strip away that common ground and turn your characters into the same old people readers see everywhere. They walk through the same “generic suburban America” or “default fantasy world #67” and act like every other character in those worlds.

You can tell readers your protagonist is:

• Scared, but resourceful
• Desperate and willing to do anything to survive
• Obsessed with the love of their life

But if readers don’t see those very real and very human details that support those generalities, you wind up with very forgettable characters and stories.

Specific details build the world and reveal the character all at the same time. One perfectly chosen, wacky and surprising, absolutely true-feeling detail beats a paragraph of generic description every single time.

This is especially handy for those of us writing in made-up worlds or off-the-wall premises, but it holds true for every writer, in every genre. The more believable your story feels, the easier it is for readers to lose themselves in it.

And just maybe, they’ll forget for a moment that what they’re reading isn’t real.

If you want to sharpen your description skills, you might want to check out my book, Understanding Show, Don’t Tell (And Really Getting It). It’ll help you find the best ways to show both your world and your characters’ quirks, so readers believe whatever tale you want to tell (or show).

And if you’d like more tips, sign up for my Narrative Nuggets list. It’s story-based writing advice delivered right to your inbox. And as a thank you for subscribing, you’ll get my book “25 Ways to Strengthen Your Novel Right Now” for free.

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About Janice:

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. and the chapter books Who’s Haunting Who? and The Haunting of Cabin 13 for Lerner Publishing. For adults, she writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series under the name, J.T. Hardy. When she’s not writing fiction, she runs the popular writing site Fiction University, and has written multiple books on writing, including Understanding Show, Don’t Tell (And Really Getting It), Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure, and the Revising Your Novel: First Draft to Finished Draft series.

Featured image licensed from Depositphotos.