Fool Me Once

Entice Your Reader to Willfully Suspend Their Disbelief

March is finally over. I have complained about March approximately nine times. I despise March. It is second only to February in terms of terribleness. Terribility. I wish we could split February and March up somehow so that they didn’t occur back to back. It’s a bit much, all that crummy monthiness right in a row. Anyway, it’s April now. Welcome to April. Happy April Fool’s Day. I hope nobody gets an unfortunate prank over on you. I hope you don’t play an unkind prank on anyone. Kind pranks only. Everybody should be laughing at the end. If you’re laughing but the other person isn’t, your prank was just mean.

Today’s article is chock full of thoughts and advice for getting your reader to suspend their disbelief as needed to accept your story’s premise (or premises) so that they may sit back and enjoy the story. You want to fool your reader into believing that the impossible is not only possible but plausible and happening right there in their imagination. You want to tell an incredible story. Everybody does. But you have to know how to make your incredible story credible. 

When we read or watch fiction, there’s usually some degree to which we must suspend disbelief to enjoy the story. When you’re reading realistic fiction, like a legal thriller or a contemporary romance novel, you won’t be asked to belay your skepticism too far. But you’ll have to accept some things that are highly unlikely to happen in reality—otherwise the story wouldn’t be that interesting. Characters have to make unexpected decisions for an interesting plot to unfold, otherwise the story would probably be very boring.

When fiction is done well, the consumer of the fiction (whoever is reading the novel, or watching the movie, or listening to the podcast—whatever it is) does not even realize that they are making a concession to the fiction by putting their critical thinking faculties aside to enjoy it. That’s why we’re not pausing the movie three minutes in for questions like “wait, who handled Harry’s guardianship paperwork when he was handed off to the Dursleys?” I mean a third party can’t just grab an abandoned baby and hand it off to somebody else to raise, can they? One thing Twilight did better was briefly show us the terrified and mildly unscrupulous mortal lawyer on retainer to handle all that administrivia for the Cullens. 

Because good fictional narratives handle the suspension of disbelief seamlessly, there are plenty of writers who don’t give it much (or any) thought. But if you write something unrealistic without a plan for handling your readers’ skepticism, you’re going to have a hard time engaging them. Here’s the pro tip: Readers have a finite amount of disbelief they are able to suspend. If you exhaust that, if you keep throwing fantastical or unbelievable elements at them past that point, then your reader will find your work too far fetched to put up with.

We get the term “suspension of disbelief” from Samuel Taylor Coleridge who is the only Romantic era poet worth knowing and better than his good buddy William Wordsworth by a large margin. Coleridge was into putting supernatural and fantasy elements in his poems, and he believed that in order to make these believable you needed to have two things:

• Human interest

• Semblance of truth

For Coleridge, humanity is universal. No matter how out there your story is—even if it doesn’t involve any humans at all—you can write human interest into it. We’ve all seen stories with alien species who exhibit humanity; we all know plenty of elves and dwarves who are paragons of humanity. Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill takes place after the extinction of humankind and all the characters are robots and it still manages human interest. Joe Hill described it as being able to “ lay waste to your heart.” That’s Stephen King’s kid. Pretend you don’t know. He doesn’t want you to know.

The semblance of truth is a bit harder to come by when you’re writing speculative fiction. How do you inject truth into a story that contains so many elements that could never occur in reality?

The genre that requires perhaps the most careful attention to the reader’s suspension of disbelief is speculative fiction that takes place in what we think of as “the real world”—urban fantasy, low fantasy, mundane science fiction, and so on. This is because the real-world aspects must be faithful to what the reader expects from the real world and the fantastic or speculative aspects must work within that realistic framework. 

Consider: If your heroine is a professional vampire hunter and her clients are all faeries but the story takes place in modern-day New York City, then I would want to know—How does she get paid? How does she pay her rent? Do fairies use human money to pay her? Or is she getting paid in some kind of fae currency and, if so, can she convert it to USD at her bank? What’s the exchange rate like on first-born children?

In my experience, the reader can accept one big-ticket item to suspend their disbelief for—in the above example, the existence of vampires, faeries, and human vampire hunters who work for faeries—as long as you don’t also ask them to accept a bunch of small items in addition. If I told this story and my reader accepts these supernatural elements placed in modern-day New York, they’re not going to be able to stretch further to accept a bunch of little unrealistic tidbits, too—not having to worry about money, not having to have a cover story for her weird job, not getting stuck in traffic, never dealing with the subway. 

You can do one or the other. If you want to use the real world that your readers know as your setting, you have to reproduce that part faithfully for them to also accept your big fantastical premise. When you borrow the real world for a speculative story, you have to get that real world right.

When you’re dealing with a fully speculative universe—the far future, alien worlds, high fantasy settings—then you don’t have to faithfully portray the world as we know it. You don’t even have to adhere to the laws of nature or physics. Everything is up for interpretation. Tolkien referred to this type of setting as a “secondary world” in The Monsters and the Critics. But you still can’t stretch your readers’ ability to believe in your creation too far. Even in a totally fantastical setting, you still have to respect your reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief.

Of any secondary world, Tolkien said, the author has to respect their creation and ensure that it is internally consistent. That means that whatever rules you have made up for your fictional reality, everything within that fictional reality must respect those rules. There’s a reason the Fellowship can’t just hop on some sweet eagle mounts and fly the ring to Mordor. The great eagles come from the same creator as Gandalf and his wizard buddies, and are bound by the same laws governing how they can intervene in the affairs of mortal people. 

Your secondary reality can be as wacky as you want, as different from primary reality (the one you and I live in) as you can imagine. But any reality must have a foundation of internal logic to keep it together. The logic doesn’t have to be based in anything from our primary reality—it just has to honor itself. Without an internally consistent logic, your reality will feel (to the reader) like a jumbled mess of thrown-together premises that don’t form a consistent whole. Premise salad.

The internal logic of your reality can be your semblance of truth. It’s like making an arch out of stone blocks. The keystone at the apex of the arch is your reality’s internally consistent logic. It’s somehow holding everything around it up, even though its only supports are the very blocks that in turn support it. Listen. I don’t understand how arches work. I don’t understand how birds stay up either—birds, airplanes. I think of it a bit like flying. Some things can hold themselves up in the air with no connection to the ground, and they do that by a logic that applies only to themself. Birds, therefore, are internally logical. Otherwise they’d all be emus and penguins. Grounded.

Coleridge also referred to the same concept as poetic faith. To take something “on faith” is to accept whatever it is based on the trust you have in the person who is giving you the information. I interpret poetic faith, then, as the acceptance a reader has of the information they absorb from the poem (story) or the poet (storyteller), without further investigation or verification of its truthfulness. 

In the real world, we don’t just take something on faith from any stranger. If your friend tells you something unlikely, and you have a long history of this friend saying truthful things to you, then you may be able to take whatever your friend told you on faith. A stranger, on the other hand, has no history of credibility with you. If a stranger comes up to you and tells you something unlikely, you are going to take that information in with skepticism and think critically about it rather than simply accepting it as true without further thought.

You, the author, are a stranger to every new reader and your words won’t be taken on faith. You have to build credibility with your reader if you want them to accept information from you on poetic faith. If you’re telling a story based in primary reality, you can do that by making sure your characters act in logical, consistent ways, and that your depiction of reality jives with what other people living in the same reality understand. 

If you’re telling a story based in a secondary reality, you can build that credibility by laying a strong foundation of internal logic for your creation and making sure that your characters—whoever and whatever they are—bring a sense of humanity and human interest to your work. Without those two elements—human interest, and a ring of truth—you’ll be treading the waters of absurdity.

It’s fine to be absurd. I am often absurd. You just never want to be absurd by accident. Trust me on this. Nobody likes an accidental Beckett. 

I am almost to the point in the year when energy returns and I am back to firing on all cylinders. More hours of sunlight. More warm days to leave the door open. Perhaps even some work meetings taken from the back porch. I hope everyone is looking forward to spring. Even if you’re a winter person, consider that we’re getting closer to Halloween with each passing day. In that respect, doesn’t spring have something for everyone? Enjoy your first April weekend and no lite te April Showers carborundorum.

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