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PLAUSIBILITY IN NARRATION[/anchor]
By Atlantic Friend
“If your attempting to be plausibly a-historic you have to portray the appeasers, the anti-war and the self-interested. The more complex answer is that, as you say, writers tend to idealise factions. People make no mistakes and show incredible foresight and vision. Which some people do to be sure, but most don't. And as the wilderness years of Churchill, Amery, et al shows; even if you do have the foresight people won’t want to listen to you. If there is one thing that annoys me in AAR land, it’s the US AAR where the country arms to the teeth from '36 onwards. You know, scraps the rubbish fleet, mass industrialises and nobody complains or argues against. Or if they do they're only strawmen to be knocked back by the visionary leader. Compare that with say CSL_GG's work (there are others, but his is the one I'm reading at the moment) and you'll see the difference. It's just a better more believable read”
El Pip
In the August issue of the AARlander, El Pip, in the interview he gave to Canonized broached what is to me a crucial issue for anyone who either intends to enjoy a narrative AAR or start writing his own: plausibility.
One could think that, since narrative AARs are mostly works of fiction, more or less loosely based on the game results, plausibility should be a relatively minor issue for the writer. Quite often, the writer indeed either honestly warns his readers that suspension of incredulity is highly recommended, or picks a genre or plotline that is in itself such a warning. As an example of plausibility-free AARs, you have most of the Comedy genre, which will be based on a voluntary suspension of plausibility to enhance the comic potential of the story, and you’ll also have the ones where the author picks a small nation and sets it up for global conquest. But whenever the goals set for the country are within reach of the country, and if the style is supposed to be a true exploration of might-have-been situations, the issue of plausibility immediately arises. Just like we expect some degree of it whenever we crack a novel open, or we go see a movie, we do expect some degree of plausibility in the AAR.
There are, in my opinion, three mains reasons to this: the plot, the heroes, the villains. I’d like readers not to take what follows as Gospel, but I’d be glad if it rather was used as a tool for prospective writers and demanding readers to build their own concept of what a story should be like. Let it also be a glimpse into my own writing process, which I put it like that: a story is like an engine. You need oxygen, you need fuel, and you need fire. When you have all three in correct quantity and sequence, the narrative engine starts, and with a little luck and help from the readers, who knows where it will take you?
THE PLOT, OR PLAUSIBILITY AS THE STORY’S OXYGEN
Once the writer has picked up a country, and charted its course through European or global domination, or simply mere survival which is often the most daring of tasks a nation can face, he’ll mostly be judged on how he goes from point A to point B. If I take France, for example, as I did in my own AAR, and if I mod up a scenario where the United States immediately ally with me, I get the atomic bomb in 1938 and Germany caves in at my every demand or never reacts, the plot won’t be exactly thrilling. Even just one of these premises would be enough to kill the suspense: whatever Germany does, at some early point GIs will storm Hamburg, a French bomber will nuke Berlin, or Germany will be prodded into subservience. Frankly, who would want to read (or even write) a story whose end is this obvious?
When all is said and done, plausibility brings challenge to the writer, forcing him to produce a more refined piece of work he would other wise had. If I wrote without the overview and challenge of my attentive readers, I’d probably get a little lazy here and there, and just decide that things go my way without having to justify much. The AAR would gently but inexorably descend into a mere feel-good story about my favourite country or historical character. On the contrary, having my every choice commented or questioned, or just knowing it won’t be always taken at face value, forces me to invest more time in the story, the background, the characters, the causes and consequences of every action. That requires a little more work to make characters and situation click together, and to cobble them up in a hopefully convincing story, but in the end it is immensely more satisfying for me, as I pick up interesting bits of information, and in the end I humbly think it is more satisfying to the readers. And it’s the readers themselves who make second plausibility this desirable, because it gives readers more than they may have bargained for in the first place. Plausibility means greater challenge for the story’s protagonists, which in turn make readers’ identification with them easier, as they face real dangers, real tough choices.
In this respect, I see plausibility as the oxygen of my narrative engine – and readers’ response as the oxygen pump: in its absence, it’s hard to keep alive the flame of the story. Take a supposedly “serious” narrative AAR and throw plausibility off the window, and you’ll soon have the fire die down. The Hero will always have it his way, regardless of the apparent odds, and you may end up rooting for the Villain for a change because he, at least, seems to put up a (dis)honest day’s worth of hard work to get anything done. It’s a bit like James Bond movies to me. When I was a kid, wow, James Bond always seemed about to be killed by the villain, cut in half by a laser or bitten by a poisonous spider, and by God, it seemed the old man was sometimes truly afraid, too. Then, as I grew up, His Majesty’s finest agent seemed to become invulnerable to the point there was no point anymore. I watched with interest the first ten minutes, because it explained the Villain’s cunning plan, and then M had Miss Moneypenny call James Bond from wherever he was, and the movie went downhill because there was zero challenge. I often thought Miss Moneypenny would have been well advise to lose James Bond’s number sometimes, so we could actually root for a MI-6 agent who’d risk more than a messed-up brushing and a stain on his Savile Row tailor-made suit. Which brings me to the second point.
How does that translate in AAR terms? Mostly, in my opinion, in reaching a subtle balance between the power of the country you have chosen, its affirmed goals, and the power of the forces arrayed against it. If your goal as the USSR is to conquer the Baltic States, I’m afraid the story will be short and not too thrilling – despite of how brilliantly you choose to portray the Lithuanian’s fight to preserve their independence, the fight will be a short one. Now, if on the other hand you chose to be Lithuania and resist the Soviet Union, you could be on for an epic tale – and even if it were a short one, it’d be more memorable for you to play and for readers to enjoy.
THE HERO, OR PLAUSIBILITY AS THE STORY’S FUEL
As Burke said, the only thing that evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing. That is true in life, generally speaking, and that is even truer in my good old narrative engine. Only the constant action by a group of good men will keep the Villain’s plot from coming to fruition, and as such the Hero’s struggle truly is the fuel of the story, keeping the narrative engine rumbling. Like fuel, I think, the general quality of the struggle will affect the output of the engine. If the Hero (or heroes) doesn’t have to work much to foil the Villain’s plans, then the plot will tend to be weak, or will re-focus on other aspects of the story. If the Hero has to make truly Herculean efforts to build his own force and fitter away the Villain’s, it’ll be a much more enjoyable read, with readers wondering how the game play is going and where the AAR will lead them. Heroes, in my humble opinion, are never as admirable as when they bleed, suffer, and make mistakes and work hard to correct them.
But oftentimes the Hero’s struggle is not enough to make us identify with their plight and fight. In our AARs, many of our Heroes belong to either the category of statesmen, or to that of military leaders, and it is often tempting to make them absolutely omniscient. If they are politicians, for example, they’ll be possessed by a vision that only the weak, feeble or traitorous will resist – until they’re rapidly swept away by the sheer power of the Hero, that is. Politicians will always have the highest ideals, always think three moves ahead of friends and foe alike, and will always put the greater good ahead of their own partisan interests. They’ll be unanimously lauded by the man on the street, and will eventually die with some inspiring last words asking about the state of the nation. If they are military leaders, they’ll be fearless, will read their foes’ mind and foil their every plan, and will die a heroic death in which they’ll score a major victory for the country.
Now, I like to see this desire we have of perfect leaders as a deep-seated (and most reassuring) conviction that leaders should be this way, but in all fairness, the world would be a pretty boring place if it was ruled by the omniscient Aunt Julia (yes, you know her, the aunt who kept telling you how a good boy or girl should behave when you were 8, and who had a moustache) with armies of James Bonds at her disposal. I personally know it would be reason enough to see if Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s job isn’t recruiting by any chance. If you take even a casual look at our real-life History, our greatest leaders have had serious flaws, or made serious and sometimes tragic mistakes, but that never stopped them from achieving greatness in their own right. Whether you regard as a great man (or woman) Caesar, Napoleon, Cleopatra, Queen Victoria, Churchill or Stalin maybe, they were human beings, with a variety of serious flaws which they sometimes fought and oftentimes embraced. The flaws of the Hero usually make the story livelier, because we either admire him for trying to fight them (think Commander Samuel Vimes in Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” novels), or seem closer to us because he does not, or only occasionally (think of most of G. R. R. Martin’s characters in “The Song of Fire and Ice”).
Thankfully, Paradox games (and particularly the Hearts of iron series) offer nifty little tools for making sure our Heroes won’t stride like demigods across the world: they get ratings, or even personality traits. While these should not be used blindly, they do provide some inspiration as to what the darker or weaker side of the hero is. The Benevolent Gentleman means good, but it may lead him to labour under serious misapprehensions about the outside world. The Autocratic Charmer or the Flamboyant Tough Guy, they may look great, but do they have substance to back them up ? And are people okay to be led by brash loudmouths and paternalist know-it-alls? This sovereign, whose military skills far exceeds his administrative skills, will he take care of the country, or just fritter its manpower and wealth into countless (and possibly successful) wars? What about this Doge, who’s just the opposite? We could go on like this for hours, but you obviously get the idea: the greater the hero, the weaker the struggle, and the less output for the narrative engine. Now that we have the fuel, and the oxygen to burn it, it’s time to bring the fire starter: the Villain.
THE VILLAIN, OR PLAUSIBILITY AS THE STORY’S FIRE STARTER
In an AAR based on a game of political intrigue and military conquest, Villains are dime-a-dozen, from diabolical dictators like Hitler or Stalin, to merciless conquerors like Attila, or to the ever-present sadist officer who enjoys beating up Jews, or Catholics, or Communists, or anyone actually. Monsters walk among us in great numbers, and if we want to be fair about it we often find it convenient to have them around, either because they do the dirty job we don’t want to ever hear about - or because they provide fire to our narrative engine.
Usually, the Villain is the one who gets the story moving – he’s the ignition key to the story, as his machinations will bring the Hero into the fray. Hence, the Villain must be well thought-out and his plans must be frighteningly realistic, making it all the more urgent someone stops the dastardly act. The Villain must have his rationale, and his plan must be based on plausible foundations. Alfred Hitchock used to say, the better the Villain, the better the movie. Nothing is more lethal to a story than a Villain whose plan has flaws which could be detected by a 5-year old, and nothing is more infuriating to me than a Villain who has a superb plan which nevertheless relies upon the megalomaniac assumption that nation X or government Y won’t intervene because they won’t dare, or are decadent, racially inferior, or listen to Jazz. Whenever you have this moment when the Villain goes from cunning schemer to Mussolini on crack, you know the story has already reached its zenith and will rapidly descend into crappy territory, where it will wallow for quite a while as the Villain’s IQ abruptly goes down 150 points.
In AAR terms, the Villain is one of the trickiest tools for the writer. As Paradox’s games deal about real nations and leaders, we have to accept that the character we’ll portray as the Villain in our AAR is actually hailed as a Hero in his country. In fact, many conflicts will oppose nations led by honourable men, which will be each other’s Villain. Take WW1 for example. I’m not sure I’d have liked to live in Imperial Germany (though I may have, after all), for example, but Kaiser Wilhelm II was no Hitler, and Imperial Germans were no different than the Republican Frenchmen they ended up fighting. In the 1920s, an American newspaper organized a context: readers had to find the most tragic headline. The winner was: “Archduke Franz-Ferdinand Is Alive – WW1 Happened by Mistake”. I always thought it was a very chilling headline, and in narrative fiction, having two equally respectable and honourable nations find themselves into a collision course precisely because honour and duty commend it is, in my opinion, much better than having one side representing all that is good, and the other all that is bad. The conflict is all the more cruel than you can feel these people could have avoided it, and you look at the struggle of both sets of Heroes with a different perspective.
There again, the Villain, perhaps even more than the hero, sets the mood of the story. As long as he is strong, cunning, and resourceful, the narrative engine burns its fuel efficiently. Whenever the Villain starts becoming too weak, it’s either time for the curtain to fall on the story or to put the plot back on track. No Villain, no story.
THE OUTSIDE WORLD, OR PLAUSBILITY AS A ROAD TO DRIVE ON
Let’s see, we have the plot, we have the Hero, and we have the Villain. That means we can safely rev up the narrative engine and start exploring the world, right? Ah, sorry, but wrong, we just need one teensy tiny thing to be completely ready: a world for the narrative engine to take us to.
As the AAR steams forward, the writer must make sure there is something to sustain it on the way. Mostly, it all boils down to actions/reactions, and to allies/adversaries.
Actions/reactions are there to remind us that the world does not revolve around or quietly waits for our nation/faction/Hero. Other players have gathered around the table where the Great Game is under way, and they are just as eager to play their own hand before anyone else. Friends, rivals and enemies are also in the game for the win, and want some award in return for their efforts. They’ll compete between each other, and they’ll compete with us, to get vital resources, gain vital influence, or uphold their prestige – that’s the action part. And whoever does play his hand first, there are reactions. Germany reoccupies the Rhineland and France rearms. France declares war on Italy, and it may suddenly find out its efforts to woo the United States have been made in vain because Washington does not want to ally with an aggressor. Whatever happens on the AAR is bound to have consequences abroad, but also within the nation/faction. Cancelling weapons programs to build factories has social consequences, both short-term and long-term. Taking an aggressive posture on the international stage won’t mean your citizens aren’t affected in their everyday life, as your army expands, or as the various political parties either applaud or oppose the move. As El Pip said, even leaders inhabited by a great vision had trouble first defining and refining this vision, and then sharing it with others and make it accepted.
Which leads us to the last of a story’s vital parts: foes and allies. Once again, El Pip very wisely warns how us about how easy it is to idealize our faction. We all do that, to some extent, out of love for the nation, faith or faction it defended. But our affection can also easy make us portray whoever opposed it as weak, gullible, or traitorous, because it fits our personal bias. And bias is a usually poor filter to see the world through. The fact is, at least in democracies, factions opposed even great leaders for a variety of reasons, which quite often had nothing to do with corruption or weakness, but a different conception of public good. Chamberlain and Daladier thought it better to concede at Munich not because they were closet Fascists or lacked the will to fight, they thought their nations needed to buy time to rearm and face Germany on better odds. Pacifists were not always bleating dupes led by fear or foreign money, they also wanted to spare their generation another massacre. Just as wars have oftentimes seen honourable men fight each others, political and ideological conflict also involved people pursuing the same ideal but from opposite points of view.
Just as it is tempting to declare all opponents’ traitors or foolish dupes, it is tempting to portray whoever supported our beloved nation/faction as good or heroic because, well, we put a lot of ourselves in that nation/faction and we crave the admiration of the masses. It works backwards : they supported us, and we were (and still are, of course) good, ergo they must have been good too. This generous assumption is in fact rarely supported by facts, as is shown by real History. Many a noble cause was defended by a disreputable regime, and many a disreputable cause has seen noble nations side with it, albeit temporarily. There’s the “lesser of two evils” issue, and there’s the “he may be a bastard, but he is our bastard” issue. While it might be tempting to use a lot of black and white in portraying the world of a narrative AAR, the truth is no nation was ever run by noble principles alone. Equally tempting is to assume that once our faction is in power, the nation’s citizens will be unanimous in supporting it, as if they always had been closet sympathizers. All too often the great leaders were hated or despised by almost as many people as supported them. Take Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle, Napoleon or Caesar, and you’ll see what I mean by that.
IN FORM OF CONCLUSION
Oxygen………..check.
Fuel……………check.
Fire starter……..check.
Outside world….check.
Now, it seems to me you have the basics. There may be better narrative engines – Hell, there certainly are. So feel free to switch models, to experiment with form, with content, and with the general concept. In the end, no piece of advice can ever replace the simple yet essential pleasure a writer is suppose to feel when moving the quill or hitting the keyboard. Writers are, I think, the proverbial golden-hearted whores. They crave attention, admiration, and honours. They could kill for that, probably. But writing is also the most selfless intellectual activity of all, because in the end you always write for someone else, even if you may not always dare show it to that special reader. Forums are great for that, for they force you out of your shell and into the readership’s warm embrace.
I can only hope that, after enduring my prose for quite a few paragraphs, you’ll find it just a little simpler to dare – after all, a narrative engine is a rather simple machine.
Atlantic Friend is a Fellow Of The Tempus Society and the WritAAR of Crossfires
