The Suspension of Disbelief

Given all the stuff I’ve written in previous blogs about how language and narrative works, here is an interesting question: how does the author use the text to convince us to suspend our disbelief? After all, one of the most important things about any story is that we should believe that it is true, at least while we are reading it and enjoying it.

This is not such an easy question. Some stories we find completely unbelievable and yet what they ask of us in terms of stretching our belief is much less than some other stories whose use of, say, space aliens or magic is completely preposterous. So there must be some trick to it, right?

Well, let’s consider first that there is an interesting tension at the heart of most fiction, certainly in the western tradition. It consists of a hero with whom we identify being lifted out of his/her former normal life and thrust into some unusual and different situation, which is set out as a trial, adventure etc. It works in our heads as readers because the hero seems to be like us; indeed we are often invited by the tricks of the author to get so far into the head of the hero that we imagine ourselves as them or, at least, as being in their situation. The trial/adventure is something that we would never have faced. It is first glimpsed and then at some point the hero is thrust into, accepts that he/she must rise to the challenge and, subsequently, many episodes down the road, arises triumphant.

Now the point here is that the challenge is supposed to be ‘alien’. At the point that we glimpse or introduce the challenge, the author can get away with just about anything. Why? Because the reader is expecting the challenge to be alien and different to the hero’s normal world.

However, I should point out that this is a one-time opportunity for the author to introduce the abnormal and otherwise unbelievable elements that drive the premise of the story. Any actions by the hero that seem illogical or changes in the physics of the world we’re sharing have to happen at this point. That doesn’t mean that other unusual events don’t happen in the rest of the book, but they have to flow from that one moment of reality disconnect. For example, Harry can have a wand duel with Voldermort at the end of the book, but only because we knew the extraordinary world was filled with magic right from the moment we first glimpsed the challenge he was facing back in about Chapter Two. If I wrote the same ending in, say, a crime novel, it just wouldn’t work.

So what’s my conclusion? My conclusion is that the way you make fiction real is to make everything but the presentation of the adventure real. You take real people from a real background, you put them in an unreal situation to test them out. They succeed or fail by bringing their real strengths and weaknesses to the task. That’s fiction.