Last post, I touched on Emotional Truth, one of the two aspects of verisimilitude critical to great storytelling. Before diving into the second aspect, Story Logic, I’d like to shed light on something that’s inspired my thinking about the semblance of truth in storytelling.
The term “suspension of disbelief” is tossed around easily and often. To understand what Samuel Taylor Coleridge meant, consider his full phrase, “that willing suspension of disbelief,” which means, as audience, we willingly choose to set aside doubt and skepticism in order to enjoy the story.
In his 1817 Biographia Literaria, Ch 14, Coleridge declares he will conjure fantastic characters, creatures and worlds successfully because he will write them with “a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
To me, this is one of the most insightful and beautiful passages in literature. Poetic Faith refers to the unspoken contract between author and audience, where the audience agrees to fully commit to the story journey if, and only if, the author—screenwriter, director, playwright, novelist—has rendered their fictional world with care and fidelity.
This means that the actions of the story, no matter how fantastic, follow a logic and that the longings, fears and decisions of the characters feel real, measured instantly by our knowing and the depth of our human experience.
This is the secret of the stories we love.
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