Disbelief: an inability to believe that something is true.

As a lifelong reader and writer, I’m on familiar terms with the concept of willing suspension of disbelief. The ability to suspend disbelief makes it possible for us to immerse ourselves in stories about people who don’t exist living in places that don’t exist (or don’t exist exactly as they are depicted) so that we can, at least temporarily, relate to them as if they and their thoughts, feelings, predicaments, and actions are every bit as real as we are.

Reading a novel is sort of like making a compact (looser than a contract) with an author. The reader agrees to suspend disbelief, which means trusting the author. And the author agrees to do his or her best to be trustworthy by getting things right, even when those things are not factual—in fact, especially when they are not factual. That includes keeping the plot and the characters straight, maintaining internal consistency, not making obvious errors, and having a juicy story to tell in the first place.

Vampires in San Francisco

I stopped suspending my disbelief in Atonement by Ian McEwan once he introduced an event for the sole purpose of moving the plot forward. I willingly suspended my disbelief in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire until she placed the toll booths at the wrong end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Losing my suspension of disbelief in Atonement was a big deal because the plot contrivance was pivotal to the outcome of the story. The toll booths, on the other hand, were a minor issue in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.

As a reader, I felt I was doing my part in both cases; it was the authors who let me down. I would have had a much different experience, however, if I’d approached Interview with the Vampire without a willingness to suspend disbelief. The very idea of “vampires” would have been a deal-breaker; I would never have begun reading the book. Not reading Interview with the Vampire probably wouldn’t have altered my life significantly—although it did give me that toll booth example, which I’ve used many times.

Things without Names

But there are other books I’ve read that I believe have enhanced my life, and reading them has contributed, even if in a small way, to me becoming the person I am now. One example is my all-time favorite novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It begins:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Magical realism definitely requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

But there has to be some promise—some prospective payoff—to cause us as readers to suspend our disbelief and invest our time and energy in a story. We like the genre or the author. The book comes highly recommended by a trusted source. It’s the next volume in a series we’re already hooked on. Or maybe we pick up a copy in a library or bookstore and are immediately captivated by the opening.

Whatever the case may be, on the one hand we readers automatically understand that suspension of disbelief is a requirement of getting the most out of fiction. On the other hand, we don’t automatically or permanently suspend disbelief for every work of fiction we encounter. We discriminate. But once we’re in, we’re in, so to speak—unless the author messes up.

Imagination and Truth

Author and columnist William Safire explored the subject of suspension of disbelief in a 2007 piece for The New York Times:

[W]ho coined the phrase and in what context? The quotation books have the coiner — the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1817 “Biographia Literaria”: “That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

But the context is an eye-opener. Coleridge and William Wordsworth were neighbors. They agreed one day that “the two cardinal points of poetry” were “the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature” (Wordsworth’s specialty, with his “host of golden daffodils”) and “the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination” (which Coleridge was especially good at). They agreed to contribute individually to a group of “Lyrical Ballads.”

You may not have noticed, but we’ve sort of wended our way, via imagination and truth, to art and science.

Safire added:

Richard Sha, professor of literature at American University, takes this to mean that “…one must willingly suspend one’s skepticism.”

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid!

Suspending one’s skepticism in undertaking to read a work of fiction doesn’t usually pose much danger. But in other realms of life, it can lead to a variety of negative outcomes, from minor mistakes to profound tragedy. But while it shouldn’t be done lightly or habitually, there are some times and places where it definitely should be done—where it has to be done if we’re to get anything out of the situation, the learning, or the experience. We not only need to suspend disbelief, we also need to commit to the process if we want to:

• Learn something new (a musical instrument, a language, a creative pursuit…)
• Start something (a business, a project, a relationship…)
• Make a significant decision (to become a parent, to get into or out of a relationship, to take or leave a job…)

What does this have to do with creating transformational change? Maybe you’ve figured that out. If not, it’s what I’ll be covering in the next installment.