Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

Six impossible things before breakfast

Like the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, I can believe all sorts of things.
I believe the earth is round, despite being able to see perfectly well that it’s flat.
I believe that one day I’ll be able to write a blurb without taking all day over it.
I’m willing to believe in the existence of telekinesis and photons and love at first sight, even though they all sound equally unlikely.

Within the pages of a book, I’ll believe—temporarily—in things that are even more far-fetched.

I’ll believe in vampires and werewolves and unfeasibly talented professional thieves. I’ll believe in the existence of One True Soulmates.
I’ll believe in a Dark Lord who’s stupid enough to put all his power into one ring that a hobbit can manage to destroy.
I’ll believe in a wizarding school where the pupils never have any normal lessons (they’ll leave school illiterate, I’m telling you).
I’ll believe in houses that can hop around on a chicken’s leg, or fly, or be possessed.

Really, you know, I’m quite easy to convince.

But that’s the key word: convince. I’ll believe in any of these things—all readers do it, and it’s called the willing suspension of disbelief—but the author has to make me believe in them.

Often, on authors’ internet forums or in real life writers’ groups, I’ve read or heard a story line or a character I didn’t believe. I’ve seen the writers challenged, and all too often the response has been either, “This is based on a real-life event so you should believe it” or, “Well, people do do things that don’t have a good reason”.

It is undoubtedly true that incredible things do happen in real life. And people do sometimes act in the most bizarre, out-of-character ways. And if these things are presented in a newspaper article, or in an autobiography, my default setting is to believe them, however unlikely they seem.

But in fiction, although I’m willing to believe what you tell me, at the same time I know it’s not true, so it’s not enough to just tell me this could happen. You have to seduce me into believing it. Not in general—it won’t help to add a footnote citing a real life incident where a skilled surgeon bungled an operation or a nuclear physicist gave his top-secret papers to his daughter’s pre-school class to use for finger-painting—but in the world of the story.

Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings, grounds the more unlikely aspects of his plot in the down-to-earth realism of The Shire. He draws the reader in with a sense of danger and unrest, so that once you get to the explanation of the One Ring, you’re willing to believe whatever he tells you. Then he surrounds the explanation with concrete details—the Ring doesn’t get hot in the fire, it feels unnaturally heavy in Frodo’s hand—and he makes Gandalf the spokesman for the explanation, so it comes weighted with authority.

J.K. Rowling, in the Harry Potter books, piles on so much excitement—and so many wonderfully-drawn details of the wizard world—that you don’t get time to stop and think, “Hang on, how would that work?”

In Gone With the Wind, the reader, like Scarlett, might be surprised when Melanie appears lugging Charles’ sword, ready to kill the Yankee soldier Scarlett has just shot, but the reader doesn’t feel that this is a character violation. Margaret Mitchell has already given us enough hints of the steel in Melanie’s character for this to be a believable, though unanticipated, event.

There are as many ways to do this as there are writers. Some writers create their worlds with such strong internal logic that the reader can see how, within those worlds, the most unlikely things make sense. Some writers distract the readers with lots of exciting detail surrounding one vital bit of handwavium. Some writers have other characters comment on one character’s behaviour:

“I can’t believe she’d do that.”
“Oh, I can. Don’t you remember how when we were children…”

thus giving a backdated explanation for an unlikely action.

It really doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you remember it needs to be done. And, thankfully, it’s not too hard! It’s not like crafting the perfect hook, when you’re trying to grab the attention of someone who doesn’t necessarily want to be grabbed. If someone is reading your book, it’s because they want you to convince them. They’re already suspending their belief. All you have to do is keep it there.