On Giving Criticism: "Possibility" and "Suspension of Disbelief" · 6:33pm Feb 16th, 2019
So recently, I took part in a... unnamed scifi Youtube channel's Discord Server contest and learned some key things about how to give a criticism on a author/artist/media creator's ideas. I'm happy to name them if you ask me in private, but the reason for not naming them in public on this post will become abundantly clear when I get into this.
The competition was to design a faction, could be a country, state, military faction, you name it and write a description in 800 words. There would be a There were around 80 other contestants, including myself. First a jury of peers from the Discord server chose the top 10 based on how well written, creative, how well-established it was etc, I'm not entirely sure on the details of the judging process, but they also judged how "possible" that faction was, whether it could really exist in it's world, and whether the author managed to prove it.
I'm going to return to the topic of "possibility" later.
After this jury of peers, the two people who ran the Youtube channel, would then pick their top favorite from that list of ten and give feedback about the rest of the ten. Full disclosure here, I didn't win, someone else VERY deserving won and he did a great job writing and designing his faction. He won because of perfectly valid reasons and I think his was the best of the entries.
My issue with the two final judges - who had founded and ran this Youtube channel - was how they critiqued the top 10 factions, including my own (click here) based on what they saw as "possible."
What do I mean? Well, when I entered the competition. I obviously used the fantasy country I've been writing for my original story, and one its features is that it has a gender-equal society where men and women can serve in the military, own land, and property, and this is because the country's national origin myth where warrior men and women managed to defeat a bunch of vampires, and also because the country is perpetually afraid of another vampire invasion. The ensuing feedback followed these lines (not precise quoting here).
Judge 1: "Okay so I do like your faction, but mention the words 'gender equality' three times too many."
Me Thoughts: (Oh bugger, that's a good point.)
Judge 1: "Also, I don't think it's possible for such a country to exist."
Me Thoughts: (Wait what).
Judge 2: "Yeah."
Pausing here for a moment readers, what's wrong with this kind of feedback? Have a guess?
Well the feedback is... not useful for a number of reasons. Now, I admit, still feeling salty about this, but I'm not going to dwell on it any longer, instead I'm going to use it point out here that if you are criticizing someone or taking in feedback, there's a key thing you really shouldn't do.
You shouldn't criticize someone's world or character based on the idea of "possibility."
What do I mean by that? Well, in the creation of fiction, particularly fantasy, dystopian, and science fiction, there's no such thing as impossible, especially when we're world-building and in character creation. People make fiction because it doesn't obey all the laws of reality, and it shouldn't because well... it's fiction. Thus, when giving feedback on a work of fiction, arguing that "this society/world isn't possible" is the equivalent to saying to Harry Potter's wizarding world "magic can't exist." Or to Star Wars's world "the force is a hokey religion."
It's a very... I wouldn't use the word "stupid," but it's a very low-level, and unhelpful piece of criticism that tends to offend people instead of actually pushing them in the right direction. It's why I didn't like and I particularly disagreed with those two judges. I don't mind being told my writing had issues like, using the term "gender equality" way too much. That's feedback on my execution, which needs work, and which I need to improve. But when I'm told that an idea I had about my world "isn't possible"... well I don't know about how you would feel audience, but I feel bloody defensive because I put a lot of thought into how this idea was possible... Something actually one of those two judges agreed on, but still thought that this wouldn't happen... in fantasy world...
In summary, arguing that someone's world or characters is "unrealistic" or "impossible" is not helpful because in fiction, reality is fluid and dependent on the author's writing, not whether something has happened in our world or not.
However, I do understand why some people say that a world or character is "unrealistic" or "impossible". But they're not being accurate or helpful to the creator. A more helpful criticism to give to a creator, which accurately can explain why their audience feels that what they read/seen/heard is not possible" is the term "Suspension of Disbelief."
Suspension of disbelief, is the idea that audiences, when reading or consuming a piece of fictional media, suspend their need to question the reality of the world of the author/media, and just enjoy watching it play out in front of them. Authors need to maintain "suspension of disbelief" in order in order to ensure their audiences don't question their world or characters at every opportunity.
So, how does an author/creator maintain suspension of disbelief? In a variety of ways. Maintaining the world's consistency and continuity helps to ground the world and more recent seasons of MLP are a good example of this. Ensuring that the rules of the world are established early and the consequences for breaking them, are also useful, like in Garth Nix's The Old Kingdom quartet. Going into the geography and backstory of the society and people who inhabit the world also does a lot to flesh it out. See Christopher Paolini's later books in the Inheritance Cycle.
As an example, the famous Lord of the Rings author Tolkein here, he's very able to suspend his audience's disbelief because he's done so much world of his stories that he has every location and race wrapped up in it's own mythology and lore, that there's enough material to write another story.
But there are also subtler ways. Brian Jacques who wrote the anthropomorphic Redwall series, which was a childhood favorite of mine, didn't go so far to explain every detail of his world and it's backstory, but his writing did flesh them out in very rich imagery. Of course, his characters were mice, badgers, and walking talking animals, but I suspended my disbelief there because he so clearly described what his characters wore, how they looked, and even their personality as related to what they wore.
Point being, neither of these authors world are possible, or fall within the realm of possibility. Critiquing them, or analyzing whether their worlds are "realistic" or not is really stupid here.
As such, critiquing someone's "suspension of disbelief" is a far more useful tool to give feedback, mainly because it isn't criticizing the work's ideas, but it's execution. It's not that all ideas are great, but people get annoyed when their ideas are criticized, especially if you're criticizing them for not being realistic, and they are writing fiction.
Criticizing someone's ability to maintain "suspension of disbelief" is highlighting a flaw in execution. It points out that they weren't able to draw their audiences into a state where they can just accept the author's world at face value, which is the primary reason why one would think that a world wasn't "possible". It's thus far more useful because one, you don't offend someone for criticizing their ideas, two, you avoid that nasty pitfall of arguing someone's fictional world isn't possible.
Of course, if you can't believe this world you're reading, you can say ... "this doesn't make sense". There are some works that are apparently that bad. But saying "this breaks my suspension of disbelief" could be a more useful term.
Hope you enjoyed this longer blog post on writing. I'll write more, but when I can find a good topic to write on.
TLDR: Don't call someone's fictional world "impossible." Use the term "suspension of disbelief" to criticize their execution, not their ideas.
Wow, i would NOT have handled that as gracefully as you, and on a side note, isnt “possible” completely judged by an individuals opinions?
It's 'impossible' for a gender equal country to exist?
I think those two have some deeper issues they need to examine.
5014575
The funky thing is that Judge 1 is a woman. Judge 2 is a guy. Mind you, I'm quoting them roughly and only sections of it, because the feedback went longer... and honestly probably would have reflected worse on them because Judge 2 (the bloke) then said I didn't explain how my original country could have become gender-equal, which Judge 1 disagreed... but they clearly didn't agree about it and the gender-equality thing was the one they were hung up on the most. :P
I wish they could examine their gender issues... but I feel that they honestly really need to take a good hard look at HOW they criticize. I didn't mention it in the blog post b/c... yeah they aren't exactly portrayed favorably there, but then there was a worse incident in that discussion.
They were critiquing another finalist, an alternate-history country entry... b/c again, by the idea it wasn't possible. That one was cringeworthy to listen to because Judge 1 clearly didn't like the genre, and admitted it, which only indicated her inability to examine it impartially. Judge 2 did know some history... but again, his approach by looking at "possibility" instead of "suspension of disbelief" meant he was bashing on the concept and not the actual execution. As a historian, I found that aggravating because I know very well that history is a fickle, fickle thing, where anything could have happened, it just happened that particular way.
What i found astounding about the whole experience was... these were all fictional worlds... these two youtubers summarize and analyze scifi and fantasy factions for a living... but they clearly had issues giving useful feedback about original factions.
5014566
Indeed! I found it ridiculous, but well... it's their opinion, so I disagreed with it, but well... no point getting too angry and worked up about their opinion. I was a bit salty about it, though, and you also didn't see some of my earlier musings and writing for this post (see Albinocorn's reply above yours for more salt). I used the blog post to focus a lot of my salt into trying to write something USEFUL for people instead of bashing on them :P
I don't think the words suspension of disbelief works here instead use the word immersive. Immersion is the world working according to the predetermined rules of the said world. The force works in Star Wars because it is a predefined aspect of that world. Magic in Harry Potter works because that magic is predetermined within the world of Harry Potter. Suspension of disbelief is when the author breaks the rules of his own work in order to fit something in, otherwise breaking the immersion. A good example of this is someone being able to use the force or wield a lightsaber without any form of training.
So long as you don't break the predetermined "physics" of your world, you're at a good start.
As long as a fictional/fantasy world is internally consistent, how can something not be possible? So, Twilight Sparkle comes to earth and can do pony magic without hint of an explanation of how she can do so on a world not known for having magic might raise a few questions, but once "how" is explained, or revealed to be a mystery to the people in the story, then the story falls back into place. For example, the EQG world having Equestrian magic because Sunset, and later Twilight, disturbed something between the two worlds by using the mirror explains the "how" well enough to make it possible to accept that a world without magic suddenly has magic, even if we don't know the precise mechanics.
As for gender equality, or anything else for that matter, if an author over does exposition and hammers away on the point then readers will eventually be like "Yeah, yeah, we get it already..." but as you pointed out that's just an issue of technique. Not sure what the judges were on about. Is it possible that they didn't explain themselves as well as they should have?
5014904
It's highly possible they didn't explain themselves as well as they should have. Still, i feel they should have been... nicer about it. They were having fun, which was... alright, I found that nice, but I felt that it took a lot of effort for the finalists to get their stuff out and the way they went about giving feedback was... very abrasive.
Put it bluntly, I'm not participating in another contest of theirs. I won't go so far to unsubscribe from their channel, but it took a lot of time ofor me to write feedback that I could get from better authors :P
Oh and here's the faction I wrote in question, which is describing the country my original book is set in: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iVBTaRIKCGnYv4TAdGaEGLi1OtMdtKY3cWWjBwdsqrI/edit
5014607
Possibly, but I use Suspension of Disbelief because that's the term used by Wikipedia and tends to be used by other fields that I've studied in part like Theatre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
5014904
I came down here to say what you said so...