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Showing posts from March 20, 2009

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief or You Did WHAT Now?

A while ago, now, Maggie Stiefvater had yet another great post on Fangs, Fur & Fey about writing stories with supernatural elements, and the reactions of the characters to those supernatural elements. This is what she says: But in urban fantasy, we ask our characters to believe in the incredible in every book. We need them to believe before the end of the book, because in most cases, the plot sort of relies on the fact that they start dealing with the supernatural crapola that's going on instead of running to see a therapist. Once again, I totally agree with Maggie.* If a book is set in the "real world" and that "real world" is then infiltrated by, or discovered to have, various supernatural elements (be those vampires, or fey, or zombies, or whatever), the characters simultaneously need to react realistically, but also need to just accept that this is how things work now, and get to the plot already. It's a fine line. Too far on the "I don