"What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible"
About this Quote
Plausible is the velvet rope Golden hangs across the entrance to his imagination. The line reads like a craft note, but it’s really a defense strategy: a novelist insisting that invention still owes rent to reality, especially when the “reality” in question is culturally charged and widely fetishized. Golden isn’t just talking about plot mechanics; he’s telegraphing an awareness that readers will treat his story as anthropology unless he actively resists that pull.
The phrasing is careful, almost lawyerly: “had to do” frames restraint as obligation, not preference. “Certain limits” implies a boundary negotiated under pressure - from historical record, from living memory, from the author’s own research, and from the market’s appetite for the exotic. And “of course” is the quietest tell: he assumes plausibility is the baseline standard, but the very insistence hints at how easily the project could slip into fantasy dressed up as insight.
Context matters because Golden is a Western writer best known for a novel that many readers approached as a window into Japanese geisha life. Plausibility becomes both aesthetic and ethical. It’s a pledge to avoid outright impossibility, yes, but also a bid for credibility in a space where authenticity is contested and stakes are real. The subtext: I know I’m borrowing someone else’s world; my job is to make the borrowing feel earned, not merely vivid.
What makes the line work is its modesty. No grand claims of “truth,” just a disciplined admission that fiction’s power comes from constraints as much as from invention.
The phrasing is careful, almost lawyerly: “had to do” frames restraint as obligation, not preference. “Certain limits” implies a boundary negotiated under pressure - from historical record, from living memory, from the author’s own research, and from the market’s appetite for the exotic. And “of course” is the quietest tell: he assumes plausibility is the baseline standard, but the very insistence hints at how easily the project could slip into fantasy dressed up as insight.
Context matters because Golden is a Western writer best known for a novel that many readers approached as a window into Japanese geisha life. Plausibility becomes both aesthetic and ethical. It’s a pledge to avoid outright impossibility, yes, but also a bid for credibility in a space where authenticity is contested and stakes are real. The subtext: I know I’m borrowing someone else’s world; my job is to make the borrowing feel earned, not merely vivid.
What makes the line work is its modesty. No grand claims of “truth,” just a disciplined admission that fiction’s power comes from constraints as much as from invention.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Arthur
Add to List
