Believable Stories

It is now Sunday evening and I am off work tomorrow (I'll be working on grad school applications since I work for a Pittsburgh roofer and the Monday after Thanksgiving, the first day of rifle season for buck deer in PA, is like a national holiday in western PA) ... so I am cleaning out some posts I have had for a while on my spreadsheet list of posts to write. A long while ago Pauli and I exchanged thoughts briefly on here on the nature of good stories, Flannery O'Connor's thoughts on such and Harry's interest in a good story in Prisoner of Azkaban. David Day, in his book Tolkien's Ring, discusses how Tolkien was drawing on a large body of "ring-lore" and one of his goals was to write a "believable source story" for this body of legends etc. By that term though, he did not mean "believable" in the sense that one would believe that they actually did happen, but rather that (given certain givens) they could have happened. What was central to Tolkien was that the story be internally consistent with itself and with the core of human experience of our own psychology and drives for the transcendent and peace and love etc (of course not with our experience of "science", etc.) So, one of my noted posts to write comes from The Goblet of Fire p. 705 where Dumbledore emphasizes very succinctly the importance of this type of "believability" in a story, and at the same time does a great act of charity in using his authority to help an innocent who is being born down upon by a bureaucrat. He notes that he has no reason not to believe Harry's and Barty Jr's stories, they make sense and they explain all the facts.