Suspension of Disbelief: Do Your Characters Make Sense?

Every writer has different strengths; but we all need strong characters.

If you ask most writers, they will feel they have a specialty in their craft, or at the least, a facet of writing they enjoy the most. What kind of writer are you?

A plot proponent?

Is setting your secret sauce?

Or is a coherent theme your perfect theatre?

Regardless, every story needs a vessel through which these separate elements play out: your characters.

And in my view, every story requires, at bare minimum, for your characters make sense―both in who they are and what they do.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Amongst all the fiction I have edited, one major writing issue jumps out at me, and that is characters who don’t feel believable.

After all, making an entire person from scratch isn’t an easy feat!

Whether your characters are inspired by muses or you fabricate them completely, chances are you want them to jump off the page and stick in people’s brains. For this to happen, your characters need to suspend your reader’s disbelief.

If you’ve never heard the term “suspension of disbelief” before, it essentially means this: your reader is able to put aside their critical mind in…