VERISIMILITUDE

Verisimilitude is one of those twenty dollars words with a ten cent meaning: having the appearance of of being true or real. And that's what stories have to contain.

Right now, I'm reading East of the Mountains by David Guterson. It's not a new book (I seldom read a new book). It is the story of a doctor who has cancer and  runs off to the mountains to die. I'd no sooner read page two, getting caught up in the story, when I had  to check  the cover. It says  fiction; I had to affirm I wasn't reading a personal memoir. Another chapter. Was that right? I check again. Yep, it says fiction, but  it reads like a real life story, it feels like real life.

How does he do it? I believe it is tiny finite details: the emotions that run through the doctor, his thoughts about what to do with his dogs, how he keeps rubbing his side where the colon cancer pain is the worst, how he needs stool softeners for his constipation and more. I'm on a chapter that speaks of  the apple orchards in Washington State. The details of how the trees are taken care, the varieties of apples, the history of how the orchard began.Vivid, yet everyday details bring the story verisimilitude.

 I continually keep going back to the cover because it is to hard to believe this is a work of fiction. And that is what we should all strive for. We should  make our readers go to the cover for affirmation that it is a piece of fiction, a piece of verisimilitude.