On audacity and plausibility

Earlier this week I got the chance to catch up with my friend JP Burten. We were talking about a recent writing project of his that involves Bitcoin as a plot element and he noted, as an aside, that he doesn’t really know anything about cryptocurrency. Could’ve fooled me, I said. I found his use of it for the purposes of his story completely believable.

I related my own plausibility story. In Dark Full of Enemies, Colour Sergeant Graves, the commando team’s explosives expert, carries a small tin of thermite with him for improvisatory use. In the sabotage scenes leading to the novel’s climax, the team uses some of this to melt the steel doors of the dam shut, sealing in the main explosive charge and thwarting German efforts to counterattack and remove them. I put a lot of imaginative effort into this passage and was pretty pleased with it, especially as a chance to play with the Arctic winter setting and theme of darkness:

McKay took the tin and went to the end of the gallery. At the steel door he took out a wad of thermite, prepared by Graves at the Petersen house, and a match and squashed it into the gap in the jamb, just above the lock. He set the bolt and lit the thermite.

The little wad caught and burned white. Molten steel fizzled and guttered in sun-bright globs onto the floor. The tunnel lit up—McKay shut his eyes. He had not seen real light for days. Yellow metal coursed in runnels down the jamb, cooling as it went. A minute later, and only the lock still glowed. The rest of the door stood smoking, fused shut.

“I’ll be damned,” McKay said.

He set another pinch of thermite in the jamb just above the lower hinge, set it aflame, and left.

But—I have no idea whether that would work. I did research on thermite (and knew more about it then than I remember now) but never determined whether one could use it the way Graves does. And yet no one has ever called that out as unrealistic, even the technically-minded Tom Clancy fans who’ve taken a look at Dark Full of Enemies and enjoyed it. Whether it’s possible or not, it came across as plausible enough to work.

Per my discussion with JP, the writer can—and should—do research and plan and prepare, but sometimes what sells something questionable is pure confidence. Whether a technical detail like these two or a plot contrivance or coincidence, present it without blinking and it’ll seem plausible. Believability is the daughter of audacity.

This requires art and good judgement and is no substitute for actually knowing things but, like Graves’s tin of thermite, it’ll do in a pinch.

Our conversation was prompted by JP’s new novella Dead Drop, a followup to his mystery The 8-Bit Detective, an internet-age cozy mystery. Dead Drop is a fun, tightly constructed short read and available free on his website.