What’s your character’s ‘criteria of belief’ toward other characters?
“What is so scary about not being believed? Is it the humiliation? The degradation? Having to confront all the things wrong with you that make you unbelievable?” Wendy Heard poses these questions rhetorically in her CrimeReads essay “On Mental Health, Disbelief, and the Psychological Thriller.” “Yes” to all of these proposals. Not being believed is humiliating and degrading, and it casts an uncomfortable spotlight onto one’s self-consciousness. That is why the condition of not-being-believed fits well into thrillers.
Wendy Heard is also the author of the thriller Hunting Annabelle.
From the real world, Heard says, “we know the criteria of belief.” Before a woman can even be believed by others, she is expected to achieve some impossible balance in her presentation. She must be smiling, warm, and convey assertiveness but not appear “frivolous,” not reveal her “actual interiority,” and not “actually assert” herself. She must also maintain her appearance in a conventionally beautiful way without leaning toward either a “prudish” or “whorish” side. If she doesn’t do this, her claims about important matters (especially about threats to herself) are likely to be dismissed.
Each of us likes to believe that we are rational individuals and that we believe other people’s claims largely on the merits of the claims and not on some spurious basis. What really happens, though, is that so often we are persuaded (or turned off) by something about the speaker’s identity and the exact type of presentation and charisma we expect from them because of our own stereotypes and prejudices. If we aren’t willing to provisionally accept someone’s claim—that is, to treat the speaker as someone who deserves to be believed—how can we proceed to fairly evaluate the truth of the claim?
Fiction writers should consider how their characters interact with each other. Part of this is assessing the “criteria of belief,” to use Heard’s term. Who is predisposed to believe whom? Who expects to be believed, and who fears not being believed? Why? And what comes to pass as a result?
