We love bringing verisimilitude to audiences, hopefully having experiences you'll never have.
Most people are middle class. Most people do wish their lives were better than they are. And I think by making my main characters ordinary, average guys, it helps readers identify with their problems. It also helps ground the supernatural events that follow in a recognizable reality and perhaps gives some of my wilder scenarios a little verisimilitude.
Despite having been awarded the dubious honor of arthood, all photography is still perceived as having one foot in the real world, a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude, no matter how often it is demonstrated that photographs can and do lie.
You can't make a good show based on pure verisimilitude, pure anti-drama. But you have to acknowledge a lot of ordinary life. Most TV doesn't do that.
VERISIMILITUDE (the appearance or semblance of truth)
Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.
The Gospel of Thomas, greatly favored in some circles, is ignored by archaeologists, primarily because it exhibits no verisimilitude. It tells us nothing about the historical Jesus and the world he and his disciples lived in. I've heard it said, that if all we had was the Gospel of Thomas, would we even know that Jesus was Jewish?
What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.
Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
