As we have been running through Elinor Glyn’s list of Nineteen Hackneyed Themes to Be Avoided, we have been working on a certain assumption: that it is desirable to avoid tired clichés, because they make our narrative less plausible.

Some authorities on fiction would say that our goal is realism, but that is where Dr. Boli must disagree. Our goal is plausibility, which is quite different.

These thoughts were provoked by a recent experience. Paying a visit to someone at a large city hospital, Dr. Boli had to pass through a check point where two uniformed police officers sat facing each other checking visitors’ bags. They were the most stereotypically rotund cop archetypes you could imagine, practically spherical, and—having to sit facing each other all day—they were naturally deep in the middle of a conversation. The conversation was all about doughnuts—doughnuts in great detail, with all their subtleties: which varieties are really the most delicious, where such varieties may be obtained, how you have to go early to get them at that place on the South Side because they sell out by nine in the morning.

Now, a fiction writer who included such a scene would be told that it was was an implausible cliché: that she should make more believable cop characters instead of reaching for the laziest generic stereotype and hoping for a cheap laugh. And the editor who told our writer that would be correct. No writer should lean on the lazy stereotype, because readers will reject it. They will be thrown out of the story: they will see the writer behind the curtain and think she could have put a bit more work into her minor characters.

But reality is not bound by constraints of plausibility. Reality is proud and stubborn, and if you tell reality that she should create more plausible characters, reality will stick her tongue out at you and tell you she isn’t a child anymore and she can do what she wants.

The lesson for fiction writers is this: reality is a good source of ideas, as long as those ideas are properly adapted. Reality must be carefully edited before it is plausible enough for our fiction. We must take out the rank implausibilities and tired clichés on which reality so willingly leans, and we must substitute characters and situations that strike our readers as believable. If we do it well, our readers may even tell us that our story is realistic. We, of course, shall smile and accept the compliment as the praise it is intended to be—but we know better.