I read a lot of fiction, and one of the biggest determinants of whether a book grips me or not is the degree to which there’s an internal logic to the world they’re writing about and the characters who populate it.
This differs from external logic in that an externally logical fictional world would need to make perfect sense according to how things actually are, whereas an internally logical world can be distinct from reality, but in a consistent way.
So in a fictional world featuring spies and villains and their respective, shadowy organizations, it makes sense that everyone would know kung fu, even though that would strain credulity in a story aiming to replicate the verity of real life.
In a science fictional world, you can have Godzilla-scale beasts romping around, being taken seriously by everyone, despite their real-world violation of the square-cube law.
I tend to believe it makes sense to consider our lives through the lens of internal logic, too, because that liberates us from assumed limitations and expectations, and allows us to think in terms of our personal priorities and realities.
Said another way, I like the idea of being able to deviate from “the way things are supposed to be” when cobbling together a me-shaped life, but I also think it’s important that I have internal consistency so that I don’t accidentally build something that’s misaligned with who I am and what I think is important.
If prioritizing my time is fundamental to who I am, that should ideally inform the other things I do and decisions I make. The same is true of all the principles I hold dear.
These core elements should be changeable too, of course: my story evolving from a world of espionage into a world of monsters if that’s what makes sense for who I am, what I’ve learned, and who I’m growing into.
So while my life’s internal logic will always be partly shaped by that of the world around me, the things I do control should, at any given moment, generally harmonize and create their own resilient, sensical context (which may differ in subtle or dramatic ways from that larger, encapsulating logical system).
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