#i'm SO close to doing a deep dive on the suspension of disbelief and its merit as a method of literary criticism

[shenyaanigans]

the journey of a writer is you begin writing just for the sake of writing and often hand wave details that aren't that important to you to get to the fun bits. then you decide you want to improve and you go through a rigorous process of thinking about lots of mechanics and abiding by sense and rationality, because the most damning insult to a piece of fiction is testing the reader's suspension of disbelief too much. this level of self criticism then colors the interpretation of other texts as well, where they are held to a particular standard where every detail must be perfectly logical, well researched, and contain no contradictions (cinema sins, if you will). nirvana is when you realize that doesn't matter and you go back to hand waving details that aren't that important to you.

#kat chats #i know i complained on my priv twitter abt smth like this but i just saw ANOTHER post of this caliber #i'm SO close to doing a deep dive on the suspension of disbelief and its merit as a method of literary criticism #spoiler alert i feel very strongly that if your criticism could be easily suspended through narrative buy in its not a valid critique #or at the very least the buck Does Not Stop at you not believing the author. you have to answer the question why #'it's not compelling because i'm not immersed' ok. why. what's broken the immersion #like. idk. sometimes there are interesting discussions to be had wrt narrative risk vs narrative payoff vs suspension of disbelief #and the fact of the matter is some narrative risk on the part of the author can lead to MUCH greater pay off #can lead to truly affecting art #and sometimes the narrative risk does not have a high enough reward to justify itself #sometimes this happens for only some people and other times this happens for large swathes of the population #shaping what literature we societally say is Good vs Bad #it's a good discussion to have in craft circles and to be aware of #but ultimately stories without narrative risk are almost meaningless. if they're even stories at all #and also sometimes your issue with suspension of disbelief comes down to pedantry #and forgive me but being a pedant does not make for good literary criticism #actually it makes you incredibly bad at it #you can't see the forest for the trees. you cant see the story for the extremely niche nitpicks that do nothing but buff your own ego #remind yourself that reading is not just a self indulgent exercise. you are entering a conversation where you have to listen for a long tim #and you must make meaning of all those words #you are not required to continue going through something that doesn't speak to you #anyways...