In an essay called “Children and Fairy Stories”, J. R. R. Tolkien writes about how important it is for authors to create secondary worlds that readers absolutely believe in. He says that if the reader has to “suspend disbelief,” then the secondary world is a failure. This is a subtle but important distinction: believing vs. grudgingly suspending disbelief.
When you check your closet to see if you might get to Narnia that way, you reveal that C. S. Lewis made you believe in the world he created. When you spend your 11th birthday looking out for an owl, you expose your belief in the world J. K. Rowling created. When you sob over the death of a character in a book, your tears are proof that you believed in that character, that he was so real, his loss causes real grief.
All of us have found fictional worlds that we believe in, and we have also recognized the kinds of unsuccessful worlds that Tolkien describes–worlds that strain credulity by their very nature, or that feature events or characters or rules that boot us out of the story. I get particularly frustrated when an author introduces a new rule midway through a story in order to explain something that would otherwise be nonsensical. For example, a character needs to get to the 21st floor very quickly, so all of a sudden that character can fly. Tricks like this twist belief into disbelief, and if the book still has merit, I may be willing to suspend that disbelief, but, more likely, I will abandon the book, because, as I see it (and I think Tolkien would agree), the book has already abandoned me.
It is easy to ask readers to suspend disbelief. It is easy to say, “Oh, and by the way, So-and-so can fly. I didn’t mention that before? Silly me.” This is lazy. It is insufficient.
Tolkien writes about fantasy in particular, but all writers of fiction create secondary worlds. All writers ask us to believe their worlds are real. The best writers craft not only rich worlds populated with complex characters; they craft belief. I aspire to be one of these writers, and I promise here that I will never settle for suspended disbelief.