i saw yet another post about how the literacy crisis means readers are less equipped to read between lines and pick up on implication (duh), but i've been thinking about that in relation to flirtation and yearning in fiction. as always, this braindump is more for my benefit than anything and is specific to my creative approach, so ymmv.
with the rise in purity culture and reading comprehension being... tenuous across today's general audience, i think authors are more expected to make the terms and conditions of their character's romantic relationships explicit and above board. the range of what can be reasonably implied such that a majority of the audience can pick up on it has narrowed. an increasing number of readers want their hand held and get agitated when they're left with questions or room for interpretation. which means there's increased pressure on writers to tell, not show, in exact detail that the characters are in love and in what way.
but flirtation is so much more than what's made explicit for me. good flirting depends on a doubling of conversation. the heat comes when each party is able to intuitively, improbably recognize the desires the other has left unsaid. yes, voicing your desires directly can be wildly attractive. but that vague inkling the characters have before outright confirmation—when the attraction is clear but they're still in orbit—is where the tension's at. that gray space of implication is where good banter thrives and chemistry is made. and, imo, great smut/romance writing makes this doubling clear while leaving just enough room for the reader to experience the excitement of connecting the dots themselves.
i've noticed an increasing number of writers who—whether by a lack of confidence, pressure from their audience, or maybe even shortcomings in their own literacy—opt to over-explain moments of attraction or relationship milestones between their characters. it'd be disrespectful to cite specific examples (i might look through my own writing to find some scenes i'm unhappy with eventually), but resolving major conflicts with conversations that are almost too comprehensive in addressing misunderstandings between characters come to mind. it's tidy. it's clear. often, it makes a case that the relationship being portrayed is healthy and admirable because hey, anything that could've caused a problem has been squared away! but when you present the reader with a resolution that neat, they're less inclined to read further. that's why romances tend to lose readers after the leads finally get together, or why stories end at happily ever after. unless the author leaves room for conflict, there's nowhere for the relationship to progress.
ambiguity is compelling. mess is compelling. it's propulsive. and the increased aversion to both in romance, both in plot and craft, is, i think, one of the reasons why i've seen some people struggling to find or write "good yearning" in fiction. characters yearn when they lack clarity. they sense, subconsciously or not, what's being left unsaid. the attraction underlying their interactions should make the yearner hyperaware of the possibility of reciprocation, but the path towards realizing it is hazy. whether by a emotional or concrete obstacles, they're unable to decisively act on their feelings. they're stuck in orbit and can't close the gap.
idk i might sit down and dig into this more deeply at some point. i've been meaning to make sense of my creative approach to writing yearners and maybe this is the bump i need.
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I had to explain suspension of disbelief to someone recently. Not in an academic context. Not as part of some obscure narratology deep-dive where you'd expect to haul out the terminology. As a concept. As in, I had to explain that it was a real thing, with a name, that fiction has depended on since fiction existed. I then had to sit with the fact that I'd had to do that at all, which was its own particular flavor of psychic damage.
That conversation is what finally made me write this, because it confirmed something I've been stewing over for a while: we are losing basic craft vocabulary. Not in some slow, graceful erosion — in a landslide, and the way we talk about fiction is getting measurably worse because of it. People are not engaging with stories anymore. They are performing autopsies on them, and they are somehow still getting the cause of death wrong.
If you've been around my blog for any length of time, you already know I talk about this constantly. Critical thinking, media literacy, art history, the works. I am not positioning myself as the authority on fiction. What I am is someone who has spent a long time studying, consuming, and making art across mediums, centuries, and several increasingly unhinged academic papers, and I have gotten tired enough of watching foundational concepts vanish from the conversation that I'm going to start putting them back. Field notes. That's all this is.
So. Suspension of disbelief.
The term comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817, though the tradition of thinking about belief in fiction — what scholars call 'belief talk' — goes back to Aristotle and has never really stopped evolving.
The idea is not complicated: if a writer puts enough human truth into a story — real emotion, real stakes, real psychological texture — the reader will voluntarily set aside their skepticism about the implausible parts. That word is doing all the heavy lifting. Voluntarily. The reader chooses to believe. The writer earns that choice. It is not a trick and it is not a con. It is a contract. The story says meet me halfway, and the audience says fine, but make it worth the walk.
Suspension of disbelief is not "this must be realistic." It is "this feels coherent enough that I am willing to emotionally buy in."
Nobody promised anyone a logistics simulation.
Now — and this matters — the contract does not look identical across mediums. Film has the advantage of image and sound working simultaneously; a score, a camera angle, a performance can accomplish in seconds what prose needs entire paragraphs to construct. Games have agency, which is functionally a cheat code for immersion, because the player is far too occupied with the immediate business of not dying to conduct a thorough audit of the supply chain. Prose, meanwhile, has what I'd argue is the most powerful tool of the three: interiority. Direct, unmediated access to psychology. To the full contradictory mess of a person thinking, wanting, rationalizing, and lying to themselves in real time. That kind of intimacy is an enormous deposit into the trust account, and it is why character-driven fiction can survive structural imperfections that would be fatal in any other medium.
The principle, however, is the same everywhere: the story makes promises, and the audience agrees to believe for as long as those promises hold.
Here is what people miss when they flatten this into a binary of "it broke" or "it didn't." It is not a switch. It is a bank account. Genre sets your opening balance. Every choice the creator makes either deposits or withdraws. And the currency is not realism.
It's trust.
Take Fallout. Two-hundred-year-old Salisbury Steak sits on a shelf in pristine condition. Fancy Lads Snack Cakes have survived nuclear holocaust with their packaging intact. Blamco Mac and Cheese waits patiently in a kitchen cabinet as though the apocalypse were a minor inconvenience it chose not to acknowledge. Nobody — and I cannot stress this enough — is running a functioning agricultural system in the Commonwealth. If you approach this setting as a logistics problem, the entire world collapses before the player has finished leaving Vault 111.
But Fallout is not asking you to believe in its food distribution network. It is asking you to buy into the aesthetic: a retrofuturist satire of American consumer culture so grotesquely resilient that even nuclear annihilation could not kill the branding. The preserved food is not a plot hole. It is the thesis. The tone is internally consistent, the satire is coherent, and frankly, the Blamco Mac and Cheese is performing more thematic labor than most prestige dramas manage across an entire season. You do not need the agriculture to make sense. The world has already told you what it is. If you weren't listening, that is not the story's failure.
Now consider Jurassic Park. The raptors are too large. The dilophosaurus did not, in fact, possess the charming neck frill, nor was it in the habit of spitting venom with what can only be described as theatrical conviction. The entire premise of the T-Rex's motion-based vision is scientifically dubious at best. People have been cataloguing these inaccuracies for thirty years, and I need those people to understand that they have entirely missed the point.
Not because accuracy is irrelevant. Because immersion is the operative standard here, and Spielberg met it. The trembling water in the glass. The pacing. The sound design. The escalating, sickening sense that hubris has purchased itself a very expensive catastrophe. You are not conducting a paleontological compliance review while watching that film. You are thinking about whether those children are going to survive. The internal logic is airtight: a rich man mistook control for mastery, the systems failed, and nature reasserted itself. The dinosaurs do not need to be correct. The story needs to be coherent. It is.
Then there is Stephen King, and I say this as someone who has been personally and repeatedly victimized by the man's body of work for the better part of her adult life: he gets dragged for his endings, and he frequently deserves it. IT. The Stand. Under the Dome. The catalogue of grievances is extensive and not entirely unjustified.
And yet people read a thousand pages of Stephen King and then immediately pick up the next one as though they have learned nothing at all.
Because his character work deposits so much into that bank account that by the time the ending wobbles, it barely matters. That is prose doing what only prose can do — you have been living inside these characters' heads for eight hundred pages. You know how they think. You know what they fear. You know the specific small humiliations and private losses that made them who they are. By the time the cosmic clown situation devolves or the dome turns out to be what it turns out to be, you were already in. Emotional investment subsidized structural imperfection, and you will do it again next book, because you are a fool who apparently enjoys this. As am I. We are not here to discuss my personal failings.
That is suspension of disbelief working exactly as intended.
The mechanism is not accuracy. It is investment.
And here is where I want to extend some grace, because I understand why people have started engaging with fiction like hostile witnesses at a deposition. I do it too. I catch myself doing it more than I'd like to admit. We live in a culture where credulity has genuine consequences — where "I believed something that turned out to be false" is not a harmless embarrassment but a material danger. The reflex to fact-check, to interrogate, to distrust the frame — that is a survival skill in 2026. Of course it bleeds into fiction. Of course people bring the same adversarial posture to a novel that they bring to a headline. The muscle is the same. They cannot turn it off.
But fiction is not journalism, and reading fiction well is its own skill. It requires the ability to modulate your expectations across genres — to understand that a retrofuturist satire, a gothic romance, a courtroom procedural, and a film about a billionaire's dinosaur park are not making the same contract with you. They do not succeed or fail by the same criteria. I spent years studying art history, and one of the first things the discipline teaches you is to read a work within the terms it is actually setting. A medieval painting does not fail because the perspective is "wrong." The artist was not attempting to simulate three-dimensional space for the eventual approval of someone on the internet. They were mapping spiritual hierarchy. The contract was theological, not literal. A Baroque altarpiece is not bad because the anatomy is exaggerated — the exaggeration is devotional. It is the point.
You learn, if you are paying attention, to ask what a work is doing on its own terms. Not whether it would survive cross-examination by the most determined pedant in the room.
Which brings me to the irony I find most exhausting. The same people who insist on total procedural fidelity in fiction — who will derail an entire discussion to point out that a speculative world's legal system does not perfectly mirror real-world municipal code — are often producing the least coherent critique in the conversation. "That's not how it works" is not analysis. It is an observation dressed up as insight. It tells you nothing about whether the story succeeds on its own terms, whether the tone holds, whether the characters earn their arcs, whether the thematic architecture is sound. It is the critical equivalent of checking someone's bibliography without reading the paper.
A story does not break because it departs from reality. It breaks when it departs from itself.
Fiction is not asking for submission. It is asking for trust.
Sofia is on her back on the bed, and Maya is watching. The scene has been circling Sofia’s reticence about being seen the whole chapter. She is good at deflecting attention, good at controlling where eyes land. Here she stops deflecting.
"You just watch now," she says, and the line comes low out of her own throat. Not a dare. Not a command. A statement of permission she is issuing to herself as much as to Maya.
She touches herself. Her fingers start slow, tracing a familiar path. She is making herself come in front of Maya. The word "my clit" spoken aloud , she has never said it out loud before, not like this, not in this room. Her breath hitches, and she feels the heat rise in her chest. Maya’s gaze is steady, heavy, but not demanding. Sofia’s own hand moves faster, and she lets herself make a sound. Then the internal finish: I came. Two wins, paired. The external act of saying what she is doing, and the internal acknowledgment that it happened. The scene is not about heat. It is about claiming. About letting someone watch you arrive. The tension in her jaw releases. Maya’s eyes soften.
The body often reveals what the mind is not yet ready to say. A character can talk around her desire for pages, can hold her cards close in dialogue, can deflect with a joke or a change of subject. But when the clothes come off, the hiding becomes harder. The body doesn’t lie the way the voice does. The flush, the tremor, the way she holds her breath before letting it go , these are not choices. They are the truth of the moment rising.
This is why the scene matters. Not because of explicitness. Because it is the rawest expression of who the character is under the performance of daily life. The genre that excludes or diminishes the sex scene is excluding a primary site where the interior reveals itself.
I understand the impulse toward closed-door romance. Some readers prefer it. Some writers feel it protects their characters or their readers. There is nothing wrong with closed-door. But the argument that open-door is simply more heat, or that closed-door is more literary, misses the point. The question is not how much skin is on the page. The question is: what does this scene do for the character?
For Sofia, the scene does what no conversation could. The chapter has been building toward this reveal, her fear of being seen mid-act, of being watched while she is most herself. The sex scene is the place where she finally lets that happen. She is not performing. She is not pleasing. She is arriving on her own terms, by her own hand, with Maya as the witness she chose. You cannot write that reveal in a summary. You cannot cut to the next morning and still earn it. The scene is the event.
What Maya does in the scene matters too. She does not reach for Sofia. She does not talk. She watches, and her watching is not a taking but a receiving. Her hand is on her own stomach, palm flat. She makes a sound, not a word, just an acknowledgment. The intimacy of being watched without being reached for, without being guided or shaped, is what Sofia needed. The scene is not only Sofia showing up. It is Maya showing up as the kind of person who can hold that space.
The body often reveals what the mind is not yet ready to say. Sofia could not have said "I want you to see me like this" in chapter twelve. She could not have named it in chapter fourteen. In chapter fifteen, she does not name it either. She simply shows Maya, and herself, what it looks like when she stops hiding. The scene ends with Sofia’s quiet exhalation. Maya’s hand is still flat on her stomach. There is nothing left to say.
The first image, a little girl's body pulled out of the rubble,
I strike from the poem. Let her rest. Language is a failed state.
The second image my own body stripped and hung by my fingers,
less their nails, piled neatly on a nearby table, I keep.
The poem is a space to rehearse for the future.
The third image a dictum of power. Something like "the state is" or
"the Guggenheim-winning poet is." This I soften and blur.
In my weakest moments I still succumb to the desire for a book deal
and avoid threatening its keepers.
The fourth image rubble alone, pulled from the mouth of my body
hanging from a hook in the black site. This image I widen so it envelops
the entire page. Yellow bile coating the margins.
I am interested in frightening you.
I do not want to be alone anymore.
The fifth image a drone giving birth to a child with gold leaf on
its fingernails. I wipe the mucus off. I give it a name. At the edge
of the poem the baby slouches toward Jerusalem. When it crosses
the border the poem can no longer see it. The drone-child becomes
an imagined condition the poem has released into the world.
I do not know what it intends. I do not know what it will eat.
The sixth image my father, dragged into the poem against his will
once more. I suspend him here with me. I revel in our
togetherness. His nails join mine, our backs are cut, our eyes plucked out.
The cruelty of jailers infected my language.
Everything I love I turn to cruelty. The poem now is just
another cell. All I know is how to write us dead.
Inside this image I reach out my little toe
and touch the image of my father's
little toe.
The state is
crueler
than your poem
ever could be,
I make the poem
make my father say.
we need to make plushies we really do customize them and get them made we'll have to backing but if they're cute enough some people will wanna buy it?? don't know. don't have a big presence online. we might go to those drawing to plushie sites or something wdk the steps…
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Sunday is usually my day to just rest because everyone needs to rest, but honestly... I might do a yarn inventory for my holiday projects, which will likely also be my first projhects of 2023. I’ll estimate that I’ll likely be done with making hats--at least the ones that I need to account for with the yarn in my room--which means I can actually see how much yarn I have, organize it into project piles and into baskets, and get myself quietly hyped for the fact that I get to start projects on 12/26!
