The Big Lie: Encouraging your Readers to Suspend Disbelief

As many of you may know, Angela and I are eyebrow-deep in edits for our Traits Thesaurus. With a lot of luck and Mountain Dew, they should be available within the next few months. 



*exhausted squeak*



In the meantime, Laura Pauling has pushed through the publishing craziness and is releasing her newest book next week. I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of HEIST while I was on vacation, and, as you can see from my Goodreads review, I THOROUGHLY enjoyed it.



Laura is kind of...well, let's be honest. She's obsessed with spies. So I was thrilled when she offered to write at The Bookshelf Muse about The Big Lie...



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Suspension of disbelief is the ability to accept the core
premise of a story as truth. It usually refers to an unbelievable element such
as magic, time travel, or entering a magical land through a wardrobe. Suspending belief is
both easy and hard to do.




I love entering a movie or a book with a premise I’m excited
about. I’ve made it real easy for the writer because I’ve already suspended my
belief. But it’s up to them to keep it suspended. Every plot point, every
complication, every twist, they need to prove it again.




Honestly, I think this is just as hard to do with
contemporary realistic fiction as it is to do with a time travel thriller. In
fact, it may be harder, but that’s another post.




Some quick and easy tips
for creating The Big Lie in fiction:



Don’t break the world building rules you’ve already
established.
The action/reaction of your characters in the world and
to the world need to make sense within the context of the story.
Bring small world building details into the story wherever
you can as long as they pertain to the scene. Don’t just drop them in randomly
or over do it.
Make sure your character's emotional arc and actions
are logical because if the reader doesn’t whole-heartedly believe in your
character then they are less likely to believe in your premise.
For me the most important way to lend believability…is
the writing. Good writing gets me every time and that just takes time and hard
work.
Don’t make your readers mad by not truly answering the
story questions/mysteries you’ve presented. Don’t give them the run-around. 






One TV show where I think the writers may have pushed it too
far was LOST. They got so fantastical with some of the events that it was just
about impossible for them to present a logical explanation that viewers could
believe. Then they made some viewers mad by getting a little cheesy with the
fountain of youth explanation. This turned many people off.




Me? I loved the whole show and never wavered. I was so
invested in the characters that I overlooked everything. There’s definitely a
lesson to be learned there.








HEIST is a time travel thriller. Think The Butterfly Effect as a YA novel. I ask the reader to believe in
time travel. That’s my big lie. Each time Jack Brodie travels back to the
Gardner Museum Heist to fix his mistakes and his world in the future changes
for the worse, I have to convince my readers to believe the lie again. (And I hope they do!) 



In what books or movies did you believe The Big Lie? I'd love to hear your examples.










Laura Pauling writes about spies, murder and mystery. She's also the author of the Circle of Spies Series: A Spy Like Me, Heart of an Assassin and the forthcoming Twist of Fate. She writes to entertain and experience a great story...and be able to work in her jammies and slippers. Her book HEIST releases August 15th. Check it out on Goodreads.