10 Tips to Write a Novel (part 3 of 3)
10 Tips to Write a Novel (last page)
6/ Master the “willing suspension of disbelief”
For those who know what this means you can skip this paragraph and the next! For the others, here’s a short reminder: imagine a review of the book “The Lord of the Rings” that would look like “grade: 02/20 Tolkien offers here an utterly ridiculous story blending creatures that simply cannot exist with a ring that can control its bearer… Total nonsense”. Or a review of Harry Potter such as: “Grade: 05/20 No Miss Rowling, 11 years old children do not wave around a piece of wood to make things appear!”. That would be totally ridiculous and the author of such reviews would be accused of not “diving” into the world proposed and to keep referring to the real world. In other words that person would not have “suspended his/her disbelief”.
The willing suspension of disbelief thus designates the almost automatic mechanism (so the word “willing” is debatable) that leads the audience to forget about the real world in order to dive into the fictional universe and embrace its rules. It’s thanks to this that we can live otherwise perfectly unrealistic stories with such intensity. Read more »