It May Be Real, But Is It Right?

I've often talked about how the point of writing is to capture reality. We want our characters, scenes, and dialogue to be realistic. But what happens when reality just isn't good enough?

Consider stereotypes. Stereotypes are bad and wrong and unrealistic, or so people would have us believe. But let me ask you, why would these stereotypes exist if there were no people who embodied them? Stereotypes exist for a reason. They are real. But should they be in writing?

Personally, I can't really stand stereotypes. I can't stand flat or 2-dimensional characters, either. They're boring. And that is what we try so hard to avoid in writing: being boring.

The whole reason we try to capture reality is that the real world is interesting. When our characters sound like people we've met in real life, we care more about them. When a protagonist is going through the same things that we have gone through, we empathize with them. When a character is the poster child for Stereotype Monthly, we look at them more as creatures in a zoo than as human beings.

I believe that the primary function of all writing is to entertain. If we can't entertain, then nobody will read our work, so anything else we try to do will automatically fail. If our characters are not entertaining, then they harm our writing. Therefore, even if a character is real and you have met such a person in real life, that does not mean that they should necessarily be in your writing. We are trying to be realistic, not real.