What Makes a Good Story · 6:13pm Feb 22nd, 2014
But first, a quote, from the musical 1776:
Oh, Abigail! Abigail--I have such a desire to knock heads together.
That's John Adams expressing his eternally-resonant frustration with Congress, but I can't help feeling similarly whenever I hear someone who aims to be an arbiter of good taste on this site talk about "what makes a good story."
Before I get any further in, let me say that I don't write this post with the intention of ruffling feathers. I don't really want to call anybody out in particular or accuse them of mucking up the conversation about story quality--it's our conversation as a community, and we're all responsible for it. However, it's a pet peeve of mine, and it comes back up any time a new group or individual appears on the site and begins to weigh in on the issue of what defines the great stories from the dreck. In fact, many of these people actually hold more nuanced views of the subject than emerge in documents like the Royal Guard's Reviewing Omnibus, which, as the founders have pointed out, is not really meant as a prescription of "what makes a great story," but as a transparent set of guidelines for what they look for, and how to edit stories up to their standards.
The problem is this: nobody really has a formula for what makes a great story. Obviously if it were possible to draw one up, the scene in Gulliver's Travels in which a scientist uses a word-randomizer to create books as a way of "democratizing" writing (so that anyone can write brilliantly without needing any special intelligence or knowledge of their topic) wouldn't be nearly so funny as it is. I mean, that parallel isn't perfect, but in general we humans find the notion that you can codify what makes art great to be pretty laughable.
In large part, the reason is that art is a subjective experience. To a person who has seen a hundred films noir, an "average" film noir, one that doesn't stand out from the crowd, is filed away as mediocre. To someone who had only ever seen slapstick comedies, it would be revolutionary. And that's just the most obvious way in which subjectivity plays a role in any person's appreciation of art. Because what makes any piece of art, even a pony fanfic, great is as unique as the person who created it and as specific as the person who enjoys it.
Of course there are ways to combat that subjectivity--having a diverse group of people whose opinions are weighed against each other, for instance, or making sure that you are educated about the background a given story is coming out of, so that you can see if it's unique amongst its peers. There are also people who try to train themselves to see beyond their personal taste into whether even a story they dislike still possesses that spark of greatness--to see whether it might be great to other people.
That's an incredibly difficult skill--and, I'd wager, one many people never even feel the urge to develop.
Which brings us to my old boss. I was fortunate to attend Kenyon College (which I say not to brag, but because I'll be fascinated if anyone's even heard of it), home to one of the oldest and more prestigious literary journals in the US, The Kenyon Review. The Review offered students at the college a great and fairly unique opportunity: to, as undergrads, work for the journal as associates. Most of the work involved reading what are called "slush pile" submissions--stories, poems, and nonfiction pieces that authors submitted without having any previous relationship to the journal (i.e. having already been published in it) or being asked by an editor specifically to contribute something. We associates read these submissions and had a choice between eliminating them from the pile and passing them up to the actual editors of the journal for more rigorous consideration.
Obviously, with limited printing space and a prestigious name, the Review got WAY more submissions than it would ever have room to print, so most things had to be thrown out. And this wasn't too difficult: it turns out that if you ever want to feel good about your writing, one of the best ways is to look at the stuff that would-be professional authors think is their best work. We got stories with plots and characters thinner than the paper they weren't going to be printed on (the whole thing is done online these days), stories which didn't follow submission guidelines, with spelling and grammatical errors... Really, the decision to throw out many of the things we read was not a hard one.
But then, sometimes, out of the slush, you got a story that was totally okay. And, sitting in a pile of slush, okay looks pretty darn good. So what do you do with that?
The head editor of the magazine had a simple rule for us--there were three things a story should demonstrate in order to be considered: Delight, Surprise, and Mastery. That was it. And yet, if you really thought about it, it covered almost everything.
By delight, he meant that a story must provide pleasure in reading--whether the pleasure of catharsis (the Review is a "serious" literary journal, so it was not exactly big on "happy" stories), or of reading great prose. Whether it was the joy of feeling like you could step outside yourself and into the characters or the sinking realization that the ugliness in a story might reflect an ugliness in your own life. The stories we wanted to print were the kinds of stories that affected you deeply, that, when you read them, provoked those emotions that are why we read in the first place.
By surprise, he meant that a story must somehow feel fresh. It can't be a predictable tale with predictable characters in predictable prose. Something had to shake up our sense of where things were going--something had to feel like it had never been done before, even if there are only [insert some number between 2 and 25, or 600-odd if you're the fairytale classification system] plots in the world.
And by mastery, he meant that the story had to feel like the writer was always in control. It had to know what expectations in created in you and play them appropriately. It had to convince you that the people and places you were reading about were real--or, if they were not real, that they spoke to reality all the same. As you read, you had to feel like the author wasn't lucking into things. The author had to sell themselves to you through their words, to make you trust them (or deliberately make you mistrust them).
Those criteria were greatly useful in weeding out stories that were merely "okay." And, in fact, in my whole time as an associate, I only passed up a few stories, and never one that was chosen for publication (which was a rare honor, actually--I don't think I knew anyone who picked a winner).
Nevertheless, this is a criteria that the editor of the journal created, AS someone who needed to go through huge numbers of stories and find the few that were really special. It was an attempt to create some very simple principles that let college students think about the stories they were reading, to give us guidance in figuring out what made a story important or powerful. It was an attempt to counter the bias of personal taste.
And what makes this style of judging great is how broad it is. We didn't talk about character, or setting, or dialogue, or prose style. When we talked about a what made a good story, we talked about the effect it had on us as readers. That immeasurable quality that ultimately defines whether we love or hate or are indifferent to a story.
That's what people read for.
More to the point, that's also what people write for. I don't add details to Equestrian society (...ever... but if I did it wouldn't be) so that people will be impressed with my imagination; I don't write jokes or metaphors so that people will think I'm clever. I write so that people will laugh, or cry, or stop and think. (Although if I come out of it looking clever I'm not complaining...)
Setting, character, plot, strong dialogue, powerful prose that's free from cliche... these aren't actually the END of a story but the TOOLS you use. The end of a piece of art is to connect with an audience. Somehow, in some way. And it's hard to do that without those things: if your prose is clunky and your characters feel flat and your setting is boring and lifeless, yeah, most people don't get sucked in--they won't feel anything but boredom or annoyance. But when we talk about these things as if they are the checklist that make stories special, I think we run the risk of forgetting that what attaches us to stories is the mental and emotional experience of delving into them. The sensation of reading words and thoughts that we would never think--or of finding things we HAVE thought suddenly given life in a way we wouldn't expect.
In a way, it's an incredibly high standard. And it's harder to aim for than "my dialogue should be revealing character AND advancing plot at the same time in order to be really effective." But it's the standard that matters in the end, in a way that technical proficiency just doesn't. And I don't say this as someone who thinks ponyfic or even media content in general needs to aspire to HIGH ART. I think making someone shoot milk out their nose is as valid a goal as making someone contemplate the transience of life. I love craft. I think craft is important to talk about.
But craft for its own sake is a distraction--and the more prescriptive you are about it, the more you discourage people from breaking the rules. In the end, it's the experience you're giving your audience that a writer needs to think about, and it's the experience that you have AS an audience that a reader ought to care about. The rules, such as they are, are just guideposts along the way to thinking about that--and while many of them are useful, I think our conversation lacks that final piece, that they are only a means to an end.
I guess what I'm really saying is I think we need two separate conversations. We need to talk about how stories are put together and how they create great characters and moments and such, yes. But we also need to talk about what makes stories powerful, what makes them stick, how they make us feel and why that makes us love them.
And maybe to start, it would help to think a little about delight, surprise, and mastery.
So what are your thoughts? Anyone think I'm totally wrong here? Want to step in and defend the way people on the site define good stories (again, I don't mean to pick on The Royal Guard in particular. They're doing a pretty cool thing, I just don't really like the setup of their reviewing guidelines, and it's reflective of a bigger issue I have)? There's certainly a case to be made that a lot of writers on this site are at a stage in their journey where it might be more important for them to learn just the rules as opposed to the reasons underlying the rules... but I've never been a fan of handing down rules without explaining them thoroughly, heh.
Anyway, I look forward to comments from the couple of you who didn't get bored and quit 2 paragraphs into this post!
On one hand, I disagree with you on the side of me believing there are rules to writing good stories. They're templates--structures that you have to fill in with details about your culture and your personal experience, maturity, & preferences. But I see these templates consistently enough to believe they're nearly universal.
For instance, the "tragedy" template has been with us a long time, and it's instructive to look at Aristotle's definition of it and study all the ways it mismatches our idea of tragedy today. Those are the places where cultural variables get plugged in. If you plug in culturally-appropriate lambda expressions, you get modern tragedy.
On the other hand, fimfiction proves that the patterns for good stories are broader than Delight, Surprise, and Mastery. Most readers on fimfiction place a premium on Delight, don't care about Mastery, and actively dislike Surprise. Most readers fall into a different category than I do, and the templates they prefer are absent from all existing theories of story. More on that below.
Nearly 300 years later, we've advanced to the point where famous writers like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac did that seriously, and called it literature.
Here's an example of where even your rule is too stringent. Looking at the highest-rated stories on fimfiction, you'll see that most fimfiction readers want a predictable tale with predictable characters. This isn't a weak pattern; it's a huge, dominant preference. I just read one today where Pinkie learns the Cakes are dead, and she becomes their foster mother, and... that's it. The entire plot is given in the story description, and the story walks you through it dispensing feels. It's got 50 likes per dislike, which is higher than almost all of my stories.
We can also look at alicorn OC and human-soldier-in-Equestria stories. People above some age hate them; people below some age love them, reliably, consistently, consciously.
The way we think about story quality is warped by the fact that the people who write about it, and get listened to, are all above that age where they love soldier-in-Equestria stories. But that love of such stories is so strong and so common that we can't call it "wrong". There's a whole category of story types like that, that we construct theories to label as bad when they are in fact good, just not for the kinds of people who construct literary theories.
I agree: there really is no one way to make a "good story." There are structures and technical standards that you can use, but it all eventually comes down to personal taste.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with that, though. Many authors, both on and off this site, speak of writing a story and having the characters "push" the story into an unintended direction, which often still results in an enjoyable story.
I never really considered any of this. In general I just take two stories and/or genres and mash them together like a chimp banging two rocks together. That's my whole writing/idea process.
I dunno. To some degree I wonder if even your rules are a bit too stringent. I've gotten emotional experiences out of stories that are perfectly played out and old hat. As far as I am concerned, there is only one universal rule for making a good story, and that's effort. You need to put all of your effort into it. You need to scream and cry and bleed over it. Everything else that "makes a good story" falls into a nebulous void somewhere that's difficult to predict or account for.
1862454
I'm with Bad Horse on the "rules of good writing." They may change from era to era, but at least in the modern style of storytelling, we value narration over exposition, strong characters over flat characters, showing over telling, coherence, believability, and a million other things (I have a scratch sheet I often refer to when writing that includes as many of these as I'm aware of. I keep adding to it.)
That said, the whole "Delight, Surprise and Mastery" thing is a great little summation of what makes a story good. If I might add another, I firmly believe that the highest virtue a story can aspire to is to make the reader ask a question about what it means to be human.
1862454 So on the one hand you disagree with me, but on the other hand you also disagree with me?
No, but seriously... I've seen a pretty intelligent defense of a completely conflictless style of storytelling (based on old Japanese and Chinese style) presented as a counterpoint to Western conflict-driven storytelling, so I'm extremely dubious about considering anything even as basic as "a story must have a conflict" to be COMPLETELY universal, although I will grant that conflict is almost universally-accepted and has been for some time.
What gets me there is that you're basically expressing a fundamentally-opposed view, but without quite saying as much. If I'm reading you correctly, you actually believe storytelling IS reducible to craft, with variation for the individual creating the story and their background. Whereas I believe craft is the way we teach ourselves to get the most out of what each of us has in them. Broad patterns of how stories are built may be traceable back through time (though usually privileging a perspective that looks for the pattern and finds the most likely candidates), but individual storytelling devices live, breathe, grow, and die over time, and I think to explain that with JUST cultural values is kind of a strange stance to take. I mean, insofar as culture is created in part by media and people come out of culture to create media which creates culture, it seems obvious that, say, major movements like Modernism come about because people have decided that what came before it no longer accurately depicts the human experience. But you get to a point where all you can say is "OF COURSE ART REFLECTS THE PERSON WHO MADE IT AND THE CULTURE THEY'RE FROM" and then it's really just a question of whether you believe the similarities between art come are because of rules underlying the form or because people use rules as a shorthand or because artists learn from each other over time, and more to the point, what happens when you start defying those rules.
As for the rest of your comment about how fimfic sort of disagrees with my assessment of what makes a story great... well, that's what I'm arguing against, isn't it? To a certain extent.
I never said I was of the opinion that mass appeal was one of my criteria simply because reaching an audience matters to me. That's a whole separate debate about whether quality or quantity of how your story affects people is more significant. I think people ARE too dismissive of certain kinds of stories and their appeal, because there's certainly something you can learn from why those sorts of stories succeed, but it might be more about the userbase than about art. Take that however you will, I guess. I mean, I think at some point, you have to accept that there exists both an impulse towards and satisfaction of "simple" or "easily digestible" media, that maybe is more distracting or comforting than really provocative. I think those kinds of stories are popular because they're comforting or distracting or familiar. And so I would argue that they probably fail all three criteria I have for greatness, and the discussion is then something like: "are 'junk food' stories inherently not-great because they strive to let us shut-off rather than making us turn-on, or is the idea of greatness flawed?"
And that's an interesting discussion to have, but my point was more about the accepted definition of greatness in stories and why I think its fixation on certain rules is unhealthy. Sort of thinking as a writer more than a reader.
1862514 Heh, well mastery doesn't have to speak to the author's PROCESS. Rather it's the sense of... complete faith in the story as you dive into it as reader. You don't stop and wonder if the author knows what they're talking about. You believe the things that happen as they happen, or if you question them, there's a sense of deliberateness that those questions are the right questions to be asking, rather than wondering if the author just made a mistake.
I think nobody writes a story with a complete sense of mastery, but it's the sort of thing where editing to bring out exactly what you want gives your writing a certain sense of self-assurance. Authority, if you will.
1862530 I feel like maybe this is a failing on my part to explain the terms as well as I could have. My boss also said that you get to a point where you've seen like, a hundred holocaust stories or what-have-you, and you're really sick of them, but then one comes along that DOES make you care again. Surprise isn't strictly about plot/character, or even necessarily prose, it's about creating that feeling that this story ISN'T every other version of this story, even if the events play out similarly or the characters fall into familiar archetypes.
I mean, it is very possible that the things I listed are incomplete. Like I said, they're created for a specific situation, for a very selective journal that printed mainly "literary" stories. But what they get at is the necessity of attention to the experience a story creates, and what's fundamental to that experience. They try to take "what makes us love stories" in broad terms and make it a guide to evaluating stories.
The reason I'd say "just effort" doesn't do it for me as a rule is that effort doesn't necessarily show to your reader. It's a good goal as a writer to always give your work everything you have, but I think effort alone, without attention to audience, is ultimately more meaningful to you as a writer than to your readers. And that's not really creating things to give to the world, if you're not thinking about audience at all.
Rustle them jimmies, Fed, rustle 'em good.
Exactly! I disagree with you in both directions.
I think there are a large number of different templates for different common story types. Any one of these templates will be much more specific than Delight, Surprise, and Mastery, so in that way, it's too general. But many of them don't involve Delight, Surprise, and/or Mastery; so in that sense, it's too specific.
Reducible? No; some stories haven't been reduced to story types, and it takes intuition and/or thrashing around to discover them. Repeatable? Yes. There are already templates you can use to reliably churn out another adventure fic, and other types of fic. You might not always want to do that, but if you are writing something for which there is a known template, depart from it at your own risk.
(There's a danger in comparing "great stories" to templates, because literary critics elect stories to the canon more for being weird than for being great. I think "Hamlet" and "The lady with the dog" are in canon more because they're ill-formed, unfinished, and hence easy to argue about or say clever-sounding non-falsifiable things about, than because they're really great. The question of whether "greatness" consists of prototypicality, or the opposite, is also relevant here.)
Those two things are the same discussion, I think. When you try to go back behind "the accepted definition of greatness in stories" and ask whether it accounts for all and only stories that are great, you have to have some standard for greatness. You can either pose some list of things you think fiction ought to do, like "being provocative", in which case you have your definition and there's no room for art; you can just go off and churn out stuff that matches your definition, like the modernists did. Or, you can look at what people actually like--which I think is the only worthwhile approach--and then you run head-on into the problem that most readers like things that writers don't.
1862597 Certainly "making the reader ask a question about what it means to be human" is a noble goal for any story. I'm... actually reasonably certain that we folded that into one of the three broad categories but darned if I can remember how, exactly. It may have been considered a contemplative sort of pleasure, or an element of "mastery" insofar as it shows that your story has something to say and that you know that you're saying it and how to say it effectively.
And it's not that I'm anti-rules in a broad sense... like I said, not following any of the craft guidelines of what makes a good story would result in a complete mess. But you probably CAN make me sympathize with a character who doesn't have a clear goal, for instance, and you can write emotionally-affecting prose that is incredibly tell-y. So I maintain that while craft is useful, keeping an eye on "what experience I'm giving my audience" is more useful. And you'll usually (but not always) find that the two line up pretty well.
That and many of the things you listed as "being prioritized by modern sensibilities" change from situation to situation... a flat protagonist has a hard time keeping our interest for sure, but if you tried to round out all the incidental characters in a story you would create a reader experience where they're getting bogged down in the details of people who aren't actually important to the plot (unless, of course, the experience you're designing is one where it turns out everyone, however small a part they play in your life, has hidden depths... but then that kind of IS your plot). That's why I have an issue with broad prescriptive statements--it's not just that they always have exceptions, it's that they're ONE way to guide an audience's experience, and I think you're better served if you consider that experience before you consider the rule.
Does your theory take into account timing. Take this highly regarded author Bats, he locked out by writing TwiDash while it was popular and got famous so to speak. It wasn't a matter of good or bad stories it was what everyone was reading and his stuff stuck out just a little more. If he had been writing something like TwiJack at the time it wouldn't have mattered how good. While yer criteria works I don't think it factors timing. If Shakespeare had been in a different time is possible no one would know his name no matter how good he was
Maybe I should read some of the stories from the Kenyon Review--I've heard of it, but never read it--and ask what makes them great.
Are you familiar with the stories in The New Yorker & The Atlantic Monthly? The AM publishes only stories that don't have characters with clear goals, clear conflicts, character growth, or any clear idea what the story is about. It isn't so much that they're freeing writers from the rules, as that they're giving the rules the middle finger and saying, "We won't publish anything that obeys any of your rules; that's just how sophisticated we are!"
So what are the rules to Atlantic Monthly stories? Because I can't figure 'em out. They seem like stories that have had the beginning and ending excised, because a complete story would be too simple.
I haven't read The New Yorker lately, but it was pretty much the same as that back in the 90s.
Thank you for saying this! I feel sometimes like people get so hung up on fiddly little details that they sometimes miss the forest for the trees. There are stories that have made me cry that probably would get thrown out by a lot of people for being "bad" writing. To me it's really not about a set of careful rules, it's about an interaction between writer and reader.
1863031 Spot Check : Roll d20 : 1 : Crit Fail : You fail to see the forest through the trees (sadly,this has happened before.)
Jokes aside, as a musician, what you say about Craft vs. Experience resonates with me. As you say, the craft itself is but a tool, not the product. Of course, without being good at the craft, it's pretty darn hard to make a good story or play a beautiful piece or write a piece.
The other point that got me thinking was one of your three requirements: delight. I never really got the point of absolutely sad endings...tragedies, if you will. I don't know if this is just a personal thing, but when I read a story, the emotions that are invoked in the story stay with me for days. After reading a story with a bittersweet or sad ending, I end up depressed over the next few days. Admittedly, one of my best concerts was played while in one of these novel-based lows, but it really does not give me any semblance of delight.
I realize that it's sometimes necessary, but I never quite got why they needed to end on such a depressing note. Does it really bring people delight when the result of the time and pages spent in the story's world results in an emotion that they already get enough of just going about daily life?
This may just be personal preference, but I'm just wondering what you guys think.
1863407 I absolutely love bittersweet endings. Maybe it's because I suffer from depression though. I'm going to be blah anyway, might as well be pleasantly blah?
But my favorite bittersweet stories are the kind where the sweet really is a big part of it. Where even though things are in some ways awful, in other ways that's okay. That resonates with me. My actual life is in some ways awful. It's good to have the hope that this can still be okay presented to me.
1863407 I write sad stories, and I don't know why. I can divide them into 3 categories:
1. Realistic stories. Think War and Peace or A Passage to India. These aren't tragic, but they aren't happy. A Hollywood happy ending can't leave me with a good feeling because I know it's a lie, and worse, that mistaking such lies for truth leads to much of the suffering in this world. A Passage to India shows people behaving realistically, with more and less noble motives, all trying, most of the time, to do the right thing as they see it, and yet all constrained by their birth, their nationality, their religion, their sex, their jobs, and so on. You might call this a sad novel, but it's only sad because we see the world with Hollywood expectations. It is neither sad nor pessimistic; it shows us people acting in ways that are understandable and hence grants all of them dignity of a kind Hollywood can give neither its heroes and its villains.
2. Sad or tragic stories, the kind I often write. They're still something like #1. All my sad and tragic characters are in some way heroic. I think portraits of heroism are tainted when the hero is victorious, because then you can't be sure whether you're celebrating the character, or the win.
3. Horror stories. I don't like them at all, and don't understand why anyone would read or watch them. I can watch some--Alien, Wait Until Dark--but even Hitchcock horror movies perplex me; I didn't really appreciate Psycho, tho I could see it was done well.
1863900 Those types of endings resonate with me as well. I know that not everything will be alright, and that not everybody will be happy. My life has had moments like that as well. I actually first looked at your commend and thought, "Huh, sounds like coffee...it needs both sweet and bitter to have a full taste."
1863988 I have no problem with realistic stories. I treat them the same way as I do with history; I detach myself from the story and look at it as facts. Tragedies may be where I really don't get it. I think that, in a happy or triumphant ending, the character and the win are very much one and the same. A story that concluded with, "...and our main character wins on luck alone." is probably going to be a bit annoying. Perhaps it's just sad *endings* that I have a problem with. They feel incomplete, like the author just cut the story off before the characters had a chance to do something about that sadness, before they could take that sadness make something of it.
1864435 It's really a philosophical question, how you feel about different kinds of endings.
To the Greeks, the purpose of tragedy, of watching someone of "high state" fall, was to remind us of how fragile our own lives and triumphs were, and perhaps to give release to some of that pain and fear of our own inevitable fall.
Narrative theorists have said that perhaps the reason the novel succeeds as a form (and this is a conversation that dates almost to the beginning of novels, or at least to the beginning of novels as "art"--there was a period where they were considered a "lesser" form than the philosophical tract or stage drama, which had a lot to do with their popularity among women, incidentally...) is that the end it provides us is both an evocation and a denial of death. That is, the story is finite, so it can have a clear meaning or arc in a way that life, which simply goes on until it stops, doesn't have an obvious meaning. But it also posits a reality that goes on beyond the final sentence. We experience a "death," where the characters and tale stop, but can then go back to our own lives, and even imagine that things continue within the world of the story.
I prefer happy or bittersweet endings myself, because I find the noble purposes in fiction to be (in no particular order, and this is probably an incomplete list even from my own perspective, but it's the ones that are foremost in my head): 1) to take us out of our current lives, and whatever pain or boredom accompany them, 2) to allow us empathy, to imagine ourselves in another place or person in a way that we really can't get inside the heads of the people around us, and to do so in the hopes that having that experience may make us better able to TRY and connect with the people around us, and 3) to give us tools to combat the hardships of life. So I find the evocation of fear or pain in a "simple" all-is-lost fashion to be less noble or significant, and prefer stories that strive to teach us how to be strong in the face of tragedy. Or that teach us that maybe we can't be strong, but that we can weather life's hardships nonetheless. Or any of a wide range of other things.
It's my philosophical blindspot that, when faced with the possibility that reality is fundamentally meaningless and morality a cheap lie, my response is "So what? If that's really the case, then believing otherwise changes nothing except to give us comforting illusions. The 'truth' doesn't fix anything, so what's wrong with comforting illusions?" Basically, I just don't have patience for anything that denies meaning, because it seems like a dead end to me. I don't get along well with deconstructionist theory, heh.
As for the subject of "realism..." I think "realism" is almost impossible to define in storytelling. It's true that not all stories depict reality, or even attempt to do so, but it's also true that tales that are the furthest removed from reality can sometimes paint the clearest or most important pictures of reality. As G. K. Chesterton said, “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” (Which is, actually, also a pretty good summary of my view on the function of literature in general)
If you really look, you often find that fiction and media have to grossly exaggerate themselves to be considered realistic. If you want to capture the spirit of "real" boredom (cough NEBRASKA cough WHY IS IT UP FOR OSCARS cough), you must be the most boring experience ever. If you want to portray the reality of hardship you must find children starving to death in the dirty streets while the careless fat-cats step over them. We sometimes accept very grim pictures of the world as "realistic" because they run counter to brighter pictures of the world which we know to be false... but I think it's the nature of stories that they can never capture the real nuance of human experience all the way down, or they would cease to have those narrative elements that define them as stories.
At the same time, "realism" obviously has some meaning for us when we talk about stories, because we keep using it as a term. Nobody likes to feel like they're being lied to.
But, in the end--and this is going to tie neatly back into my original thesis here--the experience of "realism" in a story is another way that the creator of a work of art is deliberately controlling the experience of their audience. It's not something they gain by looking at the world around them and transcribing it directly, but a carefully considered series of decisions to paint a world that looks to an observer like the real world.
you talk too much
I remember watching an interview of Phillip K. Dick where he mentioned how people often told him science fiction wasn't "serious". He argued (indirectly in his book Radio Free Albemuth) that it was fiction of the future and the US was anti-intellectual.
This happened in the 60-70s, so I have no idea if people still have this attitude today, but I never really trust when somebody uses "serious" or "real" to describe a group. There's almost always a sense of elitism behind it, like with "real" gamers or "real" bronies because there's no more just being a gamer or brony. Hierarchies come into play, and it feels like you're not allowed to settle into a following anymore without proving your worth. Of course, nobody can directly make you feel that way, especially on the Internet, and you can think pretty much whatever you want, but it's still there.
2022073 Well to answer the implicit question, there are indeed plenty of people who still regard science fiction/fantasy as a "lesser" form, or as "entertainment" rather than "literature." And even though things like magical realism sort of push the boundaries there, there's a push to reclassify works by "literary" authors that borrow from science fiction/fantasy as "literature" instead.
That said, I think that while it doesn't always line up along genre lines, you can point to a difference between stories which are "mere" entertainment and those with something significant to say? Not that one is necessarily superior, but stories aspire to different things. And certainly literary magazines tend to have a "style" of story that they specialize in. Not that the review isn't a bit elitist, but they are "serious" in that the stories they publish are stories with something significant and fresh to say about the human experience, and those tend to be stories that grapple with pretty heavy topics.
I think the problem isn't so much that people draw lines between "serious" and "non-serious" or what-have-you, but that they're broadly dismissive of things that fall across the line. And that's something you can see on both sides most of the time.