Paris Hilton, presidential assassin

John C. Wright has an interesting post about how to properly criticize a book in its context.

The worst thing a write can do is add some element to his story merely because the real-life events on which the story is based actually happened that way. Real life is not realistic. Real life is filled with strange and baffling coincidences. Real life is startling and defeats all expectations and accounts. In real life, the wicked prosper and the good are punished. In other words, real life is not believable. If you must introduce a realistic element in a story, by which I mean an unlikely and impossible coincidence, then introduce it at the beginning, or make up some believable excuse to shoehorn it into your tale in a fashion the readers will accept: such as a gypsy curse.

This is very true. If you think about it, Abraham Lincoln was a titanic historical figure, reviled as a tyrant and hailed as a liberator, praised as the savior of the Union and cursed as a war criminal, the man who destroyed the old Union and built a new one. And this man, widely cited by historians as the 2nd-best US President after Lincoln, how did this man die?

He was shot by an unemployed actor. If it were a TV drama, the viewers would turn to each other and say “like, seriously?”

Isn’t that fundamentally absurd? Lincoln was assassinated by the 19th-century equivalent of Paris Hilton. No writer of fiction, creating Lincoln’s life, would decide that after four years of civil war, the best way to achieve dramatic closure would be to have Paris Hilton assassinate the president.

-JM