Real life is boring

It was a pretty simple trick, really: They just built a lot of fake free-standing cash machines and put them all over certain shopping centers. People put in their cash cards, typed in their passwords, the machines flashed “Out of Service” messages, and that was that. A few days later, the thieves collected the machines — each of which had recorded hundreds of account numbers and their passwords — and they went to town.

“Wow,” a writer friend of mine told me when he had read the script. “This is really cool! That’s exactly how I’d do it.”

“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read,” a friend of mine who is in law enforcement told me when he had read the script. “There are about 16 zillion ways this could never happen.”

And he couldn’t understand why I didn’t care that my way of committing cash-machine robbery was utterly unrealistic.

“Brad Pitt is never going to fly around in space either,” I said. “But that didn’t stop them from making Ad Astra.”

People, I’m unhappy to say, waste a lot of time thinking about what’s realistically feasible. As a writer, I’m much more interested in what makes the story better. Realism, in my experience, isn’t something to aim for.

For instance, a few years ago, a spy novelist had just published his first novel — it wasn’t terribly successful, but the whole idea of writing and publishing a novel is so improbable, such a long shot, that he nevertheless considered himself a serious big shot despite having only about $16 in the bank.

The novel didn’t sell well. No one bought it at airport bookstalls. No one read it poolside in swanky resorts. And worse, no one called from Hollywood to turn it into a movie.

Someone must have read it, though, because a few months after its dismal publication, he got a call from a high-ranking person in the Pentagon who claimed not only to have read it but also to be a big fan.

The book, I should mention, was partially set inside the Pentagon — I think the title was something awful like Five Deadly Rings — and during the call, his Pentagon fan laughed and suggested that his book was unrealistic and fanciful. “Come to lunch,” he said. “And we’ll show you how it really is.”

I have yet to hear a credible tale of a writer who passes up a free lunch, and this guy was no exception. On the appointed day, he appeared at the front gate to the world’s most imposing and forbidding office building, was buzzed in through security, led through anonymous hallways, and escorted to a drab and sparsely furnished room where he sat, alone, for several minutes.

Two people joined him in the room, took their seats on metal chairs opposite the now-terrified novelist, and the interrogation began.

Because, apparently, despite being told on the phone that some of his facts and details were a little off, the truth was that none of them was off. His facts were eerily factual, and his details were alarmingly accurate. He had described certain spy missions and Department of Defense initiatives with such accuracy and confidence that a team of counterintelligence specialists had been scrambled and assigned to the case. They wouldn’t let him leave the building until he told them how it was that he knew so much.

For the rest of the day, he carefully retraced his steps for his Pentagon interrogators. He showed them which websites he consulted, which public domain databases he’d queried, which articles from defense news publications he’d cribbed. It was an exhausting and tense day — he didn’t even get the promised lunch — but by the end of it, the team had to congratulate him on the realism and accuracy of his novel and the dogged, plodding research it took to get it all so right.

When he sat down to write his next book, he made it all up on the spot, with zero research and no attempt at realism.

He didn’t want his books to be accurate. He wanted them to be entertaining. His first book failed, he discovered, because it was so lifelike and realistic. He didn’t want to be factual. He wanted to sell books.

Made-up life crackles with plot and tension. Real life, if we’re lucky, is boring.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.