Everyone critiquing the story tells the hopeful young writer that the scene is not realistic. They're willing to believe the boyfriend's blood would turn the protagonist into a vampire, but they don't believe an intelligent, modern-day character would try to perform a transfusion on the side of the road instead of using her cell phone to call for help. Heck, she didn't even know if they had compatible blood types.
"But it's fantasy!" the hopeful young writer declares. "There are vampires! It's not supposed to be realistic! Whatever happened to suspending your disbelief?"
Suspension of disbelief. Far too often, I've seen that phrase misused in defense of characters acting in unrealistic ways. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the man who coined the term, had this to say about it in his Biographia Literaria:
"In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavors 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."
Like our hypothetical hopeful young writer, many people toss around the phrase suspension of disbelief with no awareness that an equally important phrase originally accompanied it: semblance of truth. In other words, if you want your readers to suspend their disbelief long enough to read about your vampire, alien, carnivorous gnome, or what have you, you need to give your story a semblance truth—a world with a consistent reality and characters who act like real people. One reason so many people are willing to accept all of the magic and fantastical creatures in Lord of the Rings is because Tolkien created a world that feels real. Middle Earth has depth and texture and consistency, and it's populated by characters who behave in a realistic manner.
There are times, though, when achieving a semblance of truth means parting ways with actual truth. In Ghost Writer to the Dead, I ask readers to believe in a world like ours, only with ghosts and psychic detective agencies. Giving the story a real-world setting (the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site) and a real-world character (Edgar Allan Poe) meant I had a rich amount of detail and history to draw upon, but it also meant I had to pick the right details. In the first draft, my critique partners pointed to some word choices in Poe's dialogue that threw them out of the story. One word actually was in popular usage during Poe's lifetime, but because it didn't feel like something my critique partners thought Poe would say, it kept them from fully suspending their disbelief. So out it went.
Achieving that semblance of truth can be tricky business, particularly when you're dealing with the fantastic. But the more realistic you make your world and its characters, the more likely readers will be to suspend their disbelief. Vampires, ghosts, and the like may not be real, but the impact they can have when a reader is drawn into the world of your story most definitely is.
Barbara A. Barnett is an avid rejection letter collector, musician, MLIS student, Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, coffee addict, wine lover, bad movie mocker, and all-around geek. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Fantasy Magazine, Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, Black Static, and Wilde Stories 2011: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction. In addition to writing, she has worked in the performing arts world for several years.
Learn more about Barbara on her website.
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