How to Break the Willing Suspension of Disbelief
The willing suspension of disbelief, our bread and butter, the thing that keeps us all afloat, is a concept in literature. It’s what allows fiction writers to sell stories about elves, dwarves, and fantasy lands to people. Coined by the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early 19th century, this term refers to the audience’s acceptance of implausible or fantastical elements in a work of fiction. In other words, it is the temporary setting aside of one’s skepticism or critical faculties to fully engage with and enjoy a fictional narrative. This is imperative, Timmy. If I’ve been giving you tools and materials with which to build your narrative, this is the basic, unbreakable natural law upon which the building process of a narrative is constructed. Without it, we are nothing. Without the readers or audience willingly agreeing to the contract, we’re just a bunch of petty clowns doing silly things for an empty auditorium.
When individuals willingly suspend disbelief, they allow themselves to immerse in the fictional world, accepting unreal or unlikely events, characters, or premises for the sake of the narrative experience. It’s part of the basic contract between the audience and the authors of any stripe or kind, no matter where those authors hail from, and the contract is everything. Breaking any part, any clause of the contract for no good reason is the breaking of the entire contract, which terminates the partnership between author and reader. When that happens, you lose everything as an author and writer, Timmy.
So, without hyperbole nor exaggeration, keeping the willing suspension of disbelief is crucial. And how do you maintain the willing suspension of disbelief? I think a better question is to ask how it is usually broken.
Inconsistency: The Saboteur of the Narrative
The first culprit is inconsistency. A character’s hair color is often depicted as brown, grey, or yellow, and it’s never clear which color is right. This might be acceptable for a story with a shape-shifter , but when dealing with a peasant drama in the middle of medieval Russia, for example, a character changing hair colors becomes implausible and disrupts consistency. The downside of this kind of writing mistake is that it takes the reader out of the story by making them pause and think. Characters are typically described once, with only relevant changes to clothing or other characteristics as needed in their journey, when two characters are described having a discussion in the middle of the story you don´t need to have the characters describe every time they speak, you just know how they look and only what actions they make are described. The importance here is that it allows the reader to seamlessly continue reading. If you have to stop to reimagine a character you’ve already pictured in your head, the chances of breaking away from the tale are high.
Minor inconsistencies can be bothersome, but the larger ones are the real danger. Plot inconsistencies, narrative breaks, abandoned plot threads, characters acting out of character, and setting breaches.
Plot inconsistencies are my personal devil, especially because I can’t stop myself from noticing them. Events that occur solely because the plot required them, occurrences out of nowhere – they irk me endlessly, secondary plots become the main one for no reason or motive, relevance of events changing just because and not because of characters actions. A half-competent author should be able to spot these things and rectify them before shipping a final product.
Narrative breaks occur when the story takes an unexpected turn. This is problematic for several reasons, chief among them being that it throws the reader for a loop and provides an opening for them to exit the story because they now have to rethink the entire narrative. Don’t mistake this for a plot twist, Timmy; they are different. The latter is built up through the story, with clues and foreshadowing, creating a surprise that is welcomed. Narrative breaks, on the other hand, come out of left field, leaving everyone lost and stunned.
Abandoned plot threads aren’t necessarily bad, and they shouldn’t be confused with red herrings. In serial stories, something might be introduced or built up and then abandoned and forgotten. While this can happen, it has the potential to break the magic of the story. Red herrings, however, are a narrative tool that we’ll discuss another time.
Characters acting out of character is part of the consistency issue, but it deserves its own spotlight due to the paramount importance of characters. If you present a character as a coward and then suddenly have them agreeing with every suicidal charge presented by reckless characters during a battle, you’re doing it wrong. Character traits and personalities should be intricately woven into the story, resisting the plot or, better put, resisting other characters depending on their wants and needs – all given personality through your characters’ personalities. I’ll delve into this in detail another time, but suffice to say, if you have a brave soldier barring something truly life-changing happening, that soldier should remain brave and true to themselves.
Setting breach is my favorite but also quite uncommon, at least in my experience as a reader. It is my favourite because it can have hilarious consequences. It’s simply the breaking of the established setting. For example, a medieval setting with a medieval world, yet there’s a librarian with a holographic display for no apparent reason other than it’s cool? That’s a setting breach, a minor one at that. It can be irksome and annoying, but it is, as far as I am concern, a fairly lowrisk of causing you to lose readers. However, We’ll explore Deus Ex Machina later, trust me.
These are just the larger categories; there’s much more, such as inserting inappropriate current-day views unrelated to the story, injecting pop culture references that become dated quickly. Plenty can be done to break the willing suspension of disbelief.
Then there’s the passive effect of creep – power creep and spectacle creep. Things can grow out of control so subtly that you hardly notice. Especially with franchises and corporations at the helm, these elements can spiral out of control, Timmy. There’s a false sense that each iteration should be grander than the last, and to an extent, they’re right, just not in that way. Power creep is when the power of characters and villains grows out of control until it becomes absurd, and spectacle creep is similar but with shiny objects. Lose control of these two forces, and you don’t have a story anymore; you have a vehicle for two monsters.
This is problematic for several reasons, chief among them being that every reader has a tolerance limit for bullshit, it is not the same in everyone, and once reached you lose that reader. The greater the creep in your story the more breaking people will reach their breaking point and lose interest in your work. This has nothing to do with organic growth, wish happens naturally in a story, this happens when things go out of whack, because when you reach the point of silliness you force your readers to rethink the entire narrative.
The next iteration should always embody the other force of writing: change. There’s a limit to how much things can grow. If you let something spiral out of control, you’ve broken the willing suspension of disbelief and, therefore, the contract we are all beholden to. But building a story upon another through change, that is not only the ideal but the way things should realistically be.
So, to recap, the willing suspension of disbelief is our bread and butter, the very force that allows every tool and foundation in fiction writing to exist. Breaking it is one of the things that renders the entire contract void. Throughout the previous lesson, we explored several ways it can be broken. Keep in mind, this is just a general overview; much you will have to learn by doing.
Got it, Timmy? Yeah? Well then,
Until next time.
