Quick Note on Suspension of Disbelief

While there are some occasions where we are indeed forced to watch or read some fictional thing, most of the time, when we pick up a book or sit down to a movie, we are willingly prepared to engage with it.

We are willing to "suspend disbelief" that what we are about to encounter is not real, and is in fact all made up of very entertaining lies.

A lot of authors think that to achieve this, they must layer lie upon lie, details upon detail, in a vain attempt to rationally explain every bit of the physical reality in which their story takes place.

This is a fallacy

Suspension of Disbelief relies upon the 'just enough' principle. You must make your world just believable enough that a reader does not stop and ask the question that should make you shudder: "Wait, how is that possible?"

Once this question is asked, problem after problem will ensue. But the problem is not with everything that follows after, but with what caused the question to be asked.

Imagine you are gliding above the surface of a piranha infested river. You have a long way to go and only a little bit of fuel. To arrive at your destination safely, you have to use just enough power to keep yourself out of the water. But if you even dip your toe in, you are likely to be swarmed and killed by hungry little fishes.

That's the trick to suspension of disbelief, getting ever so close to the river, yet never getting wet. But if you try and fly too high, you will run out of narrative fuel and crash and burn, Icarus reborn.

This is where beta readers are uber-helpful. Not with their questions about how this could possibly do that, but to tell you where in your story you first got wet. Fix that, and you'll likely get much further down the river.