Suspend Disbelief
AUTHOR: Jennifer Dunne

At the Dallas RWA conference, author Lynn Michaels gave an excellent speech on "Suspending Disbelief Through Character Motivation in Paranormal Romances." I highly recommend this tape to anyone who is struggling to make the reader believe in a word that is out of the ordinary.

She started her talk by posing a situation to the audience, and asking why the heroine chose to "fight" instead of "flee."

It's the heroine's job to fight.
If the heroine runs away the scene falls apart.
The reader wants to stay and find out what happens next.
Ms. Michaels then pointed out that these are reasons, not motivations. Using a reason will cause the book to hit the wall. Using a motivation will draw the reader into your reality.

In any given scene, the characters' motivations are foreshadowed by real actions. For example, if the heroine (who, coincidentally, is also giving a presentation at a romance writers' conference) looks at each person coming into the room, or that morning applied concealer to hide the circles under her eyes, the reader would believe that fear of who might attend the talk was keeping the heroine up at night. A scene where the heroine was motivated by fear would be believable.

Another key to making the actions and emotions of the characters believable is to show real reactions and details. For example, if you described the feel of a run slowly creeping up the back of the heroine's stocking, her sweaty palms and knocking knees, your reader could believe that the heroine remained behind the podium to "fight" because fleeing would let the audience of women see the run in her stocking, and besides, she wasn't sure her legs would support her if she tried to run.

Ms. Michaels proceeded to give a spell-binding example of the use of details. She explained that her heroine was afraid because every night, she dreamed she was giving this talk and the same dark and threatening stranger appeared in the aisle seat of the fifth row, but she'd checked everyone as they walked in and he hadn't come through the door, so she figured she was safe, until she looked up from her notes and there he was!

Every single head in the room swiveled to see who was sitting in the fifth row -- except the gentleman who occupied that seat, who blushed to the top of his balding head. The audience had been so captivated by her use of details that many us kept darting glances at the man throughout the rest of the talk, "just in case."

Ms. Michaels then explained that the heroine is the key to the reader's suspension of disbelief. If you can make your reader trust and believe your heroine -- that she is a real, live person, whose actions are logical and justifiable -- then the reader will trust that you, the author, have an explanation for all the weirdness you can cook up, and accept everything you throw at them.

Two of the fastest ways to destroy believability are to have the heroine (or hero) waste time in denial and belaboring a point. If your heroine finds herself transported to another time, she should figure out that she's not in Kansas any more the first time she looks for a bathroom or gets drenched in mud from a speeding carriage. To have her deny the truth longer than that just makes her seem stupid. Similarly, she needn't rework Einstein's equation of relativity to explain how she got there. It's enough to tell the reader that she did. If you did your job creating a trustworthy heroine, the reader will believe that it happened, because the heroine believes that it happened.

The technique Ms. Michaels uses, illustrated in her book, Nightwing, is to pack the real and the unreal elements into "snowballs" -- the fluffy soft snow of reality hides the hard shards of icy unreality until the iceball smacks into the hero's or heroine's stinging face. Then, she throws the snowballs at the hero and heroine so fast, they don't have time to doubt or deny what's happening to them. And neither does the reader.