Suspension of disbelief

Internal consistency is the key to plausibility. If you want bare bottomed paddlings in 2010 then find a way to explain it in a way that is consistent with the story.

Maybe it's a wacko religious thing. Maybe the town accepted money from a crazy elderly millionaire who wanted to see those doss darn kids put in their place - and a lawyer is scheming to steal the money back if the school doesn't follow the agreement. Maybe it's politics - far right wing, or weird brand of libertarianism, or maybe just plain old crypto-anarchism (building a mock totalitarianism system to encourage rebellion) run a mock.

However you explain it, you have to keep the logic of the setting in mind while you write so you can be internally consistent - because nothing ruins a setting faster than the reader going "Hey, it doesn't work that way - I've just finishing reading 3 pages about how it works and this is all wrong".

And the more reasons you can give for something weird happening, the less the reader has to suspend disbelief.

If I may offer a setting that I think works - during the depths of the economic crisis I wrote a story called "Returning to..." about the plight of adult children returning home (which was happening) and being forced to return to childhood (which wasn't). The theory being that since the returning adult children have already screwed up their lives they need to relearn what it means to be an adult - which means returning to childhood. One of the ways I explained it happening was to say that Oprah got behind the movement and dragging many of her fans with her. Including a trendsetter like her in the story made it just that more plausible. Of course, now her inclusion dates the story, but that's life.

Goodgulf

Generally true, I believe, however then there are books that get their suspension of disbelief from their refusal to admit to any rules, Alice in Wonderland comes quickly to mind.

More or less on a tangent, while there is an extensive literature on the spanking of various Harry Potter characters and I have seen at least one work in which Dorothy is spanked by Aunt Em after returning from Oz, for some reason nobody that I know of has ever written of Alice getting a spanking, presumably for endangering herself and quite possibly for dirtying her dress while falling down the rabbit hole. Perhaps our resident leporid might comment

Shameless self-plug coming up.

I wrote a little story based on a sixties psychedelic era Alice, called "Allie in Wonderland"

I'm very fond of it but it has had relatively few reads and comments. Perhaps there aren't many other retired hippies on here

One story that I was never able to actually write had what might have been the most profound ending for a spanking story ever. But I could not get past my own measure of whether suspension of disbelief was within limits.

The problem was twofold - I don't do sci-fi and for the punch line to work, the reader had to be brought up to speed on some pretty high level theoretical physics.

In a nutshell, time passes at different rates depending on how fast you travel, and how close you get to the event horizon at the edge of a Black Hole. So - our intrepid crew are in a space craft trying to measure that effect on some highly improbable measuring equipment as they explore the perimeter of a small black hole.

The second in command makes a fatal error - her mistake moves the craft to a point where it can never escape back out of the pull of that black hole. As they get nearer and nearer to the event horizon, time passes slower and slower, but never gets to a moment when it stops.

So her spanking lasts from now until the end of the universe.

There might be a way of doing something like that - having the science officer or navigator or someone comment, explaining the situation at a high enough level that the commanded can understand it. Maybe have someone start reciting an equation (one containing time and the event horizon) and have another character say something like "And what does that mean in english?" and explain it a high level. Or have one the character thinking about it - say the second in command is mentally reviewing her error as the spanking goes on and reveals it that way. Or the spanker comments on it as he's spanking.

The thing is - I'm pretty sure that the readers are going to think it's sci-fi, even if it isn't, and supporting equations just don't work in a spanking story.

It is scifi. Its just hard scifi.

"Even if it isn't"??

Well, I believe that such a story would have to take place in a future time in which humans have interstellar spacecraft capable of approaching the event horizon of a black hole, while at the moment NASA is working (slowly) on eventually landing human beings on Mars.

Set in the future, involving technology that currently hasn't been developed on Earth--AFAIC that's science-fiction.

Making the plotline conform to the known laws of physics, IMHO that arguably would mean that the story would be plausible science-fiction rather than partially fantasy... --C.K.

Those are all excellent ideas. It is this sort of plot device that can allow readers to suspend disbelief.

Sorry - when I said 'even if it isn't' I was referring to that real element. That people will take it as a "I just made this bit up whole cloth so my story would work" type thing. It's that at a certain level most 'sci-fi' has become tech based fantasy. That in most modern 'sci-fi' stories there is no understanding of science or attempt to work with real world physics so few readers expect actual physics in the story.

The idea that time slows in relation to gravity will - to most readers - have as little basis in science as FTL space flight and lasers you can hear in space. They will think that it's one of the fiction elements, not one of the science parts. It's a shame, but to most people E equals M C squared is the total sum of relativity - and many people will think MC Squared is a the name of a DJ.

That said, do you think that the idea of someone quickly recapping the physics would work? Maybe salvage the story?

Goodgulf

If you have an explanation for this, I will believe it. But what Goodgulf explaines with 'E equals M C squared is the total sum of relativity' doesn't work in this case, does it? If the time doesn't pass by, the spanking cannot proceed either. So it could always be only one single spank which would last until the end of the universe, but she will not feel this last spank, because the time passes too slow. Or the other way: If the spanking (that is several succesive spanks) goes on forever, everything else is also going on forever. That means it could also stop. So you need a physical law, which explains why spankings doesn't follow the theory of relativity.