A Matter of Suspense

I signed up for Netflix last week. It’s a two-week trial, but I know I’ll keep it. When I was married (still am, technically) we lost the desire to go to see movies. What’s the point of spending twenty bucks on tickets and getting raped for what amounts to a scoop of popcorn and two cups of bubble-y sugar water, only to sit in a room full of rude, noisy people who can’t shut up when the actors are talking?

And then, while we had the time and energy to sit and stare at the TV set, we didn’t want to set our favorite shows aside to watch movies. At least not that often.

But now I’m in a determined effort to catch up on seven years of missed movies!

And that brings up what I’ve been thinking about for the past few days, probably the most important element to making a successful book or film or television show: the suspension of disbelief.

People have been writing fiction and other people have been lapping it up since the first ink was set to papyrus in the Old Testament, and beyond. What magic it is that a skilled wordsmith can use the same letters as you and I, the same words in our collective vocabulary, and spin a tale to make our hearts race or our hair stand on end, or bring us to the heights of laughter or the depths of sorrow!

We’ve all been there; anyone who can read has read, and has experienced a world of sensations beyond anything we’ve done, yet entirely contained within our brains!

I’ve never watched the action-adventure serial 24 on television. I’ve only experienced the program at my whim via DVD player. I know the people I see on the screen are merely highly paid actors following a script. I know that the setting is a mocked up room within a much larger room, and that none of the computers or phones are hooked up to anything beyond the walls and in the real world. I know that the scenarios presented to me are the products of a group of very active and clever imaginations and, further, stretch the boundaries of plausibility. And yet, the story that script tells the actors to tell, the scenarios in which the characters find themselves, grab me by the throat and pull me in! The program can be addictive, and I will sometimes sit and watch four episodes back to back! On a school night!!

At what point in the expository scenes do we accept the terms of the tale? What determines the breaking point where an implausibility is ignored or is dwelled upon, where the story is moved along or it is ruined for us?

As an aspiring writer I find fascinating the challenge to imagine a scenario that is interesting enough, and to string together the right combination of words in the right order to bring a reader into my story and ignore its flaws and stretches and fantasies, and to BELIEVE. And to stay to the end.

May I someday meet that challenge.