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This week: Suspension of Disbelief Edited by: Jeff  
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"Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.”
-- George R.R. Martin
Trivia of the Week: When the Oxford English Dictionary was first being compiled, contributors would submit words and their definitions to a committee that would approve their inclusion in the dictionary. To the committee's great surprise, they discovered that a single man was responsible for contributing more than 10,000 individual definitions for the project. To their further surprise, that man - Dr. W.C. Minor - was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane during the time he worked on the dictionary project. Simon Winchester wrote a fantastic account of the story in his book The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary: ($14.99 from Amazon.Com).
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SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
"Suspension of disbelief," a phrase coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early Nineteenth Century, is a very technical-sounding term for a very simple concept that fiction writers need from their audiences. In short, it can be defined as the ability of the audience to choose to ignore the part of their brain that knows what they're reading isn't actually real. As discerning, intelligent beings, we can watch a horror movie about a psychopath chasing a co-ed through an abandoned school hallway and know that it's not actually a real psychopath chasing a real co-ed. We know that when the hero's partner or love interest dies, that person isn't really actually dead. It's fiction. We know these situations and events aren't real.
So why do some fictional stories affect us so much?
That's where suspension of disbelief comes in. When we open the first few pages of a book or set foot in a movie theater or watch the curtain rise on a theater production, we as an audience choose to turn off our skepticism about what's actually real, and choose to immerse ourselves in the fictional world that's being created in front of us. Whether we're talking about a fictional world of superheroes and spaceships, or a world much more similar to our own, audiences agree to go on a journey with the characters and follow their lives as if they are real.
When it doesn't work, it's obvious. That's when we laugh at the ridiculousness of a situation, or start rolling our eyes or scoffing at the implausibility of what's being presented. When audiences jeer at the screen during an action movie when the protagonist has been shot ten times, run over by a car, beat up by countless henchman, and keeps on coming... that's the audience's way of saying, "Hey, that's too much. This is so unbelievable, I don't buy into it anymore." But when it does work... that's when you see a fictional story and fictional characters truly affect someone. That's when people cheer at Ross and Rachel finally getting together, or cry when Bambi's mother dies, or gasp in shock when we realize Bruce Willis was actually dead the whole time. We, as audience members, suspended our disbelief and - because of that - were drawn into the story to a point where we emotionally connected with those situations and characters as if they were people we knew or situations we've lived through.
There is some debate about whether the act of suspending one's disbelief is the responsibility of the storyteller or the audience. I would humbly propose that it's actually both; it's the storyteller's responsibility to tell a story that is believable, honest, and capable of being believed... and it's the audience's responsibility to actually agree to suspend their disbelief and experience a fictional story as if it were actually possible. The storyteller may ruin the audience's ability to do that with poor craft, and the audience may never give the storyteller a chance with poor attitude, but ultimately both artist and audience play a part in the balance required to suspend disbelief and immerse an audience in the fictional world of a story.
In my experience, there are two things necessary in order for an audience to successfully suspend their disbelief and enter the world of a story:
1. Consistency of the established rules. No matter how outrageous or outlandish your story, you absolutely must adhere to the rules you've established for your story and your characters. If Superman is invulnerable except in the presence of Kryptonite, you can't have a scene where he's beaten up by Lex Luthor's bodyguards, or shot and critically wounded with a regular gun without tearing the audience out of the story and ruining their suspension of disbelief. Similarly, if you've set up that there's only one person in the whole world who can develop a cure for the protagonist's rare disease, you can't have another doctor suddenly show up with a cure because you've undertaken this story by setting the audience's expectations that no one else is able to come up with a cure for that disease. An audience will accept a great many things... but breaking your own rules that you've established is one of the ones the probably won't.
2. Honesty of the human experience. Give your audiences something to connect with on an emotional level. Star Wars, as a story, is successful because it may involve alien worlds and spacecraft and use of The Force... but it's ultimately a story about a boy struggling to find his place in the world/universe. I Know What You Did Last Summer was successful because audiences identified with (and were terrified by) the idea that someone could come back and get revenge for a horrible accident/mistake that happened years ago. And people bought into a crazy concept like The Matrix because they connected with the underlying idea that so many of us are disconnected from our mundane daily lives and somehow wish we were destined for something greater than a generic existence.
As audience members, our enjoyment of a fictional story is firmly based on our ability to suspend our disbelief and accept the fact that impossible and improbable things are indeed possible and probable in the fictional worlds we experience. But in order for that to happen, we as authors must not abuse that trust by throwing situations at them that are too improbable or too inconsistent with the rules we've established for them. If you find that you're audience is disconnecting from your work and not finding that connected-ness that you're hoping for, take a look at your work and see if perhaps you're being completely consistent in your application of the rules of your fictional world, and if you're connecting with the audience on an emotional level. If you can do both of those things, audiences will forgive a great many other sins. 
Until next time,
-- Jeff
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For Authors: March 20, 2013 Issue [#5583]
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