Suspension of Disbelief?

Basically, it's the willingness of the audience to accept something as true that they know is false to continue with the story. For instance, in Star Wars, it is somewhat unbelievable that every single stormtrooper fails to hit Luke and Leia in the chasm. But you accept the small detail, suspend your disbelief, so you can enjoy the meat of the movie.

Suspension of belief, as I understand it, is what makes most fiction work. If the reader wasn't willing to suspend their belief, or put aside their ideas about how the world really operates, most fiction would never make it.

Examples, I guess would be, willingness to believe vampires exist for Dracula or Interview with the Vampire to work.

Willingness to believe Man can create life from dead bodies is what made Frankenstein work.

Willingness to except the existence of hobbits and magic is what made Lord of the Rings work.

Some science fiction requires the reader to believe that many things will be possible in the future.

Horror is based on believing in bogie men and things that go bump in the night.

It's when the reader doesn't think "For pity's sake, this type of person would never do that!", "Um, pretty sure that's physically impossible...", or "That makes no damn sense, I give up on this stupid book."

In order to persuade someone to live in your world, they have to willingly suspend their normal levels of disbelief. Most people do that automatically when they sit down to read a book or watch a movie--they are willing to remove themselves from their reality and enter yours for the purpose of entertainment. This is the state a writer wants to KEEP them in throughout the story.

What that means for your writing is that you can't jar them from that--with an anachronism or a stupid grammatical error. Your details have to be spot on; an acute reader will spot these jarring notes and think about them--which reinstates their normal levels of disbelief and so you have to suck them back in.

It would be like reading a fantasy novel set in a medieval country and having a character talk about the Yankees--thus removing the reader from your world and making it more difficult to bring them back in.

I know some people who can't do this, and that's why they can never read fiction or see a movie.

Even for those who like fiction, the writers still need to do their darnest to keep the readers in the story, to create that "fictive dream" so they can't get out and shatter that suspension of disbelief -- at least not enough to make them go "huh?"

Have you ever read a book that, despite its content, you momentarily forgot you were reading a book and were completely involved in the story? That's suspension of disbelief- the moment where you're entirely consumed into the novel/movie/film/etc and, no matter what the story is about, you're able to forget that it's not real.

I think it's also backing up the unbelievable with enough mundane normal stuff that it hits closer to home:
In Frankenstein, the good Dr. uses the latest technology--electricity which has been proven by galvanic response to ennervate dead tissue--the 'make the frog's leg jerk' and taking it a step farther into revitalizing about 300lbs of dead coldcuts.

Suspension of belief also comes in thinking the monster would learn such a nicety of vocabulary and mental acuity just by listening and reading from a couple of lost books--all of which does him no good because his appearance belies his facility of language and his urge to be just like everyone else.

I see this in a more limited form. I have problems with certain fantasy and science fiction because I won't accept some of the premises. I agree that you have to agree that Hobbits or Narnians exist, but once done their world should operate on a set of predicatble rules just as ours does.

John Gardner speaks best of the Fictive Dream, in which the reader willingly suspends disbelief to participate in the dream. Here's how he puts it:

We may observe, first, that if the effect of the dream is to be powerful, the dream must be vivid and continuous —vivid because if we are not quite clear about what it is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgments must be confused, dissipated, or blocked; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion. There may be exceptions to this general rule, but insofar as the general rule is persuasive it suggests that one of the chief mistakes a writer can make is to allow or force the reader’s mind to be distracted, even momentarily, from the fictional dream.

The dream runs like a movie in the reader’s mind. If the writer distracts the reader —breaks the film, if you will— by some slip of technique or egoistic intrusion he allows or forces the reader to stop thinking about the story (stop “seeing” the story) and think about something else.

He has two books on writing, both of which are good.

Remember that the reader is your willing collaborator in the suspension of disbelief.

It's the suspension of disbelief that allows you to believe that the guy speaking English in iambic pentameter is really the Prince of Denmark, and that those pieces of painted canvas are the walls of Elsinore castle.

James D. Macdonald said:

It's the suspension of disbelief that allows you to believe that the guy speaking English in iambic pentameter is really the Prince of Denmark,

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What???????? You mean . . . . all this time . . . ??????

caw

Think of it like this: suspension of disbelief is the willing to accept the reality of the fantasy of the story.

Now, I'm seeing both "suspension of disbelief" and "suspension of belief." Which is it?

Think of it like this: don't think about it at all - that's the point!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is to blame. Here's where the phrase first showed up in his Biographia Literaria in 1817:

In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

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It's suspension of disbelief. You, as a theatre-goer, or reader, agree to put aside your skepticism and buy into the story as if it were real. But there is a limit to how far an audience is willing to go, and the writer has to be aware of it. It's a rule of thumb in science fiction, for instance, that you are allowed one scientifically impossible development, such as faster-than-light travel, and that's it. If you keep pulling in one improbable technology after another, it becomes a parody. Of course, if you are doing a parody, then it's OK.

In humour, for instance, the audience will suspend disbelief more willingly and longer than in a serious story. The goal of the humourous story is primarily to make us laugh, so we will go along with improbably pairings, absurd coincidences, and even physical impossibilities quite willingly. In historical fiction it would be death. Similarly, in thrillers we will pretend we believe that a human being can escape explosions, leap from moving vehicles, and crash through windshields and immediately turn to the next bit of fighting/running/loving. There is a very tough fellow who teaches martial arts and survival skills and is a consultant to the makers of numerous thriller movies and writers of thriller novels who only watches chick flicks. He just can't stand watching the heroes of thrillers walk away from these things unscathed. He knows how impossible it is and it jerks him right out of the story.

It's not really about suspending your disbelief in magic, interstellar space travel, aliens, vampires, elves, etc. It's about whether the story fits your philosophies or understanding of the basic laws of the universe, human nature, or your world view.

For instance, most of us know that there is no free lunch, people are not basically good, and that nothing worth doing is easy. So in Star Trek, we have to suspend our disbelief in 1) a peaceful humankind (yet they still have non violent conflict and fight aliens?), 2) an economy without any monetary system, 3) transporter technology which makes everything too easy. So you have to suspend your disbelief about such things if you are to enjoy the show.

So why would a disbelief in magic not require that you suspend your disbelief when you read Tolkien? Because you know that you are reading a fantasy novel. So there are certain things you will accept for the sake of the story, even though you don't believe them. But there are even more basic things that you will not accept if the author gets them wrong.

It's part of the contract with your reader. I will give you a big bang in the end if you believe my little lies.

TrickyFiction said:

Now, I'm seeing both "suspension of disbelief" and "suspension of belief." Which is it?

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Suspension of disbelief, though the concept is somewhat the same, I suppose. Think of suspension as something physical- the ability to hold your disbelief off or away for a period of time. In essence, the story makes you want to suspend any thought of "This isn't believable in the least!" until the story's purpose is served.

IMO, suspension of disbelief comes easily when it's about things, but is hard to maintain when characters act in unbelievable ways. (Neat how I defined the problem in a way that automatically supports my opinion, isn't it?)

In other words, readers can easily accept the existence of elves and unicorns, but have a hard time swallowing a loving mother who doesn't bother to ask her daughter where she goes at night.

I hated the movie, Transformers, because the MC was an obnoxious BS'er. But the one moment when my suspension of disbelief came crashing down was when the giant robots are in his back yard, and he spouts some Sgt. Bilko BS at his father to keep him from coming outside.

The problem? It's his father, for chrissakes! His father who's heard the kid's BS for years, and somehow accepts it when the kid is clearly trying to hide something. A real father would say, "Cut the crap! What are you hiding?"

The existence of the giant, transforming robots didn't bother me in the least...

wayndom said:

IMO, suspension of disbelief comes easily when it's about things, but is hard to maintain when characters act in unbelievable ways. (Neat how I defined the problem in a way that automatically supports my opinion, isn't it?)

In other words, readers can easily accept the existence of elves and unicorns, but have a hard time swallowing a loving mother who doesn't bother to ask her daughter where she goes at night.

I hated the movie, Transformers, because the MC was an obnoxious BS'er. But the one moment when my suspension of disbelief came crashing down was when the giant robots are in his back yard, and he spouts some Sgt. Bilko BS at his father to keep him from coming outside.

The problem? It's his father, for chrissakes! His father who's heard the kid's BS for years, and somehow accepts it when the kid is clearly trying to hide something. A real father would say, "Cut the crap! What are you hiding?"

The existence of the giant, transforming robots didn't bother me in the least...

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I think this is a good study of how people react to new things as opposed to things we're familiar with.

UNicorns, dragons, etc- they're all merely a concept. People are aware of this. Therefore, we're much more likely to be accepting when these concepts are brought to us in new ways (i.e. a vampire who loves to sunbathe, or a vegetarian werewolf). Because we know they're fake, we're willing to say, "Sure, I'll play along for the sake of this story".

People on the other hand are very different. As people who have been surrounded by people from the moment we were born until the day we die, people are experts at realizing personality trends. This goes for situations as well. I don't know HOW many novels I've read and thought, "This person would never do that," or, "There's no way that could happen." Reality is harder to write about than fantasy- in fantasy, anything goes, and most people are aware of that. Thus, this is why we're more inclined to allow our disbelief to be suspended when we're merely dealing with Merlin getting a ride home from a fierce dragon than we are of Billy the Terrible Tot sharing his toy for no or little apparent reason with the kid he's picked on for years .