#wordlbuilding

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.