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.

I had half a thought about networking I was going to expand on, but as i started to write it out I remembered I just ranted about networking, well… not that long ago, relatively speaking. And I don’t want you all thinking I’ve only got three or four pieces of writing advice. So I’m skipping ahead to talk about zombies. Sort of.

Honestly, I’ve ripped this one apart and put it back together three times now.

I’ve talked once or thrice here on the ranty writing blog about using obscure words and overly-elaborate language. Usually in the negative sense, because this kind of stuff often throws up barriers between me and my readers. Best-case scenario is they have no idea what I’m trying to say. Worst-case is they get frustrated, maybe because they realize I’m just doing this to try to look clever, and they stop reading.

Well, they stop reading my work, anyway.

This doesn’t mean I should never use obscure or specialist words. It just means I need to be better about how and where I deploy them. Over the years I’ve come up with two simple rules-of-thumb for using obscure words or jargon in my books.

First, have there be an actual reason to use an obscure word. And no, showing off my vocabulary isn’t an actual reason. These words should fit the character, the situation, the world I’m trying to build. It should make sense and sound natural (within these guidelines).

Second, define it in the story. There’s a bunch of reasons something might need to be explained in a story. Plot reasons. Character reasons. If there’s a real reason to use this word or term my reader probably isn’t going to know, there’s a good chance someone in my story doesn’t know it either. Which means I have a believable reason to explain it. Keep in mind, that explanation can come in a number of ways, but it should get explained in a believable way.

ProTip on that last bit. I don’t want to fall back on “as you know” to explain things. Or a thinly-veiled version of it.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s how I do it, and I’ve seen other folks do it, too. Again, just a rule of thumb, but if I’ve used glabrous to describe a character… maybe I should see if these two rules apply.

Want some examples?

Okay, well, this is where the zombies come in.

Shaun of the Dead begins in Shaun’s favorite pub where his (very-soon-to-be-ex) girlfriend Liz is explaining why things aren’t working out between them. One of her big reasons is that they don’t ever get to do anything alone because Shaun rarely goes anywhere without his best friend Ed (who Liz insists she likes), which leads to her often inviting her flatmates along (who Shaun insists he likes) which only exacerbates things. Which then leads Shaun to ask… what does exacerbate mean?

Look at that. First, we’ve got the added subtext that Liz is a bit out of Shaun’s league, casually using a word she thinks s pretty straightforward and he admits he doesn’t know. Then we have the explanation, because Liz is trying hard to be gentle here, and, you know, let’s stay on track with the breakup talk, okay?

Or how about this one– remember when Doctor Who introduced the word petrichor to millions of sci-fi fans? Short version, Amy and Rory were trapped in a TARDIS gone mad and had to unlock a door with a telepathic lock. And one of the “keys” was the word Petrichor.

So here we are again. First, it makes sense this would be a slightly obscure word (and a scientific one) because it’s essentially a password in the Doctor’s time machine. And it makes sense that Amy and Rory have to be told exactly what the word means because they’re dealing with a telepathic lock—it’s not just looking at the word on a screen, it’s looking at the word in their minds, at their understanding of it.

Y’see, Timmy, there’s nothing wrong with rarely-used, obscure words in my manuscript. I just want to use them in ways that strengthen my story, not one that pushes my readers away. Because pushing readers away is… well, it kind of defeats the whole purpose of this, doesn’t it?

Oh, and one last thing. I hate to be that guy, but… well, it is award nomination season for things that came out in 2025. Nebulas, Locus, Hugos. If you were they type of person who nominated things and wanted to put up God’s Junk Drawer, the Combat Monsters anthology, or even just my specific story from it “The Night Crew”… well, I’d be grateful.

Next time… okay, look, next time you’re just going to have to trust me and go with this next one, okay?

Until then, go write.

This is one of those things I’ve meant to revisit for a little while now. So, hey, let’s talk about the Children of Tama.

“Darmok” was one of the most popular episodes of Star Trek:The Next Generation, but on the off chance you don’t know it (it’s been *cough* thirty years, after all)–the Enterprise crew is attempting to open relations with an alien race called the Children of Tama. All previous attempts have come to a grinding halt because the universal translator can’t make sense of their language. It can be rendered in Federation English, yeah, but the words and sentence structure are just… gibberish. Determined to solve the problem, Dathon–the Tama commander—kidnaps Captain Picard, dropping the two of them on a hostile planet where they have to learn how to communicate and work together in order to survive. Through the course of this, Picard comes to realize Dathon’s language isn’t based on individual ideas and concepts, but on stories and metaphors. The Children of Tama wouldn’t say “I’m so relieved and happy to see you,” they’d say something along the lines of “Carol, when Zosia returns to Albuquerque.” It’s been impossible to properly translate the Tama language because the Federation doesn’t share their history and folklore.

In a way, all of us do this every day. We reference movies, TV shows, books, pop culture events, and then we stack and combine them. And we know people will understand us because they get the reference. It’s why we understand memes and reaction gifs and emojis.

Heck, want to know what an ingrained aspect of our language this is? When Bluesky first opened up, it didn’t have the functionality for gifs yet. So for almost a year, people responded to posts by just writing out things like “DiCaprioToast.gif” or “CasablancaShocked.gif.” And then the next step was (no joke) screenshots of Dathon from the “Darmok” episode describing various gifs. No seriously, that was a thing for a while.

Now, we also do this on a smaller scale. All of us have jokes and references that are only understood by certain circles. Coworkers. People who share a common interest. I may not get that programming joke, you might not understand School Spirits references, and neither of us are going to get those hardcore biathalon jokes. Pretty much every job has its own “inner language” and shorthand.

And sometimes those circles get even more intimate. Friends. Family. Even individuals. My gaming group has a bunch of things we all say that nobody else would comprehend. I’m in an ongoing group chat with a bunch of writers and we’ve got a few inside references none of you would get. And heck… my beloved and I have little things we say and do that nobody besides us would really understand (it’s how we’ll identify each other when the pod people/ body swappers take over). But to an outsider they could sound rude or confusing or like, well… gibberish.

Now, I’m willing to bet you all understand what I’m talking about here. The real question is, why am I bringing it up on the ranty writing blog?

A not-uncommon problem I see from some folks is they write dialogue loaded with references and figures of speech from their own personal experience. It might make sense within the writer’s personal circles, but outside readers just end up scratching their heads. And when this gets pointed out, the writers responsible for this issue will try to justify their words in a number of ways…

One is that their friends talk this way, and their friends are real people. Therefore, people really talk this way, and there’s nothing wrong with it. The thing is, as I’ve brought up here once or thrice before, “real” doesn’t always translate to “good.”

Two is they’ll argue this joke or reference is common knowledge. They’ll say the material is generally known– universally known, even– so the problem isn’t them, it’s the uneducated, unaware reader. This one’s tough, because it can be hard to agree on what “everybody knows” or even what’s generally known. If somebody honestly believes that everybody knows who won Best Original Screenplay in 1938, there’s not much you or I can do to convince them otherwise short of assembling a large focus group.

Y’see, Timmy, I can’t just write for my five closest friends. I mean, I can, sure, but not if I want to have some degree of success. I’m not saying my writing has to appeal to everyone and be understood by everyone, but it can’t be loaded with so many in-jokes and obscure references that nobody knows what I’m talking about.

This is one of those inherent writer skills that we all need to be good at. We need to keep learning and being aware of the world. Not just the world as we want to see it, not just the parts that interest us—all of it. Because if a large swath of my story assumes you know the entire Japanese voice cast of Parasyte, Vietnam-era military jargon, or why talking about squirrel voices counts as sexy talk… it probably means I’ve just knocked my readers out of the story.

And knocking people out of my story is never a good thing.

In conclusion, the Children of Tama eventually joined the Federation. Lt. Kayshon was chief of security on the USS Cerritos and everyone could understand him. Most of the time. Commander Ransom, the first officer, even learned some Tama phrases.

Also, nobody won Best Original Screenplay in 1938. The category wasn’t invented until 1940.

You didn’t know that…?

Next time, I’d like to talk about what was really going on when we met.

Until then… go write.

There’s a little maxim you may have heard– work smarter, not harder. If you haven’t, what it means is some folks solution to every problem is to throw 100% of their effort at it. They’d throw 110% at if that was possible. But it’s not.

Meanwhile, another type of person will look at the problem and figure out how much effort it actually needs. Do we want to do the time and work to dig through the mountain when we could go over it? Or around it? And then we can save all that effort and energy for somewhere we actually need it rather than burning out early on problems we could’ve just, well, easily gone around.

I mention that so I can tell you a few stories. There’s a theme. Trust me.

A bunch of you know I worked in the film industry for about fifteen years. Mostly television, some movies. Some of it’s even stuff you’ve heard of.

An all-too common problem I saw from beginning directors (and let’s be honest– also from plain bad directors) was an urge to make every single shot special. Every one had to be Oscar or Emmy-worthy. Didn’t matter if it was a wide shot, a close-up, a master, or coverage. Didn’t matter where it fell in the story. Didn’t matter what the day’s schedule looked like. Every shot of every scene required hours of set up and rehearsals and discussions and little tweaks and adjustments.

Now, on one level, yeah, this is sort of the director’s job. To make it all look good. But there’s a lot of nuance there. I can make an individual shot look good, sure. But does it fit with the last good shot? Does it fit with the rest of the scene? Is the editor going to be able to cut these shots together in a way that works within the filmic, visual language we all know on some level? Heck, does it even fit in the story I’m telling?

Plus, well… this is going to be an awful shock for some of you, but there are a few capitalist aspects to filmmaking. Yeah, sorry you had to find out this way. Making a movie costs money. It has a budget, and one way that budget’s expressed is in how long you have to shoot something. Spielberg can take a week waiting for the absolute perfect sunset his heroes can ride off into, but I’ve got today and it took us too long to get to this location so I might get two tries at this if I’m lucky and that’s it.

Anyway, what this meant for the crews I worked with was we’d get stuck with a new (or bad) director and they’d spend hours on the first two or three shots of the day. Like I mentioned above, it didn’t matter what they were or were they fell in the story. These folks would spend the whole morning working on whatever scene happened to be first up, and then we’d come back from lunch and surprise we still have 83% of today’s schedule to shoot in the last six hours of the day. So we’d rush through all that stuff—again, no matter what it was—and then come in the next day and, well, usually watch them do the whole routine again.

And this was really bad, from a storytelling point of view. The final film or TV episode would end up uneven because there was all this visual emphasis on random scenes that didn’t need it and often very little on scenes that did. Heck, once or twice I saw folks spend all this time on a random “pretty” shot and it wouldn’t even get used because there was no way to cut it in. These directors were so focused on making individual shots look amazing—no matter what that particular shot was—that they didn’t stop to think of the film as a whole.

Okay, this actually reminds me of another fun story (still semi-related). A few years after I got out of the industry, my beloved took me to an Academy screening of Pacific Rim (yeah, she’s super cool) and Guillermo del Toro was there talking about the movie. One of the things he stressed was even though he knew large swaths of the movie were going to be mostly computer-generated, he didn’t want any sort of wild, impossible “camera moves.” You know, the ones where the camera’s essentially whizzing through the air and then it loops down under the monster’s armpit to come back up between punches from the giant robot and then it circles around the two of them before pulling back for the panoramic shot of the city in flames as they fight? We’ve all seen some of those, right?

Yeah, del Toro didn’t want any of that in Pacific Rim. He understood those sort of visuals becomes distracting very easily, and once the audience is thinking about them they realize how impossible these moves are. And suddenly a big chunk gets lopped off their willing suspension of disbelief. They become consciously aware they’re just watching a movie rather than getting drawn into the story. That’s why the CGI camera shots in Pacific Rim are all set up as if actual, physical cameras are there doing regular, normal shots.

Now… I told you all this so I could tell you about Krishna Rao.

I worked with Krishna on a show called The Chronicle, back when the SyFy Channel was called the Sci-Fi Channel. Krishna started out in the crew (one of his very first film credits is on John Carpenter’s Halloween) and over the years worked his way up the ladder (seriously check out his list of credits), becoming a director of photography and quite often a director as well. Which is how I knew him. He had a loose rule he tended to follow when he was filming an episode. Honestly, I’m not sure he ever even put it into words, because it didn’t really click in for me until the second or third time I worked with him.

Krishna would only really plan on one pretty shot a day. That’s it. Once a day we’d have a complicated move with the camera dolly or some other elaborate shot that required lots of set-up and rehearsal. Everything else would be simpler, workhorse stuff– masters, overs, some coverage if it was needed. And I’m sure a few folks reading that may have some thoughts about “real” directors or the lack of art in American television or whatever. But here’s a few things to keep in mind.

Krishna made his schedule pretty much every day. Because he didn’t overload himself trying to do too much, he could make sure all his material fit together just how he wanted. He still had at least seven solid, very pretty shots per episode—that’s a cool shot every six minutes in a standard 42 minute television episode. And because he was being careful about using them, they always landed where they’d have the most visual impact.

And, sure, like any rule, sometimes he’d bend it a bit. He wasn’t against doing something fun or clever if he could do it quick. Sometimes we’d do two pretty shots in a day, maybe because of stunts or special effects. But these were always the exception, not the rule.

And his episodes always looked fantastic,

Okay, all interesting, but what does it have to do with books? With, y’know, our kind of storytelling? We don’t deal with visuals.

Y’see Timmy, something I’ve talked about a few times here on the ranty writing blog is pointless complexity. In structure. In dialogue. In vocabulary choices. I’ve seen stories with the most confusing non-linear structure just because the writer… felt like using non-linear structure. There are folks who scoff at using pedestrian words like blue or house or said. They spend all their time figuring out how to bury their story (or hide the fact that they don’t actually have one) behind layers of complexity.

To be clear, I’m not saying any of this stuff is inherently bad in and of itself. Personally, I love a story with a clever structure, an author who knows how to use their full vocabulary, and some twisty-turny character motivations. But a key thing is that when they do this—when they make a choice that isn’t the basic, workhorse choice—is that it’s actually making things better. This added complexity is an improvement, not an affectation.

And one other thing to consider. Sometimes… we need the simple stuff. We need the workhorse to just come in and deal with this paragraph or page. Because if I try to make every single sentence/ paragraph/ chapter the one that gets me an award, what I’ve really done is make a flat, monotone manuscript. If every single line is the utterly amazing artistic-piece-of-beauty one, they all have the same weight. Nothing has emphasis. To paraphrase one of great modern philosophers, once everything is super… nothing is.

So think about where you’re putting your effort. And how much of it you’re putting there. And how much you might want somewhere else.

Next time, I may blather on about the Children of Tama. Haven’t talked about them in a while.

Until then, go write.