Suspend Disbelief Abuse (advice for all fiction writers)

We all know that all fiction authors, to some degree, want their readers to "suspend disbelief". So they can temporarily allow themselves to believe something that isn't true and enjoy the work of fiction. But something that can poison good writing is when the author abuses the suspension of disbelief. I am of the opinion that readers should only be expected to suspend disbelief once per story. Perhaps twice. But beyond that... abuse creeps in.

For example...
"What's your book about?"
"Aliens invade Earth."
"I can suspend my disbelief for that."
"The Aliens are from the moon."
"But we know for a fact that the moon is lifeless. Perhaps, the aliens live underground?"
"And the government is collaborating with the aliens."
"What?!? That is VERY unlikely..."
"And not just our government, but ALL the governments of the world."
"Really?"
"And the aliens are wizards!..."
"I'm out."
"...who travel through time!"

Has anyone here ever been enjoying a book right up until the author abused your suspended disbelief?

 

This is a Blake Snyder concept in Save the Cat! He refers to it as "Double Mumbo Jumbo."

I don't really have an opinion on it because it depends largely on what we can throw into the realm of "one piece of magic."

And obviously Mr. Snyder is talking about movies, but I had the book right next to me, and I had just read this portion, so I figured I'd chime in.

 

If we're talking about a very basic "My First Short Story" writing level, then I'd say yes, don't push too much on the reader.
That being said, once you're more comfortable, suspension of disbelief becomes less of a set limit and more of an expanding one. It's a gauge; the more the reader identifies or enjoys your work, the more they're willing to give. Conversely, you can destroy the sense of disbelief for laughs. Not to put too much weight behind Sharknado, but it worked.

 

I got really drunk a few weeks back and vowed to watch all the movies in sequential order. Luckily I sobered up literally and metaphorically.

 

Good question.
Star Wars had only two required suspensions... You are witnessing events that happened a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away. AND There is a magical force some people in that galaxy are able to use. The little things like light-sabers, blasters, telekinesis, and droids come bundled with one or both of those two suspensions.
Harry Potter, as another example, has only one required suspension... that there is a secret world of magic. All the monsters, spells, wands, wizards, etc... are bundled under that one broad suspension.
Now if robots from Mars invaded Hogwarts...

 

I think it depends on the type and setting of the story.

If it's fantasy or science fiction, set in a made-up world that's very different from ours, then it's natural that more suspension of disbelief would be required, probably multiple times. That's just the nature of those types of story.

If, however, it's a realistic type of story, such as crime or historical fiction, set in the real world that we live in, then yes - too much suspension of disbelief (whether it be a case of being asked to suspend disbelief too many times or just one really big obviously ludicrous one) would probably be a turnoff. It all depends on the setting and context of the story.

 

I think part of the trouble you might run into is trying to classify what counts as one and what counts as several suspensions. In your original example you list all the things the aliens can do separately, but you could say about them equally 'there is a secret magic race of aliens' and 'the aliens are joined in a conspiracy with earth's governments'. If time travel has to be a third suspension of disbelief for the alien story it would have to be for Harry Potter too. And if you're including that then why not separate out other points?

I'm not disagreeing that sometimes people try and do too much to the point where it just gets stupid - horror films are what comes to mind for me, where a lot of characters make decision after decision to go to the the scary place and stay with the scary person and ignore all the scary stuff.

But I think to a point it does just depend on people's personal opinion. For me, if the universe of the book is internally consistent and well written I don't mind it. I'm reading for escapism and a good story. Personally I think the only time it really annoys me is as @hirundine said, when the story is supposed to be set in a realistic representation of the very world we know, in which case it can be jarring. I do understand though that others don't necessarily feel this way.

 

Like any other rigid 'rule' of writing, sticking to only one suspension of disbelief is not something any writer needs to do. However, the concept of requiring 'too many' suspensions of disbelief is worth considering, no matter what kind of fiction you write.

Requiring suspension of disbelief can result in every fantasy concept there ever was slapped into a story with a trowel—just because you can. Or it can result in something as simple as creating a current, real-life airline that only takes 30 minutes to fly between New York and Los Angeles. Do this kind of thing too often and the reader will certainly notice. Whether they continue to enjoy reading your story is down to how you handle it, and, of course, their own reading preferences.

The fewer suspensions of disbelief you require, the more likely the reader is to a) not notice them at all, or b) be inclined to 'believe' your story on an emotional level. If you're conscious of creating them, and use them to their best effect, you should be okay.

 

This isn't just a problem in sci-fi/fantasy/speculative/whatever. Stories set in the 'real world' suffer from the same problem, mostly when you ask the reader to accept too many coincidences. I know we had a recent discussion about coincidences on the forum, so I won't rehash it. But as @jannert said, I think all of us need to bear this in mind when writing.

Of course, the other option is to embrace the ludicrous happenings in your novel and make it part of the magic, like Douglas Adams did in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (of five).

Truth.

 

I would say that Star Wars requires multiple suspensions of disbelief, from the overall concept to the minutiae of the plot. But it is essentially a fantasy about space wizards who go on a hero's journey to destroy a mcguffin and on that level it works.

Again, Harry Potter requires multiple suspensions of disbelief (the world is certainly inconsistent), but it is essentially a fantasy about earth wizards who go on a hero's journey to destroy a mcguffin and on that level it works.

War of the Worlds is more grounded (hard-ish) sci-fi, involving alien invaders from Mars, and I can also manage that suspension of disbelief given the time it was written. However, if a modern novel involved Martians, I would assume the writer is a moron and put the book down.

The more grounded and realistic a piece is, the harder suspension of disbelief becomes. I can accept space wizards jumping around space destroying giant spaceballs with lasers, but I cannot accept even the slightest suspension of disbelief in a gritty, grounded drama because any plot-hole, contrivance or deus ex machina sticks out like a sore thumb.

 

Yes, absolutely. Coincidences are a big problem in some books. Yes, coincidences do happen, but if there are too many, they start to make your story unbelievable, even if it's set in a 'real' setting. They usually get brought in to solve problems, or to make a plot easier to manipulate. I'd beware of more than one coincidence in any story, and that one better come near the beginning.

I've always bought into the notion that a coincidence is a fine way to begin a story, but a very bad way to end one! I think readers instinctively know this. It's not so much the appearance of the coincidence at the end, it's what the coincidence does to the plot. If it provides a smile, a twist, or something to think about as the story draws to a close, fair enough. But if it's used to solve the story's central problem? ...or even some of the secondary ones? Probably best avoided.

Nobody will turn a hair if a character runs into an old friend in a place they didn't expect them to be, and their unlooked-for meeting sets the story in motion. But readers will certainly complain if running into an old friend in an unexpected place solves all the character's story problems, and everybody waltzes happily off into the sunset—The End.

 

Yup, a book called Defenders, by one Will McIntosh. Near term SF, about 2050 or so? Basically, the Earth is invaded by telepathic aliens who have an exactly 8km range of being able to read human thoughts. Okay, it's pushing it, but I'll go along. So humanity is losing badly because if you so much as think "I'll go left to take out that machine gun nest" the aliens are going to know what you're up to. However, the humans manage to build a strategic bunker under the White House, in a shaft that is just over 8km deep. Without the aliens getting either telepathic word of it, or noticing 8 km of dirt coming out of the hole. But that lets humanity make a plan to secretly bioengineer a whole new species of people who are 3meters tall, have three legs, and no serotonin, because that's what makes telepathy possible because....

You're losing me here.

Anyway, the Defenders were created on some rock in the middle of the Pacific that was safely out of range of the aliens, and they managed to win the war and capture all of the aliens.

Then they demanded that they be given Australia, and all the aliens to serve as their slaves. Did I mention that not having serotonin makes you not only telepathically unreadable, but also devoid of emotion or care?

So I'm done, but I paid money for the book, and I keep going. First thing they do is destroy every building in Australia and recreate it, as an exact replica, to their scale (average height 3 meters, not somewhat under two). They use their alien slaves to accomplish all of this, but then get bored and demand that humanity surrender to them, and set up a tyranny where the aliens are slaves, the humans are slaves, everyone is slaves, so the humans team up with the formerly evil aliens to try and defeat their once Defenders and there was supposed to be a second book but just no...

The thing is, if the author had taken out a few very gory scenes, and, IIRC, one fairly explicit sexual episode, it might have made a decent YA book. The flaw in it are the sort of things that kids (I'm thinking tweens to early teens, not The Hunger Games crowd) really enjoy, but I just couldn't take all the handwaving nonsense.

 

I think this advice is completely useless honestly. Maybe it works for Hollywood-style movies where you want to make them really easy to market, like "this is a vampire movie" and "this is a ghost movie", but as someone already pointed out, it's very hard and subjective to count the number of suspensions of disbelief in any serious way past that. For example in Star Wars every planet is either all snow or forest or whatever, which is ridiculous if you know the slightest bit about astrophysics. You could say this throw-away suspension of disbelief is a flaw though. On the contrary I think it adds to the fairy tale appeal of the movies and is very visually pleasing. I mean imagine how wrong it would feel if Star Wars suddenly had realistic planets ...

I think the only real rule is that the more imaginative you are, the harder it is to write well. In fact I'm pretty sure even tongue-in-cheek dialogue in the first post could become a good story if you actually started from the beginning and didn't dump it all out of nowhere like that. Everyone has probably heard the story about how the writer Jim Butcher, after claiming good writing was more important than the ideas, was challenged to write a fantasy series combining the Roman Empire and Pokémon. Since then it's turned into the highly successful Codex Alera series. Some people, of course, are just really down-to-earth and don't like their stories to have too many wild ideas. That's fine too, but they don't have to ruin the fun for the rest of us.

 

I've always heard the phrase as willing suspension of disbelief. The idea is that it is a mindset that one has to apply to read any fiction, realistic or fantastic.

 

I don't agree with the advice, either, and one reason it is not useful is that the number of suspensions required by a work can apparently be whatever you want it to be, provided you adjust your definition (as demonstrated above). Star Wars, for example, requires multiple suspensions, including that someone would build a Death Star with an exhaust port that could be used to easily destroy (which they finally got around to retconning 40 years later), behavior of spacecraft out of atmosphere, the inability of highly trained storm troopers to hit anyone with a blaster, and so on. Sit down and watch it and there is a lot of stuff you have to agree to suspend disbelief to and go along with. It's fine.

 

A lot of this depends on the reader. If you're dealing with Hard Sci-Fi readers - they tend to have really high suspension of disbelief thresholds, one at most, and even then you have to make it convincing. (Which actually is really funny to me because in a lot of cases this is accomplished by dumping tons of level-9000 science detail to hide some big suspension of science at the core...my favorite being The Three-Body Problem, which spends so much time on orbital physics and subatomic particles that you forget it's about a FREAKING ALIEN INVASION). Coincidentally, this is why a lot of Hard SF type people (or people whose sci-fi reading friends are Hard SF people) dump on Star Wars for being "bad sci-fi" when really it's good space opera. If you're reading space operas or fantasies, you're not going to mind a lot of suspension of disbelief, because that's what you signed up for (Look up Michael Underwood's Geekomancy books to see this taken to it's logical extreme and still done well.)

I think the other thing is that if you're looking for massive suspension of disbelief, you still need to make it feel real - the reason the Geekomancy books work so well is that all the crazy stuff is enabled by a core magic system that's simple, elegant, and well extrapolated (If magic is defined as the extraction of emotional energy from objects, it's not a long leap to the point where you have a "Geekomancer" protagonist who carries a plastic lightsaber because she can turn it into a real one and evil "Cinemancers" pulling monsters out of classic films and throwing them at the protagonist).

 

You learn about foreshadowing in elementary school. It's one of the bread and butter elements of writing fiction.

Myself, I don't look at foreshadowing as telegraphing, but rather as etching out the dimensionality of your story so as to provide ample room for whatever miraculous occurrences you want to put.

Someone here made a good point in that you don't generally expect to find alien invaders suddenly being turned into vampires. I wonder if we can't come up with some sort of rule of thumb which states that the emotional, philosophical, or metaphorical breadth of one's stories scales with the number of distinctive elements requiring different suspension of beliefs.

A movie about a shark attack? Well, that sounds like suspense. A movie about sharks attacking from tornados? Well, now that's actually not just a suspense film, it's a campy suspense film- so good it's bad.

 

True, but some of these things go to tropes. The Achilles' heel is so accepted that it might require more suspension of disbelief if you said that your Death Star was actually invulnerable to anything significantly below its throw-weight.

This is very important. Similar to what I said above, suspension of disbelief ≠ factually accurate. Many people aren't really that well acquainted with orbital mechanics, so if you made a movie that reproduced the details of: back = up, down = forward, widdershins = charmed (I'm probably mixing up some science things I don't understand), you'd lose most of your audience. I was thrilled as hell to see fighter ships in Babylon 5 and the BSG reboot just flip around and waste the guys behind them, but that's going to strike a lot of people as just wrong, while banked turns in zero-g vacuum will conform to what they learned watching Black Sheep Squadron and Top Gun. Much more believable than a starship firing a cloud of ball-bearings at 20k kilometers.

Furthermore, I keep getting into arguments with people who believe that (one of) the solution(s) to overpopulation is offworld colonies. No matter how many times you point out that it costs around $10k/kg to move things into even the orbit of the ISS, let alone Mars or Proxima Centauri, most SF people believe that this will someday happen, even if they can't quite source the tech yet. I'm as happy to read those stories as anyone else, but the moment you have a story with more than eight or ten highly trained, fairly young, remarkably intelligent and accomplished people doing anything beyond about 40,000 feet, your audience is either suspending or engaging in disbelief. Which is cool; Andy Weir worried that Neil Tyson was going to hate The Martian because a Martian storm couldn't do that, seems Dr. Tyson was okay with it though.

Lifeforce

 

Yeah that's a whole other debate on what suspension of disbelief actually is. I write near-future and I've had some knock-down, drag-out, heated confronations with people who are really adamant that I'm asking way too much suspension of belief by not advancing tech farther than I do by 2035. In my case there's litreally nothing off about the science because certain things haven't changed and people are saying that it's "unrealistic" for me not to be more optimistic on everything from social policy to tech development. (I'm extrapolating stagnation in communications tech development on purpose, but even saying that gets me told that's impossible). The point being that what people believe or suspend disbelief for can be very different - in my case down to people refusing to suspend disbelief because I'm telling a vision of the future that's less rosy than theirs and closer to the way things are now. Personally as a reader I'll balk at character behavior that strikes me as inauthentic or deaths that I don't think should/would happen. Does that mean the author made a mistake or just that I have my threshold?

 

You're in good company. In the 20th or 30th or whatever (too lazy to look it up) anniversary edition of Neuromancer, Gibson's author's note mentions something along the lines of "How the hell could I not have forseen cell phones? 'Somebody find me a modem' indeed!"*

*heavily paraphrased

 

Haha. I have the exact opposite problem - literally - I get a ton of "WHY DO THEY STILL HAVE CELL PHONES?!"

(Answer One: Because I said they do. Answer Two: THE CORE OF THE WORLD BUILDING IS STAGNATION IN COMMUNICATIONS, AND IF I TELL YOU WHY I RUIN MY ACT 2 CLIMAX!)

 

I don't understand what people expect to happen in 35 years? What has happened since the early 80's? The rise of mass consumerism; a revolution in communications; regime change in several countries by the west; an increase in wealth inequality to levels that historically always results in revolution; the near collapse of western currencies; epidemic levels of private and state borrowing that have rendered fiat currencies moribund; a surge to the political right as we enter the twilight years of western empire. Hardly anything!

 

I didn't say things won't change. I said things wont change the way we think they will. There's a difference .

Newt Gingrich got laughed off a debate stage in 2012 for saying we should have a moon colony by 2050. If George McGovern had said in 1972 that we WOULDN'T have a functioning moon station up and running by 2000, people would have thought he was nuts. Development isn't a straight line, and projecting space program development at the height of the Apollo program assuming a straight-line would have been problematic. That's my issue with the way people extrapolate communications development. We don't know where it's going, it could go left, right, accelerate, or decelerate. The last few decades have been marked by acceleration of communications development and deceleration of infrastructure development and space exploration. In 30 years we will likely have a similar situation - crazy development on things we don't expect and stagnation on advancements we thought were inevitable.