Of Verisimilitude

I have to warn you.

This post wasn't really built on a real experience, like most of the others.

Ironically, it is this reality that I'm going to speak of.

verisimilitude

noun

the appearance of being true or lifelike

- Oxford English Dictionary

I found this word - quite rare, I might say, as I've never heard of it before - while trying to find a genre in which I could place the things that I've written. Allegory is the closest that I found, even though I don't entirely feel it's totally appropriate. Rampant symbolism, I suppose, is not a recognized literary phenomen. Besides, allegories tend to have meanings that aren't merely beyond the literary text, but also in the text itself; whereas my texts tend to have something of a middle ground.

Either way. I've already written of my new idea in previous posts. I've started writing my rather liberal idea of an outline. Brainstorming it in my head when I wasn't occupied with other things.

And it's funny how I see my own style shape around it. Obviously, you know, I've only written a very little bit, but the way in which I write them seem to change in my head all the time. The steps between Raison d'Être and Mind at Rest - oh yes, if you do not love my titles, what do you love - are immense, in terms of style and thinking. Raison d'Être is certainly a piece I'm proud of, but all the same I can't look at it without criticizing my own style of writing. I wonder if the same problem harrowed the likes of Asimov, Stephen King, Poe... Obviously, comparing myself with literary masterminds, for they are nothing short of that, would be extremely preposterous, past the barrier of what is normally ironic and sarcastic (i.e., Smith with an I and Shakespeare... Never mind), breaking through onto the other side of anti-sarcasm.

This definitely inspires me to go on further, and analyze my own work as I write. And the definite movement I notice is that I strive for verisimilitude. Ach, I shall have to use it now. Just like sesquipedalian. I eschew some of the more abstract concepts and settle for stronger, more close-to-earth sets of ideas and settings.

Is this a good thing? I think so. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing it, would I? I haven't even started writing on, hah, Houses of Glass as we might call it for the moment (I think A Summer in Stockholm is my next bet), as I'm still very much in the outlining phase and just finished the first, rough draft of Mind at Rest - ironically branded as draft 4 since the previous drafts hadn't even got to the concluding period.

Yet I can tell that Houses of Glass will have more of a connection to real life than previous texts. This is also where I decide that I will spend a lot of time merging dialogue with descriptive text. Raison d'Être contained solely the latter, and Mind at Rest was built on the former. While I think that in my polishing stage of Mind at Rest will not only rebuild large parts of the conversation, certain parts of the debate will be expressed descriptively instead. However, I have no doubt that I will have to make it very symbolic in order to still get the gist of what I'm trying to say.

My next piece of short fiction - ah, I revel in that word, saying it over and over again in my mind - will use dialogue and descriptive text together, and will probably not be as symbolic overall. I find as I said in a previous post, Of Polyester, that I feel that much I write of is just so fake, so wrong, that merely thinking about it makes me ill. As such, I will leave most of this behind, and start working on fiction that is truly fiction and does not need to be compromised in order to reveal all of it's quality.

With that said, I don't intend it to be empty fiction. It's not a Hollywood movie script, or at least I intend it not to be. There is motivation, there is an underlying message, it's just not as underlying as it was in the works of philosophy, a-hah.

Ach, I wish I had an irony sign. Too bad it was never worked into the English language.

Quick notice, by the way: I know that verisimilitude does not constitute the act of being true or life-like, but the appearance of being so. The difference? Well, it's a contested matter, I suppose (and one I might take up at some forum somewhere), but to me, that sounds like while it is indeed fake, it has the appearance of being real. Madame Tussaud's wax dolls, for instance. They have verisimilitude?

How do you use that word, anyway?