[NOTE: I submit this blog post as a writer, a reader, and a regular, everyday person. When I use the word ‘we,’ I’m referring to the collective, as in all writers, all readers or all citizens.]
Image courtesy of Wikihow.com
In the real world, where what happens to us via laws and public policy really matters, we seem to be okay with the fact that those we hire (read: “elect”) to represent us in government, are not straight with us. Basically, they lie. Even as candidates for office they lie, either directly or by omission, about their backgrounds, their sources of income, their willingness to take a stand on an issue and stick to it once they get the job. And when confronted about such antics, they are only occasionally held accountable. How many times have you heard, “What’s the big deal? All politicians do it.” Maybe that’s so, but does that make it right? If we don’t like to be lied to, why do we keep electing the people who lie to us? What does that say about us as an electorate?
Many athletes and other celebrities fall into the same category (remember Roger Clemens’ infamous claim that a friend of his “misremembered” a conversation about steroid use?).
Then there’s the media, whose members ostensibly deal in non-fiction, a.k.a. the facts. They are just as bad, and perhaps worse, because they’re supposed to be better than that. From network anchors to prize-winning reporters, members of the press are known to fabricate or skew stories to either further a political agenda or stroke their own egos. Yet again, only in the most egregious cases are they reprimanded to any degree, and even then it’s often with nothing more than a symbolic slap on the wrist. As viewers we seem to take it in stride that we rarely hear both sides of a story on the “news.”’
Here’s the irony: in our fiction—which by its very definition is supposed to be made up (i.e. not true)—we expect believability, and we get ticked off when it doesn’t happen.
With the exception of unreliable narrators (which I’ll talk about in a future blog post), we insist that what happens in the fictional world we’re reading about (or seeing on screen) conforms to the rules of logic for that world. No lies are allowed unless we readers have been told (even if subtly) that they’re a possibility. In a mystery, for example, the sleuth can’t solve the crime … and then say, at the end of the story, “Sorry, I lied, I have no clue who did it.” If the sleuth did say such a thing, he or she would have to have a darn good reason for doing so (a lead-in to the next installment of the story, perhaps); it couldn’t be the end of the story per se. At the end of a romance, you certainly couldn’t have the heroine learn that her hero lied about loving her—not unless he wasn’t the true hero to begin with. Add to those a plethora of lesser story elements that writers simply can’t lie about without risking immediate rebuke on the part of readers.
If a writer fails to suspend the reader’s disbelief; that is, if a writer causes us, through sloppy writing, to stop, even for a millisecond, to think those four dreaded words, “I don’t believe that,” then we readers get hoppin’ mad. This anger may take many forms:
**We don’t finish the book
**We might even throw it across the room in disgust
** We don’t recommend the work to others
** We might even write a bad review online
** We subject the work to ridicule
Our readers insist that we labor under the highest standards of integrity—higher than our elected officials, higher than celebrities, even higher than the press!
That’s a tall order. So how do we do it? How do we keep our readers from thinking those four dreaded words? Here are six must-do’s for keeping your work believable:
Image courtesy of www.FairyHomesand Gardens.com
1) Make sure your reader understands the rules of your fictional universe as soon as possible, and once you’ve laid down those rules, stick to them. If woodland fairies and gnomes exist in your version of twenty-first century Manhattan, so be it – just don’t spring them on the reader without warning, or worse, without follow-up. I’ll accept the parameters of your world if you just present them to me and then operate within the rules you’ve laid out. To use the same scenario: if your gnomes can’t drive cars because they can’t reach the gas pedal, then don’t bring a car-driving gnome onstage later on without explanation.
2) Keep your characters’ skills and motivations consistent from start to finish. This is tough to do sometimes. Let’s say you’ve got a character named Lorelei who has been a strong-willed ball buster for much of the story. Don’t make Lorelei wimp out at the climax unless you’ve set the stage for her change in character. The same goes for having a wimp save the day by using some sort of super skill that no one ever knew about.
3) Unless you’ve set them up already (see rule #1), don’t use anachronisms. My historical novels The Art of Love and soon-to-be-published The Depth of Beauty are set in turn of the 20th century San Francisco. I can’t be using figures of speech (e.g. “that’s so cool!”) that weren’t used then; my readers are going to say, “I don’t believe that.” Unfortunately, many historical romance writers fail to follow this rule. Their characters speak in modern language style, and readers aren’t shy about pointing this problem out in their reviews. If a speech pattern or type of clothing or activity seems out of place, it probably is, and that can easily shatter a reader’s suspension of disbelief. Stay true to the period you’re writing about!
4) Watch for continuity errors, such as too much, or too little time passing between events, or characters’ ages or names not remaining consistent. No matter which time period your story is set in, you’ve got to make all the elements fit together properly. This is where having a good editor is crucial—and even then some details can slip through the cracks. One of my readers pointed out a discrepancy that was wrong if read one way, but accurate if interpreted another; I resolved to keep such ambiguities to a minimum in future work.
Image courtesy of www.GoogleImages.com
5) Use logic when plotting. This is a big one, and as a reader, it’s my number one reason for saying the dreaded “I don’t believe that.” I read a contemporary romance recently where the hero doesn’t get the call from the heroine he’s expecting, and throws the cell phone across the room. Later, his buddies tell him “Yes, she did call; you didn’t check your messages.” And they show him the messages on his phone. Okay, I didn’t throw the book across the room because it was on my Kindle, but I sure felt like it. How did the buddies know this (they hadn’t talked to the heroine), and not the hero? How did they get into his cell phone – did they know his password? Arrgh! Having cell phones makes misunderstandings and dangerous moments more difficult to pull off in contemporary novels; if you don’t want your protagonists to be in contact with one another, you have to show logically why they wouldn’t be. In my upcoming release The Lair, the hero’s phone has run out of juice, and he logically could have used his friend’s phone. So I had to set it up where the two men purposefully didn’t want any calls to the heroine on the buddy’s phone (he’s a local police officer and the calls could be used to accuse him of corruption). I also didn’t set it up as a life or death situation, because if that were the case, logically you’d say “The hell with propriety, I’m going to use that phone NOW!”
Image via ProfessionalFanGirls.com
One of the more egregious lapses in logic happens on the big screen. A lot. I just watched “Insurgent,” and while I enjoyed it, I did find it unbelievable that these young people kept jumping on and off trains and buildings, and kept getting shot at by hordes of bad guys, and never once did the hero or heroine get hurt or shot, even though they looked like sitting ducks most of the time.
And of course, there is always the iconic “Noooo, don’t go down into the basement!” Such ploys are so unbelievable and so hackneyed, they’ve sunk into the sludge of cultural ridicule.
6) Finally, make sure the story achieves what you set out for it to accomplish. That doesn’t always mean a happy ending, but it does mean that you stayed true to your characters, your theme and the tone of your work. If you haven’t delivered on whatever promise you implicitly made at the beginning of your story, your reader will know it. They may not even know why they’re saying the four dreaded words, but they’ll say them just the same: “I don’t believe that.”
Image courtesy of www.buzzbinpadillacrt.com.
Mark Twain hit the nail on the head when he said, “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. “
As writers, we’ve got to set the standard for truth high, and stick to it. If only our politicians and journalists would do the same!
What do you think? Should we hold our government and our press to the same high standards we hold our fiction writers? Who do you think does a great job in making us “true believers” in their work? I’d love to hear from you.
