Writing Lesson - Suspending Disbelief

United States
March 3, 2018 2:53am CST
As a writer of fiction one of the things we ask our readers to do is suspend disbelief. Now this is a two-edge sword because what we are doing is asking them to except as true a world that is impossible in reality. BUT at the same time it must be true in its self; meaning that it must conform to the reality that it is in a believable way. Examples: Harry Potter is so unlike reality where monsters and magic exist and where kids go to wizard school. She makes the stories no matter how outlandish believable because the characters don't automatically know magic and even uses their novice abilities to drive the story. Now imagine she introduced to us a world where there is a school for wizards which tells us great magic users are taught but then Harry Potter knew perfect magic at the start. Would you believe the story if she wrote it that way? As a writer you need to understand the rules of your world and stick to them or readers will put aside your story for another author. Like an earlier lesson where I suggest you create a complete back story for a character that may never make it into your story but will help you keep true to that character's personality, I also suggest you make a set of rules and history for your world and keep it in mind while writing so that your story remains believable in context to your world. One of the most extreme examples of a writer creating a whole back story and history mostly not seen in his books but was the blueprint assuring that though his stories were science fiction they were completely believable in their own context is Frank Herbert's Dune. This book took him six years to research before writing because he felt it needed to be believable. Could you imagine if we were told Superman could not be shot only to have him stabbed? Once a rule is set never break it without setting up a system of rules that makes it believable inside the story. Superman's people were normal on their home planet so its material, kryptonite rendered Superman normal so that a knife or bullet could harm him. The context creates a believable loop hole. Imagine instead suddenly Superman was weak after eating pizza but nothing in the story ever hinted something about pizza was different for him. How would you react when suddenly Superman was shot in a PizzaHut? As a sub-topic of this let me speak quickly about Deus ex machine (God in the machine). Deus ex machine is a technique where an unknown or surprise is introduced late in a story to help tie everything together and is very dangerous because it usually kills a reader's desire to suspend disbelief because it is telling them something that was not a natural part of the existing story and is generally believed to be a sign of a lazy writer. That said a great writer knows when to break the rules and some have used Deus ex machine to great success. The most famous would be H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds where we go a whole story of these dominating aliens who destroy everything in their paths to suddenly die out because of germs. No where in the story does he ever mention they need to be careful in breathing Earth's atmosphere (mostly because the tale was told in the form of emergency news broadcast) so when suddenly they just stop it is new, surprise information.
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@MissNikki (5237)
• Maple Ridge, British Columbia
3 Mar 18
Very interesting! Thank you for sharing.
1 person likes this