Resistance is basic to living.
So basic that when you touch something, the electrons in your hand repel the electrons of the touched surface. When you push an object, it pushes back: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
This is one reason resistance creates a sense of realism in fiction. Writing instructors talk about how conflict is indispensable as a way to create drama, and they are right. But I have rarely seen resistance discussed as a way to make the illusion of fiction seem more real.
If you tell a reader, “A bar of soap rested in the soap dish,” the reader can picture that. But if a character grabs a bar of soap and it slips through her hand, splashes into the water of a tub, and bangs her knee, and makes the character say, “ow,” that soap becomes real in the mind of the reader.
To give another example: In a fiction story, you could say “She moved the dining table across the room.”
This is fine if the detail is only a side-note to the drama. But suppose that a character is trying to move the table for a dramatic purpose like blocking a door to protect herself from a crazed assailant. Imagine that, while moving the table across the room, is so heavy, it will barely budge. When it does move, it scrapes the hard floor or catches the edge of the carpet.
Suppose that the protagonist is forced to move one side and then the other a tiny bit at a time. What if the splintering wooden surface pricks the hand of a character and she gasps?
In this situation the table becomes a mini-antagonist. Not only do these details of resistance tighten suspense; to the reader that table will probably seem so real he can almost touch it.
The more fanciful the story, the more the writer needs resistance, along with vivid sensory details, to pin the fiction to reality, to make the dream-like details more tangible.
However, dramatic resistance goes beyond mere touch. I had this thought while reading a Harry Potter novel. I was at the part where Harry is at the house of the Weasleys and Mrs. Weasley points out the garden gnomes to him.
They are stupid, they gnaw on plant roots, they damage gardens, and they are in the way. In order to get rid of them, Harry is informed, you have to grab them, spin them, make them dizzy, and toss them over the fence. Sometimes they escape and you have to chase them.
When reading this I thought, “What better way to make a fantastic creature seem real than to make it annoying?” No one has ever seen a live gnome, but most people have had experience with annoying animals, from biting insects to overly-aggressive but playful dogs.
Besides sabotaging a garden, the gnomes have to be engaged physically by grabbing and spinning, which makes them so tangible that, at the time I was reading, I could almost imagine that they were in the living room with me.
Had Rowling presented only a static image by saying that the gnomes had potato-like bodies, I could have pictured them, but the sense of tangibility that comes from tossing a resistant and dizzy gnome over a fence against its will would not have engaged me in the same way.
The same is true of most anything I describe in my fiction. If something balks, if it struggles, if it resists, if it is in the way, it seems more real.
This is because real life is filled with frustrations great and small. A cat bites your thumb when you try to force her into her pet carrier. On certain hot summer days, the wheel of a car is too hot to touch. Torrential rain drenches your sweater and obscures the path ahead.
From the need for conflict that is the basis of all drama to the smallest tussle with a household object, resistance is a fundamental experience of living in the physical world. And because it is so basic to life, it is also basic to the art of writing, which needs to mirror reality enough that the unreal seems possible.
Resistance pulls the fanciful from the topmost arc of a rainbow and turns it into something that the eye can see and the hand can grasp. The hassles of everyday life, while unpleasant to deal with, become gold to a writer seeking to create an illusion than convinces and compels.