: Re: How to tell readers that I know my story is factually incorrect? Sometimes, it so happens that I do some research for a story and find that a major plot point could never work in real life.

@Kevin153

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"I simply let my character survive a wound that he shouldn't have survived"

Real people do this all the time, one of my favourites was a guy in Alaska who accidentally severed his own jugular vein with a chainsaw and then proceeded to walk 20 odd miles to the nearest town for help. He should have been unconscious almost instantly and died a few moments later. Sometimes people just get ridiculously lucky; to maintain realism and immersion for your audience people should comment on how lucky the survivor is, possibly until they're sick of hearing it. This means only saying it once in the direct narrative and having the character immediately tell that person they've had it with everyone reminding them of how dead they should be.

Now without knowing exactly what you're proposing to do this time around it's hard to say how you might go about justifying the outcome you want but luck and odd happenstance can get you a long way to the apparently impossible.

You can write a foreword that says, among other things "anything that's wrong with this story is deliberate and/or my fault" but within the narrative don't say anything about inconsistencies, it destroys the readers' experience.

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