There's always a reason... but not in real life

Have you ever noticed that everything always happens for a reason in fiction?

I don't mean that everything has a cause, or that everything is connected to everything else in small, hard-to-detect ways-- those things are true in real life, too. What I mean is that whenever something, no matter how small, happens in a work of fiction, it always seems to be connected to the main events of the story in an important, "meaningful" way.

For example, if a fictional character has a slip of the tongue, saying something other than what he or she meant to say, it can mean one of three things:

1. It's a Freudian slip, and it gives us a glimpse into what was on the character's mind.

Or:

2. It shows that the character is nervous or stressed, and therefore making mistakes in speech because of distraction.

Or:

3. It's part of character development, indicating that the character is "the type of person" who would make such a mistake-- which, in stories, always seems to mean a clumsy, bumbling type of character.

Of course, in real life, we frequently see dexterous, alert individuals in relaxed, non-stressful situations having little slips of the tongue that cannot possibly be interpreted as windows into their psyches. But those mistakes are completely irrelevant to the "important" events of these people's lives-- and so, if the events of their lives were made into a fictionalized story, those slips of the tongue would undoubtedly be left out. Everything in a novel or short story has to be relevant to the plot, or else readers start asking, "Why is this even in here?"

This is one of the things that annoy me about fiction. In real life, not every tiny little event is relevant to the things we consider important. Connected, yes, in some tiny way-- but not connected in the overt ways we always seem to see in fiction. Which means that fiction-- or at least the vast majority of fiction-- is unrealistic.

I'm guilty of doing this in my own fiction, too, if only because I'm afraid of readers getting confused about why I put some particular detail into the story. There always has to be a "why." If any author ever wrote a realistic story-- a story in which at least 70% of the events were unrelated to the plot in any vital way-- people would not understand it. They would look at 70% of the paragraphs and ask, "Why is this even here? It's not relevant." In fact, the same would happen with a story where only 10% of the paragraphs were irrelevant. If there's even one sentence in a story that's not connected to the plot, then someone, somewhere, is going to criticize it.

So all the characters have to speak perfectly, unless they are nervous, clumsy, or thinking about another subject. No sight, sound or event can be described unless it is useful in building character, setting or plot. How can people say that this is the right way to write a story, and yet still say that fiction should be realistic?