Granular verisimilitude

You know you have a good editor—thanks Tim!—when they point out that the narratively-necessary-but-totally-arbitrary-8-digit number in your novel manuscript is unlikely to have the unique digits you thought would make it appear random because among the 100 million 8-digit numbers, there are only about 1.8 million whose digits are all different. So your number is an outlier in that particular sense; not only might the reader find it hard to imagine that anyone could know a number to that precision, but it smells like a made-up number.

Engineering the suspension of disbelief is all in the details.

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Complement with a brief anatomy of story, the surprising plausibility of Russian Doll, and my advice for authors.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly reading recommendation newsletter and lives in Oakland, CA.

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