Deniable Plausibility

Write what you want. Crazier stuff has already happened.

Sometimes when I’m writing, I stop and wonder if what’s leaked through my fingertips and onto the page is just too fantastic. Have I just stepped over the line? Will the reader be thrown out of the story and skid to a stop like a tractor trailer jack-knifed and squealing down the road sideways?

Then I remember. The state of Texas chose and adopted almost the same flag as the country of Chile, and nobody seemed to notice for a long time. In Vienna, Austria, before the First World War, Hitler, Stalin, and Trotsky (poor, aspiring revolutionaries at the time) all frequented the same coffee shop, the Café Zentral. Which is still in operation to this day. European ships sailed up and down the California coast for 200 years, before an overland expedition stumbled upon the excellent harbor we now call San Francisco. The Golden Gate blended in so well with the background and/or was shrouded by fog so that no one suspected the bay was there. The local indigenous people knew, but they, wisely, keep quiet about it.

Estimates (by real scientists, not yahoos like me) place the total number of people who have ever lived at around 117 billion. Only 7 % of that group is alive today. A statistician could probably calculate the number of interactions, combinations, and permutations possible from those numbers. The result is doubtless too large to be comprehensible to our brains. Imagine trying to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar the size of Rhode Island.

Place those jelly beans in a somewhat larger jar, so they can roll around and bump into each other. make the jar the size of, say Connecticut, and shake it up. that’s a fitting metaphor for history, random events over a long stretch of time.

When you slap unlikely events with numbers this large, they become a lot more likely. Don’t limit your creativity. No matter what bizarre situation you come up with, history has already topped it with actual, unbelievable events. The reader will let you know if you cross the line.