"Truth is stranger than fiction. But it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."
What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator". He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true;" it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.
— J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories"
"It's just you and the audience — hundreds of people — and you've got just one chance, just once chance, to convince them that it's real. There's a magic moment where you can make them believe anything because they already want to. They're there and ready and you just have to take them the rest of the way."
— Ben Cato, The Dreamer
"Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities."
"It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to translate our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procedure for these shadows of imagination willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
"Suspension of disbelief doesn't throw away all logic. It just allows me to believe that there are people that can run really fast or aliens that can shapeshift living among humans."
— Linkara, Atop the Fourth Wall
"At a certain point, it's just a deal between the director and the audience where he basically pauses the movie and says, "Look, if you want to see some more cool action scenes, just initial here that it's OK that the alien computers run on MacOS for some reason." And you go, "OK," and he goes back to blowing things up for you."
"Nor need their strange worlds, when we get there, be at all tied to scientific probabilities. It is the wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that matters. When I myself put canals on Mars, I believe I already knew that telescopes had dissipated that old optical illusion. The point was that they were part of the Martian myth as it existed in the common mind."
— C. S. Lewis, "On Science Fiction"
"I know you’re meant to suspend your disbelief in a horror film about what is survivable and for how long, but watching a man with a gushing head wound – i.e. a knife straight into the brain – stumble around for a while and still have the mental capacity to utter "fuck you Bruce Willis" before he falls down dead is the point where I say "fuck you movie.""
"I used to lose sleep over this, but then I realized if there's enough interesting things going on in a big budget epic sci-fi film, then you can distract me from all the science you're getting wrong."
"The trick comes down to this: How do you make a ridiculous scenario (talking, colorful animal-people fighting a ponderously large madman) engaging enough to read regularly? The answer: A tricky balancing act where the reader isn't necessarily supposed to take it seriously, but the characters of the world do. If the characters believe themselves to be in peril, then their honesty will inspire the reader to believe them. But at the same time, the writer has to craft it so that the reader is looking upon all this in an accessible fashion; we can't just assume the reader will be immediately invested and believe in the ridiculous scenario [...] But the writer can only do so much. It's also part of the reader's job to approach the material in the right mindset. If the reader is looking for a grand, sweeping anthropomorphic saga, or a GRIMDARK study of slavery and the theme of Nature vs. Industry, or if the reader simply isn't going to allow themselves to enjoy such high fantasy, then there's nothing the writer can do to entertain theme."
— Ian Flynn on writing Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics)
"Road House is the kind of movie that leaves reality so far behind that you have to accept it on its own terms."
"Let's talk for a moment about "illusion" [...] Illusion is a necessary part of entertainment; it is, for instance, a key part of the suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief is frequently required in fiction, and sometimes, when someone will defend a work, they'll say: "You never heard of the suspension of disbelief?" snobbishly, because stupid people are incapable of saying stupid things in any other way. Suspension of disbelief, though, is a two way street; the audience must be prepared to extend it, but the artist must also work to sustain it. Any audience that comes to the work has already — probably — made the effort. So, in those cases, when it's lost, the artist is to blame. Maintaining the illusion is their job. If you suddenly make me realize that I'm just watching a movie, because you've said or done something, that's your fault, not mine. That is because, for the most part, we want to be fooled by the illusion; that's why we've come here."
— Chuck Sonnenburg, in his review/analysis of Dragon Age II
"And besides, I remember what Wells said; Wells said that if there is a fantastic fact, it should be the only fantastic fact in the story, because the reader's imagination — especially now — does not accept many fantastic facts at once. For example, he has that book: The War of the Worlds, which deals with an invasion of Martians. He wrote this at the end of the last century, and then he has another book written by that date: The Invisible Man. Now, in those books, all the circumstances, except for that capital fact of an invasion of beings from another planet — something in which nobody had thought then, and now we see it as posible — and an invisible man, all this is surrounded by trivial circumstances to help the reader's imagination, since the reader tends to be incredulous now. But despite having invented it, Wells would have ruled out — seeing it as difficult to execute — an invasion of this planet by invisible Martians, because that is already demanding too much; which is the error of scientific fiction today, which accumulates prodigies and we do not believe in any of them."
— Jorge Luis Borges, Dialogues.
You see how it kind of becomes hard to buy into a movie that basically has no logical consistency because it makes up the rules as it goes along? You don't know what matters because everything could change at the drop of a hat.
—The Critical Drinker
reviewing Alien: Covenant
reviewing Alien: Covenant"It's a complete suspension of disbelief on your end, though. You have to fully embrace the robot as a genuine, living person, even knowing they are not... You need to spend a lot of time with it... treat it like a good friend..."
— Rue, OneShot
"The suspension of disbelief is the simultaneous belief in two inconsistent things. Anyone who watches The Matrix believes both that we are watching a fight between Neo and Morpheus, but is aware that we're actually watching Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne perform a choreographed sequence of actions being shot on a film set. And it's the filmaker's job to make it as easy on the audience as possible to supress that second idea, which is why solid writing, acting, and editing is so important, because a discrepancy in any particular one could break the audience's immersion, destroying our investment in the story."
— Super Eyepatch Wolf, "Why Professional Wrestling Is Fascinating"
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings…
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings…
"We don’t need to be experts on the Bible to prove that the “prophecies” of Left Behind are ridiculous. That ridiculousness presents itself on every page of these books. “These things will happen,” LaHaye says. “These things are prophesied and therefore they must happen.” And without ever consulting the text from which these supposed prophecies are derived we know that this is false — that such things cannot be and will not be because people are not like this.
Human nature will not allow it.
Human nature is the one thing we require from any story for it to ring true. We can accommodate fantastical elements like Nicolae’s supernatural mind mojo powers. That’s unlike the world as we know it, but we’re willing to stretch that far. What we cannot tolerate, though, is the notion — the requirement — that people will cease behaving like people. And that is the premise and prerequisite for most of what happens in these books.
It’s not just that we occasionally see a few people behaving strangely or inexplicably, but that everyone behaves inexplicably. In these books, the whole world is out of character.
I don’t just mean the sort of out-of-character behavior that arises from sloppy writing, where people talk funny or seem to have inappropriate emotional responses. There’s plenty of that here, too, but what I’m talking about here is the way in which alien, inhuman behavior is made the necessary driver of this story. The plot depends upon people not acting like people. It depends upon them acting in a way that people have never acted and, being people, will never and would never and can never act. If people in this story behaved like actual people, then this story would not happen.
That makes this a bad story — an unbelievable story that does not ring true."
Human nature will not allow it.
Human nature is the one thing we require from any story for it to ring true. We can accommodate fantastical elements like Nicolae’s supernatural mind mojo powers. That’s unlike the world as we know it, but we’re willing to stretch that far. What we cannot tolerate, though, is the notion — the requirement — that people will cease behaving like people. And that is the premise and prerequisite for most of what happens in these books.
It’s not just that we occasionally see a few people behaving strangely or inexplicably, but that everyone behaves inexplicably. In these books, the whole world is out of character.
I don’t just mean the sort of out-of-character behavior that arises from sloppy writing, where people talk funny or seem to have inappropriate emotional responses. There’s plenty of that here, too, but what I’m talking about here is the way in which alien, inhuman behavior is made the necessary driver of this story. The plot depends upon people not acting like people. It depends upon them acting in a way that people have never acted and, being people, will never and would never and can never act. If people in this story behaved like actual people, then this story would not happen.
That makes this a bad story — an unbelievable story that does not ring true."
— Fred Clark on Left Behind, Slacktivist
To me, a story—any story—at its core, is about us. Our perception of fictional characters is based entirely on what we understand of our own species. A well-written story is one that is able to recreate the complexity of humans within its constructed world and convince us that the events the characters are going through—no matter the story's concept—are actually happening to them. And that the decisions these characters make are consistent with our own rationalization patterns. Bad stories are the ones wherein the characters stop resembling people and you begin to see the strings on their bodies as the author or writer marionettes them through the world with no attempt to mirror reality.
"So the movie can happen!"
—Screenwriter, frequently, Screen Rant Pitch Meetings
