Author: peterclines

A few weeks back on Bluesky I got a very nice compliment about how my books very frequently—actually, the word was inevitably—take a sharp turn. That got me thinking about twists in general. And then I glanced at that list I mentioned a few weeks back and… twists bumped up a few.

Before I dive in deep, though, I thought it might be good to define a few terms up front, just to cut down on any possible confusion as we move along.

A reveal is when the characters or the reader get a new piece of information. I refer you back to the often-quoted-here Damon Knight rule of thumb— facts my readers and characters don’t know are information, facts they already know are noise. Some reveals are key and dramatic. Others are not.

A mystery is when the main character and the readers are aware that information has been hidden from them and are searching for that unknown fact. Really simply, a mystery is when someone in my story has a question and is trying to find the answer.

Real quick aside—please don’t confuse mystery the story element with mystery the genre. All mystery stories are about mysteries, but not every mystery is in a mystery story. Make sense? I know, giving them the same name is confusing. Not sure who we can blame for that

Anyway, that brings us to a twist. A twist is when information is revealed that my characters and the audience didn’t know was being kept from them. Unlike a mystery, they don’t even suspect those facts are out there. When a twist appears, it comes from out of nowhere and changes a lot of perceptions for the characters and the audience.

So let’s talk about what makes a good twist. Or at least, what I think makes a good twist. Your MFA professor may have different ideas. And just for fun, I’ll mention a few ways they can go wrong.

I think a good twist always has four distinct elements…

First, as I just mentioned, my readers and my characters don’t expect a twist is coming. By it’s very nature, it’s a surprise that hits when we least expect it, often in a way we don’t expect it.

Keep in mind, if I tell you there’s a big secret about our hero’s best friend… well, I’ve just told you her best friend has a big secret. If I tell you you’ll never guess who they run into in Argentina, I’ve just told you they’re going to run into someone unexpected in Argentina. It’s a lot harder to be surprised by something we’re expecting, so it’s hard for any twist to land well when my readers are already on the lookout for it.

This is one of the reasons I rant about spoilers a lot. If I’ve structured my story so that this reveal has a certain dramatic weight, knowing the reveal ahead of time means that’s just gone from information to noise (there’s Damon Knight again). In my dramatic structure, it’s just gone from a high point to almost a flat line.

Second, the information a twist reveals has to be something my readers and characters didn’t already know but they need to know. Revealing that the murder victim is dead is kind of a given. Showing you Billy has a pet cat isn’t much of a reveal because, well, we’ve been talking about the cat since chapter four. It’s a fact that doesn’t carry any weight at all. Telling you Billy’s cat is a seven hundred year old immortal Wichianmat from the Empire of Ayutthaya —well, that’s something you didn’t know.

It’s worth noting I need to be revealing information the audience doesn’t know, but it has to be information they could know. It can’t break the characters or the world I’ve established. It needs to fit within that context. If I’ve been talking on and off about the ancient secrets of the Ayutthan Empire for twenty chapters now, cool. If this is a modern-day romance between rival hockey players that’s never referenced anything farther back than February… Empire of What?

A good rule of thumb is that whatever information I’m revealing in my twist is something my readers should be able to guess—even if it might mean a lot of guesses. If I have sixteen characters/ potential suspects in my murder mystery, it shouldn’t take forty-two guesses to name the murderer. If the big surprise is that Phoebe is Wakko’s niece, the readers should probably know who Wakko is. And why it would be shocking that he has a niece.

Third, the information revealed in a twist has to change how my readers and characters see previous events in the story. This is the moment when our view of things get twisted (ha ha ha now I get it) and we realize we’ve been looking at a lot of characters and elements the wrong way. And again, seeing them the right way should give my readers a bit of a thrill as everything realigns and fall into place in new ways.

That said, this new information can’t actually contradict previous events or any of the information my readers have been given up until now. Worth noting—this is when a lot of twists go wrong. I can’t reveal Billy’s dog is immortal when it’s been a cat for the past 200 pages. Also, this is still a hockey romance, but Billy was always a baseball superstar. And a federal marshal. Who’s here in New Orleans hunting immortal cats.

One of the worst examples of this is when we’ve been seeing over a character’s shoulder for a few hundred pages and they just, y’know, never happened to think about how they’re the serial killer the whole team’s been hunting. Or that Wakko knew Dot was the killer since chapter four but just didn’t mention it or act on it until the last twenty pages. For reasons.

Fourth and last, a twist needs time to build up strength. It’s really tough to have a good twist in the first five pages of a novel. As I mentioned above, a twist needs to alter our view of past events, which means… there have to be past events. So they tend to happen in the back half of the story.

I think a large part of this is that bit I just mentioned above about everything realigning. The power of a good twist comes from how many things it forces us to re-examine, so more time means more things. Some folks try to have their big twist in chapter two and it usually falls flat. Instead of seeing a dozen things in a new light we’re seeing… two? Maybe one? And sometimes, yeah… none

And that’s that.

Again, these are my own requirements, not something (to the best of my knowledge) taught in any courses or books. And as always, there’s always going to be a few exceptions, sure. But I’ve found these four elements tend to be pretty solid.

Y’see, Timmy, when a twist lands right, your readers will absolutely love you for it. They’ll re-read the whole book just to see how you slipped it past them. You can’t have slipped this past me! Holy crap you did!!!

But if I mess up a twist… at best it’ll leave readers with this gnawing, something-doesn’t-sit-right feeling. Or they’ll go back through the book and pick it apart. And at worst… they’ll just shake their heads, put my book aside, and forget about it.

And that’s definitely not the reaction I want a twist to get.

Next time… well, okay, next time is probably going to be in two weeks because I’ve got a handful of final tweaks to do on The Off Season. But when next time shows up, unless someone mentions something cooler, I’m probably going to talk about that one thing you were supposed to do.

Until then, go write.

Okay, I know I said I was going to talk about twists, but then… something came up.

Last weekend was WonderCon, and once again a few very talented folks (and me) came together to do the Writers Coffeehouse. If you’ve never been, it’s essentially a bunch of professional writers who are just there to answer your questions. That’s it. Anything goes—writing, publishing, feedback, publicity, editing, contracts, managing this whole hobby/ part-time job/ career/ whatever it is to you. You ask, we answer. Sometimes with a joke or two and the occasional segue.

Anyway, one question we were asked ended up getting, well, a strong emotional reaction from someone in the audience. Not angry. Quite the opposite. No, not happy, either. And I wanted to revisit it because I think the answers we gave out got kind of muddled by a few misinterpretations of the question.

So, all that said… when should we give up on a project? What are the signs or benchmarks something needs to hit for us to say this is as done as it’s going to get? When is it time to drag those first 60K words to the recycle bin and start something new?

To be honest, I don’t know.

Great talk, everyone! Glad you keep checking in on the ranty writing blog. So informative, I know.

I don’t know because this is something absolutely nobody can decide but you. If anyone tries to tell you that you should quit, feel free to ignore them. Tell them I said to ignore them, then go back to ignoring them. I don’t care who they are. Your writing instructor, your significant other, your family member, some professional with a pile of credits, that loudmouth guy online with no credits. I don’t care who they are. Seriously, nobody decides this but you.

Got it?

Okay then. With that in mind… let’s talk about a few reasons I might be thinking about giving up on this short story or screenplay or novel or long form epic poem. I think it usually comes down to four things. Each of these is kind of an umbrella, and it won’t surprise you that there can be overlap.

First is that I’m stuck. Could be a character thing, a particular interaction, or maybe a description. Maybe I just don’t know how to get from point L to point M, even though I had it all outlined. It just doesn’t work for some reason. Or maybe I didn’t have an outline and I’ve got no idea what happens next. Maybe I’ve been stuck for a while now. Possibly a long while.

Second, closely related to being stuck, is that I’ve been polishing this thing forever. Maybe I can always see something else that needs tweaking. Maybe I show it to other people and they always see something that needs tweaking. Writing means rewriting, and I’ve rewritten this whole thing five or seven or eleven times.

Third is that… well, I’m bored with it. Maybe it’s because I’ve been stuck and beating my head against it for ages. Maybe it just doesn’t excite me anymore. I wrote all the cool bits and what’s left is kind of boring. Nobody wants to write something dull and this thing has become dull.

Fourth and finally is that maybe I’ve become a little embarrassed by it. Ashamed, even. No, not because I forgot there were racy parts when I asked my mom to read it. Okay, maybe that. But maybe because I showed it to someone and they didn’t think it was that great. Maybe they told me it sucked. Hell, maybe I asked for feedback and they just ghosted me. I mean, how bad is this manuscript? I thought it was pretty good, but I guess it’s really awful and I’ve been wasting my time…

So that’s four reasons I think most people consider giving up on a project. Let’s talk about each of them and why maaaaayyyybbeeee they don’t really matter. Or maybe they do, in this case. Again, I can’t decide this for you.

First, we all get stuck sometimes. All of us. Yeah, even pros. Yes, me too. It’s really rare that I can’t write anything, but I have absolutely hit times when I just can’t make this sound right or that bit just doesn’t work, no matter what I do. And sometimes it takes a while to figure it out. One thing that helped me a lot was realizing this usually happened with my first drafts and first drafts just… well, they don’t matter. They can be gloriously messy, error-filled, unfinished things with gaping holes in them. Hell, the first draft I just finished up has so many holes in it, if it was a shirt I couldn’t wear it in public. But it doesn’t matter. A first draft is that shirt you only ever wear around your home because, y’know, it doesn’t matter.

If you get stuck in a first draft… skip it. Seriously. Just leave a note to yourself in all caps or brackets or whatever and just deal with it in the next draft. That’s what the second draft is for. Looking at stuff again when you’ve had some time. You’ll have a better grasp of the characters, the plot, and the whole story, and the things that you were beating your head against before will suddenly seem a lot easier to deal with.

Speaking from a lot of experience on that one.

Second, like I just said, everything needs edits and rewrites. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you or themselves. Possibly both. We need to clean up that first draft and then go over the second draft to make sure we didn’t make new problems when we fixed the old problems. But it’s easy for this process to become a trap. Because, yeah, there’s always going to be something else to tweak, something else that could be a little stronger, a bit smoother, and crap, I’ve been doing this so long that reference is a little dated now, isn’t it? Maybe i could come up with a better one…

I tend to do five drafts of a book and then… I’m done. I put it down. At that point I know, personally, that anything I do is just going to be stalling. There will always be something else to fix. And there’s probably always going to be another chance to fix it. So don’t get trapped rewriting the same thing over and over and over again when you could be using those skills to move on to something else. Something better.

Third, yes it sucks when writing turns into work. Yeah, that first draft is filled with energy but then… well, it’s always more fun to make the mess than to clean the mess up. Plus, let’s be honest, sometimes we’ve got this other idea bouncing around in our heads and that one is really exciting.

The truth is, if I’m just doing this for fun… punt it. Move on to something you’ll enjoy more. But if I want to do this professionally—at any level—sometimes I just need to slog through it. I can’t really do anything until I’ve got a finished, polished manuscript, and sometimes that just means… I need to finish it and polish it.

Sorry.

Fourth… this one’s probably the worst because this one can hurt. And it’s really hard to ignore something that’s causing us pain. Sometimes it’s accidental. Sometimes… yeah, it a dick who thinks they’re being funny. Worse yet, they’re openly trying to hurt us. Sometimes with the assurance that “oh, it’s for your own good” and sometimes… because they just want to hurt us.

A few things to remember when this happens. Not every story is for everyone, and I can’t be surprised when someone who doesn’t like genre X has a bunch of issues with my genre X story. Some folks are really bad at vocalizing—or honestly, even identifying—what they think does and doesn’t work in a story. Taking criticism is a skill we need to learn, and alas it’s rare to learn how without taking a few bruises.

But while I’m getting bruised, I need to remember, no matter what anyone else says… this is my story. Nobody knows how it’s supposed to go better than me. Absolutely no one can write it better than me. And definitely nobody can fix it better than I can, because (again) nobody knows what it’s supposed to be better than me.

And one of the best lessons of criticism is… sometimes we can just ignore it. It can be tough, but like I said up at the top, no matter who they are, they don’t get to make the decisions.

So anyway… there’s four reasons you might want to quitting on a project. And four reasons you might want to reconsider quitting. Y’know, if you want to. And even if you do, quitting doesn’t mean deleting all your files and burning all existing copies. If you do decide to quit, you can still change your mind later.

Y’see Timmy, like I said above, nobody can decide if you should quit or not. But if you do, just make sure you’re quitting for the right reason.

Next time, for real, twists.

Until then, go write.

Okay, not so much rant.

Well, no more than usual, I guess.

I try to have a running list of seven or eight topics for future blog posts. That way if nobody asks a question or something doesn’t leap out at me, I’ve got something to fall back on. One of the ways things end up on the list is that I’ll be dropping links into a post, pointing back at when I previously talked about this or that, and I’ll suddenly realize I haven’t talked about whatever it is for six or seven years.

At which point I’ll usually let out this tired sigh and think something like holy crap I’ve been doing the ranty writing blog for a long time.

Which brings us to me ranting.

No, wait. That brings us to dialogue.

Hopefully we all understand how important dialogue is, yes? It’s how we bring characters to life, making them sound and speak like real people (sort of—more on that in a moment). It’s also the absolute best way to communicate information to my readers (or any audience) about the characters, their world, or the situation they find themselves in.

Likewise, dialogue is one of the easiest, quickest ways to alienate a reader. If my characters sound forced or stilted or just… well, unnatural, it’s going to push my readers away. So it’s something I’ve got to get right.

I know! There’s so many friggin’ things I need to get right for this to all work. But this is why so many people give up and you’ve stuck with it.

Anyway, I’ve talked once or thrice recently about different aspects of dialogue—vocabulary, subtext, arguments—but it’s been a while since I did a big “here’s a dozen or so tips” rants. So what I’d like to do is toss out a bunch of general “hey, think about this” things I’ve picked up from years of screenplay reading and manuscript reading. Just little things I should to keep an eye on in my dialogue. If it’s something I’ve ranted about in a bigger way at some point, I’ll link back to it.

And, as always, not every one of these is going to apply to every situation in every book. Nobody knows your book better than you. No one. That’s why it’s up to each of us to figure out exactly how this character sounds and speaks to move my plot along, to develop their story, to keep my narrative going, and so on.

Here we go.

Grammar – As you’ve probably noticed in your own life, very few people speak in perfect, grammatically correct English. Our tenses don’t always match. Verbs don’t always line up with our nouns. A lot of “spoken” English can look awful on the page. And this makes some folks choke, because they can’t reconcile those words with the voice in their head. When I lean into grammar I lose that natural aspect of language in favor of the strict rules of grammar, and I end up with a lot of characters speaking in a precise, regulated manner that just doesn’t flow.

This doesn’t mean toss grammar out the window and write however you want. People still need to understand what my characters are saying and that I’ve chosen to have them speak this way. But dialogue does give us a little more freedom in how we say stuff. See?

Contractions– This is kind of a loosely-connected, kissing-cousins issue with the grammar thing I just mentioned. Some folks avoid contractions because they’re trying to write correctly! But most of us use contractions in our everyday speech—even scientists, politicians, professors, soldiers, everyone. It’s just human nature to make things quick and simple. Without contractions, dialogue sounds stilted and wooden. If there’s a reason for one of my characters to speak that way, then by all means do it. If my characters are regular, native English-speaking mortals, though…

As a bonus, using contractions also drops my word count and page count. Win-win.

Transcription– Okay, some of you know I used to be a journalist and did lots and lots of interviews. One thing it taught me is, with very few exceptions, people trip over themselves a lot when they talk. We have false starts. We repeat phrases. We trail off. We make odd noises while we try to remember words. It’s really common and normal

BUT… anyone who’s ever read a strict word-for-word transcription of a conversation (or typed up a lot of them) will tell you it’s awkward, hard to follow, and a lot gets lost without the exact inflection of certain words. This kind of ultra-realistic dialogue will drive readers (and editors) nuts. Plus it wastes my word count on dozens of unnecessary lines. This sort of rambling can work well in actual spoken dialogue, but it’s almost always horrible on the page.

Similarity– People are individuals, and we’ve all got our own unique way of speaking. People from Maine don’t talk like people from California, people living in poverty don’t talk like billionaires, and fantasy elven princesses don’t speak like futuristic bio-engineered soldiers. My characters should be individuals, with their own tics and habits that make them distinct from the people around them. If a reader can never tell who’s speaking without seeing the dialogue headers… I might need to get back to work.

On The Nose—If you’ve ever heard someone call dialogue “on the nose,” they mean the characters are saying exactly what they’re thinking without any subtlety or subtext whatsoever. It’s the difference between “Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?” and “Would you like to come up and have sex in my living room right now?” There’s no inference or implications, no innuendos or layered meanings. And the truth is, we’re always layering meaning into what we say.

Pro tip—I’d guess nine times out of ten, if a character’s talking to themselves out loud, it’s on the nose dialogue. It just works out that way. I’d guess half the time it’s just exposition (more on that in a minute).

Humor—Here’s another human nature thing. A lot of us tend to make jokes at the worst possible times. Breakups. Office reviews. Funerals. It’s just the way we’re wired. The more serious the situation, the more imperative that release valve is for us. In fact, be honest… people who never crack jokes make us a little suspicious or uneasy. Not everyone and not at every moment, but when there’s no joking at all, ever, it just feels wrong.

Plus, how a character jokes says something about them. Do they make non-stop raunchy jokes? Do they have a dry sense of humor? A completely awful sense of humor. Do they have any sense of when it is and isn’t appropriate to tell a certain joke?

Flirting—Flirting’s like humor in that it’s almost universal. People show affection for one another. They flirt with friends and lovers and potential lovers. Sometimes—like with humor—at extremely poor times. It’s not always serious, it can take different forms, but that little bit of playfulness and innuendo is present in a lot of casual dialogue exchanges.

Flirting is also like joking because it’s impossible to flirt with on the nose dialogue. Flirting requires subtlety and implied meanings. If nobody in my story ever flirts with anyone on any level, I might want to take a second look at things.

Profanity—Yet another ugly fact of human nature. We make emphatic, near-automatic statements sometimes. We react verbally. We throw out insults. How we swear and respond to things says something about us. Phoebe doesn’t swear like Wakko, and Phoebe doesn’t swear in front of Wakko the same way she swears in front of her mother. Or maybe she does. Either way, again, that’s telling us something about her and making her more of an individual.

Fun fact—some profanity is regional. The way we swear and insult people here is not how they do it there. So this can let me give a little more depth to characters and make them a bit more unique. I mean, I had a character who often shouted “tarnation” or “pissbucket!”

Accents– Speaking of regional dialogue… Writing characters with accents. There are a handful of pros out there who can do truly amazing accented dialogue, yeah, but keep that in mind—a handful. The vast majority of the time, writing out accents and odd “language” tics will drive readers and editors nuts.

I usually show accents by picking out just one or two key words or sentence structures and making these the only words I show it with. Just a bare minimum. Like most character traits, my readers will fill in the rest.

Dialogue Tags—I just talked about this a few months ago, so we won’t spend long on this. I don’t always need to put Yakko said, Dot replied, Wakko said, because after a point it should be apparent who’s talking. Plus with less words, dialogue gets leaner and faster. Tension builds in the exchanges because the reader isn’t getting slowed down by ongoing reminders of who’s talking.

Names—Related to those dialogue tags, if I don’t need names around the dialogue, I need them even less in the dialogue. Pay attention the next time you’re on the phone with someone. How often do they use your name? How often do you use theirs? Heck, if my friends call my cell phone I know who it is before I even answer—and they know I know—so I usually just say “Hey, what’s up?” We don’t use our names, and we definitely don’t use them again and again in the same conversation. If I’ve got two established characters, it’s really rare that they’ll need to keep using each other’s names. Especially if they’re the only ones there.

Monologues – Here’s another observation. Most of us don’t talk for long. We don’t give lectures or monologues. We tend to talk in bursts—two or three sentences at best. When I have big blocks of dialogue, I usually think about breaking them up. Is this person just talking to themselves (see above)? Is nobody there to interrupt them with a counterpoint or question or a random snarky comment? Is this monologue even necessary? Does it flow? Could I get all this across another way? Is this a time or situation where Yakko should be giving a four-paragraph speech? Especially if it’s the fifth or sixth four-paragraph speech…?

Cool lines— Our latest ugly truth (so much truth in this rant)—everything becomes mundane when there’s too much of it. If everybody can sink a basket with a hook shot from the three point line… sinking a basket isn’t that impressive, is it? If everyone can fly, being able to fly doesn’t seem like such a big thing, does it? As a wise supervillain once said, when everyone’s super… no one is.

The same holds for dialogue. We all want to have a memorable line or three that stands out and sticks in the reader’s mind forever, but that’s the catch. They’re memorable because they stand out. They’re rare. If I try to make every line a cool line, or even most of them, none of them are going to stand out. When everything’s turned up to eleven… well, it’s all at eleven. It’s monotone.

Exposition—Remember being a kid in school and that one teacher who just read right out of the textbook? Just raw, boring facts poured out in front of you, often without a lot of context? That’s what exposition is like to my readers.

Simple test. If a character ever gives an explanation of something the other characters in the room should already know (or my reader should know)… cut it. Seriously, just slice it out and see if it really makes that much difference. If nothing gets tripped up and things move faster…

“As you know…” – Closely related to exposition. I’ve mentioned this once or thrice before. I need to find every sentence or paragraph in my writing that starts with “As you know” or one of its cousins. “As you may recall…” “You all know…” Once I’ve found these, I need to delete them.

Think about it. A character saying “As you know” is openly acknowledging the people they’re talking to already know what’s about to be said. I’m wasting time, I’m wasting space on the page, and I’m wasting my reader’s patience. If I’ve got a rock-solid, lean-and-mean manuscript, I might be able to get away with doing this once. Just once. Past that, I need to get out my editorial knife and start cutting.

Listen to It—You may have seen the suggestion to read your manuscript out loud to help you see how things flow. Personally, I think this works great for catching errors, but not as good for catching dialogue issues. Since I wrote these lines, so I know how they’re supposed to sound and what they’re supposed to convey. When I read them aloud, there’s a chance I’ll be reading things that aren’t on the page, if that makes sense.

So if you’re worried about dialogue… get somebody else to read it out loud. A real person, not a text-to-voice program. Just a few pages. Let a friend or family member who doesn’t know it read it out loud and see what they do with it.

And there you have it. A big pile of tips which should help your fictional dialogue seem a little more real. Fictional-real, anyway. Not real-real.

Next time…

Holy crap! WonderCon is this week! Like, tomorrow! If you’re going to be there, I’m doing a Friday night panel called Neighborhood Nightmares, a Sunday afternoon session of The Writers Coffeehouse, and a later-Sunday autograph session. Plus I’ll probably be wandering the floor before/after those. If you’re going to be there, please stop by, say hello, ask a question or two!

Anyway… next time here, because it came up on Bluesky… I’d like to talk about twists.

Until then, go write.

I though I’d talk about something utterly unbelievable.

No, seriously.

Most of you have probably heard of willing suspension of disbelief. It’s when my readers (or moviegoers or whatever) are willing to overlook or ignore obviously wrong or just plain impossible things for the sake of enjoying a story. It’s a deliberate, often unconscious decision to… y’know, just go with it. We know super-powers aren’t real, but we can still enjoy Wonder Man. Ghosts aren’t real either, but I’ve really been loving School Spirits. Dragons? Also not real, but people keep lining up for Westeros-related stories. Heck, kaiju make no sense whatsoever. None. They’re 100% impossible, on so many levels. But people keep heading out to see Godzilla movies.

The catch, of course, is that this is willing suspension of disbelief. But if I’m not careful, I can push things in my story a little too far and my readers are suddenly no longer willing to suspend their disbelief. It hits a point where they just can’t ignore all the cracks and cut-corners and missing chunks and then… the whole thing comes down.

When that suspension of disbelief starts to crumble—or if you prefer, when disbelief starts to grow—I think it comes from two specific directions. One is from elements within my story. The other is from characters in my story. Let me talk about both of these for a few moments.

If we’re talking about I think genre stories tend to be the immediate targets when we talk about willing suspension of disbelief. Sci-fi. Fantasy. Horror. Genre tends to have a lot of the elements I was talking about earlier—super powers. Ghosts. Monsters. So it’s the easy thing to point at when we talk about suspension of disbelief because they’re easy things to, well, not believe in.

Now, granted, yes, some people just won’t believe this stuff no matter what. We’ve all seen that reviewer who begins “Well, I picked this up even though I never like horror… and now I remember why!” It’s possible for folks who don’t like a genre to tolerate a genre, sure. Just keep in mind, what seems like a little ask for another reader is going to be much harder for them to let slide. Their block of disbelief is going to be calving off massive chunks of disbelief like a glacier dealing with global warming.

I’m saying this just as a reminder– we can’t do anything about these people. If they happen to pick up one of our books, it is what it is. Let’s not worry about them too much.

But even for people who do like these more fantastic elements, there comes a point where I’ve pushed things too far. Maybe I’ve crossed one too many genres. Perhaps I brought in an element too late in the story that makes too big a change. Whatever it is, eventually there’s a beat, a moment, a thing where I’ve just gone too far. I’ve seen John Scalzi call this point “the flying snowman”—that we can accept a snowman who comes to life, sings, eats food (hot food, even), but hang on now he’s flying? Seriously? Oh come on…

Something I’ve talked about here a few times is that stories have to be believable. There needs to be a grounded world my readers can understand. That includes stories set in medieval fantasy valleys, gigantic space stations, and even a world just like ours except no one’s ever done anything about that serial killer who lives across the lake by the old summer camp. Whatever my setting is, it has to be something a reader can—on some level—understand and believe characters can exist in.

Take that giant space station. We all inherently understand the nature of a space station—even a very advanced one—and why it might need different crew members. Maybe even a lot of crew members. We can understand why it’s located out here on the fringes of space, working like a sort of interstellar lighthouse—or maybe a watchtower? Very isolated research? Artificial gravity isn’t a wildly new idea. Neither are supply runs or some form of food synthesizer or an oxygen generator. Look at that. A bunch of very understandable, very believable things about our space station, but still leaving us lots of room for weird, new things we don’t understand. Make sense?

Three quick notes to this. First, I personally try to resist the urge to give normal, familiar things new “genre” names unless it’s going to be really clear what they mean. Too often this is just, well, a lazy way to worldbuild. Most folks will get frustrated if they read through a hundred pages of jha’krynn forging and training before it becomes apparent a jha’krynn is just what people call a shield in this world. Plain old, normal on-your-arm shield. And they should be frustrated. Maybe even a little annoyed—I’ve been making them do extra work for no reason. And that frustration means they’ll be a lot more judgey going forward (maybe even looking back), and less likely to suspend their disbelief.

Second note ties to that other thing I mentioned. A world just like ours except… Some folks think “the real world” means I don’t have to worry about things being believable or relatable. But the truth is, unbelievable things happen in the real world all the time—things that would be pure nonsense in fiction. And a lot of what’s relatable to me in my life would probably be completely alien to a little girl growing up in Aswan. And the life of an undercover NSA agent would probably seem baffling to me. Depending on what my story is, it’s still going to need that grounding.

Third and last. My readers are going to have a sense of what’s possible in my world. Keep in mind, possible can still include highly unlikely. The thing is, knowing what’s possible means they know what’s impossible, and if something comes across as impossible… well, that’s another big chunk off the ol’ disbelief block.

Now… remember, way up there when I mentioned the two directions? Let’s talk about the other one. The Roman numeral II in our outline. Or probably a B, thinking about it.

Anyway…

The other thing that can wear down my willing suspension of disbelief is my characters. If they’re doing or saying unbelievable things, or if they’re just inherently making someone think “I can’t believe anybody would…” I mean, my readers won’t be willing to suspend their disbelief long for someone like that. Honestly, how many found footage movies hit that point where we’re basically yelling at the screen “WHY ARE YOU STILL HOLDING THE CAMERA?!?”

Characters have to be believable. They’ve got to be consistent—or at least consistently inconsistent. I can’t have them acting and reacting in whatever random way happens to move my plot along. My readers need to see motives they can understand. Natural-sounding dialogue. Relationships that are somehow relatable to the average person.

The reason this is important is because when my readers believe in my characters, they’ll believe in what happens to my characters. If I believe in Yakko and Yakko ends up turning into a werewolf, then—by extension—I have to believe in werewolves. If I believe in Dot and she runs into a dragon, oh holy crap, it’s a dragon!

Okay this is getting silly-long so one last tip. It’s silly to point out, but one thing that whittles away at suspension of disbelief really fast is getting facts wrong. If I tell you that WWII ended in 1964 (the same year the first war with Iran began) or that there’s only one T in Manhatan, your brain is going to automatically shift into denial mode for a moment. because you know these aren’t correct. It’s a little slip in that willing suspension of disbelief, and after too many slips…

Yes, there might be a reason my character thinks there was a war with Iran in 1964 (he’s an idiot) or that Manhatan only has one T (we’ve slipped into another universe). But this is yet another one of those I need to be careful/ every story is different things. If I let too many of these build up without an explanation, I’ll hit a point where it doesn’t matter if I have a reason for them or not, because my reader just can’t believe any of this anymore.

There’s also a flipside to this, one that takes a bit of empathy. I can also blow the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief by using completely accurate facts that are unbelievable. There are lots of websites and YouTube channels that’ll tell you about amazing true coincidences or billion-to-one events that actually happened. If I’m basing a chapter—or a whole story—around these things, it could cause problems.

I’ve mentioned this before, but years back I interviewed a filmmaker who’d just finished a documentary about the botched 2003 invasion of Iraq and the even bigger mess that came after it. One of the things he told me was how much material he’d left out of the film. There were so many incidents of complete and utter incompetence in the year after the invasion nobody would’ve believed them. Because they were just so goddamned unbelievable. He told me a few during the interview and I kept saying “What? What?!?”

Oh crap. Wait. One more thing. The for-real final tip, kind of going off that last bit. I’ve said this many, many times before but… being true doesn’t matter. Once it’s on the page, all anyone cares about is if it’s a good story about believable characters. Whether or not the events and characters are real is irrelevant. Too many folks see “true” as some sort of pass that means readers have to accept things. But if I’ve got a true story that’s just completely unbelievable… it means I’ve got a completely unbelievable story. Simple as that.

Y’see, Timmy, that’s what it all boils down to. When your suspension of disbelief is broken, even for a moment, it breaks the flow of my story. The more often the flow’s broken, the harder it becomes for my readers to be invested. And eventually it’s just easier for them to go sit on the couch and get caught up on Starfleet Academy or School Spirits or something.

So keep it believable. Or as believable as you can.

Next time I’d like to rant a little bit about ranting a little bit.

Until then, go write.