Thinking About Believability

I don't believe it! We're kicking off season two by thinking about believability, how to make writing feel authentic and why it may or may not matter. There's a plethora of terminology to demystify, including emotional reality, internal logic and the suspension of disbelief.  So if you're worried about audience incredulity, this is the place to be!

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Music by Chris Stamper
Illustration by Matt Miles https://www.instagram.com/datmattmiles/
Design by Adam Smith

Transcript

Hello podifiers, the Thinking About Writing podcast is back. Production was slightly delayed due to some technical issues. My microphone was acting up a bit and as a highly trained sound fixing person I was using lots of tools like, a chainsaw, but then it turned out the problem was the microphone was actually made of jelly. But a magic pixie conjured up a new one for me, and here we are. Say, does that questionable explanation make you think about the importance of believability when writing. Because this episode is all about believability. Unbelievable!

We’ll be looking at such topics as plot holes, internal logic and emotional reality all as part of understanding the suspension of disbelief. It’s a terminology bonanza! So come on, you unbelievably lovely lot, let’s set some realistic expectations, have an authentic half an hour and believe in our ability to do some thinking about writing.

Thinking About Writing Blatantly Believability

Hi, I’m Robin Taylor, comedy writer and script editor unextraordinaire, and this is Thinking About Writing, the podcast which aims to explore and demystify some of the terminology and techniques involved in script writing. It’s for anyone who’s writing, or thinking about writing, for film, audio, theatre and television, as well as anyone who enjoys listening to the sounds of a voice. Gutten tag!

So yes, believability. A useful quality when trying to convince people that what you’ve written isn’t a load of old nonsense. It can help in shaping a story by considering how or why events can occur in a believable manner. Because essentially writers are asking their audience to feel engaged and involved in the story they are being told, and one way to help them in this is for the story to make sense, and certainly avoid choices which bring the overall credibility of what’s happening into question. 

Yet when we talk about writing, the focus isn’t necessarily on belief but rather the suspension of disbelief. But what the hell is that?

Thinking About The Suspension of Disbelief.

Suspending disbelief is a term that can come up now and then, and on the surface it is a bit of a funny expression. You might think why not just say believe? It’s like, rather than saying you want the audience to be entertained by a script you’re trying to prevent their unenjoyment. But there is meaning and nuance to the expression. There are rare pieces of culture which aspire to making the audience believe what is happening, for example, The Blare Witch Project is presented as something truthful, the audience are invited to imagine that this is real found footage happening to real people. Most culture though is evidently not real. 

Some work aims for authenticity more than others, which can happily point out their own inauthenticity, but it’s always evident this is not a genuine moment in time. When we see a play we know we are in a theatre, not a real place, that these are actors performing and that they are speaking words which have been written for them. 

To suspend your disbelief is to forget all of this knowledge for the duration of the spectacle, so that we can be engaged and even emotionally affected by this story, ultimately enjoy it and not storm the stage to perform a citizen’s arrest when a character is murdered. Otherwise you could be the kind of person who thinks “What’s the point in stories, they’re all fake. I’m off to enjoy something real, like the news or Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” 

So the writer is in a position where they can assist the audience in this disbelief suspension, by trying to avoid writing which jars or irks by being too unbelievable. Which is where logical understanding comes in.

Obviously anything which feels harder to believe risks making the audience response shift from rapturous enjoyment to grumpy arm folding and a snorted “Well that wouldn’t happen.” And this can be caused by all manner of issues, but it can often come under the blanket term of plot holes.

Thinking About Plot Holes

Plot holes can elicit very powerful responses. There are sections of the internet dedicated to pointing them out jeering with incredulity at the fools who included them. Obviously production errors have nothing to do with the writing - if a Starbucks cup pops up in your fantasy drama or a continuity mistake means a character keeps switching from right to left handed, it’s unlikely the writer suggested that in the script. 

If a script overlooks something though, such as a character being bumped off in one scene then popping up unharmed with no reference to their death a few scenes later, that isn’t a plot hole so much as a major mistake, and hopefully the writer will pick this up in a proof read, or someone eagle eyed will point it out. Though in that example it’s not so much eagle-eyed as just… eyed.

Where plot holes are relevant to the writing process is when, as the name suggest, something is essentially missing, there is a hole in the logical mesh of the story. Much like with a knitted jumper, a hole can easily grow and potentially spoil, if not pull apart, that cozy knitwear your beloved granny lovingly put together for you. 

One typical way an audience can respond to a situation is to ask “Why wouldn’t they just…” If there is a simple, logical response to a predicament and a character doesn’t take it, there arguably ought to be an explanation of why that’s the case. The question is then how is that explanation given. A classic example might be a horror film where the characters are inevitably endangered. As the heroes flee the axe wielding maniac, the audience might wonder why said heroes don’t simply call the police. 

Hence many of said films features an early moment where someone frustratedly waves around their mobile phone and realises there’s no service out here. Yes, it’s cliche, but it deals with an oncoming problem ahead of time, and we can argue it contributes to a general feeling of isolation and the removal of modern safety nets. More creative solutions could be found, indeed, but the point is without any such explanation the nagging question of “But why?” can come into play.

The term plot hole can be thrown around too liberally though when an audience simply hasn’t perceived something which is in the script. As a writer it’s beneficial to try to preempt such responses by questioning if what you’re trying to convey is clear or sometimes even present. Someone may ask of a script “But why does that character do that?” and you may have a fully formed and logical explanation, which is good, but the next question may be “And does the script show that?” There is a chance all the reasoning and rationale is clear in the writer’s mind, but if this isn’t communicated in the writing, even in suggestion or implication, how are the audience to know without big leaps of guessing? And how that is conveyed to the audience is covered in our episode on Show Don’t Tell. 

That isolated cabin in the woods scenario speaks to a bigger concept which often pope up in writing, which is the idea of the trap.

Thinking About Traps

As the old edict goes, drama is conflict, so characters are often placed into uncomfortable or unpleasant environments, and again the audience may ask, why wouldn’t they just leave. With our horror friends there could be a practical explanation - the only bridge back to civilisation has collapsed! But often these justifications are more convincing when tied into emotional reasoning. We sometimes talk about the classic idea of the trap or the box, the reason why the characters stay where they are and won’t or indeed can’t leave. 

This is particularly relevant to situation comedies where the situation cannot change, it needs to be maintained, and a prime example is Steptoe and Son. Harold lives in a grotty junkyard with his disgusting father Albert and dreams of bettering himself. So why doesn’t he just leave? Well Albert often sabotages Harold’s efforts, can emotionally manipulate him by appearing pathetic and helpless, and perhaps Harold does not really have the potential or self belief to be better than a rag and bone man. Underpinning this is the natural familial bond of a father and son, and the sense that they only really have each other. 

So it makes logical sense, it’s believable that Harold wouldn’t walk away and never look back. We can presumably all think of situations where we’ve been in jobs we hated but stayed to pay the bills, in hopes it would improve or out of comfort in the known rather than uncertainty in leaving. Some stories are about escaping the trap, in which case it’s a matter of building up the believability of why the last straw has been broken and the character decides they can’t take any more.

So a trap needs to be convincing and compelling otherwise the audience might not believe it, or simply not care. If a trap can be broken free of, that can simply mean the end of an idea, and running away from a situation can mean avoiding the drama, which is a shame. Conversely if it seems that characters in held in a trap without reasoning then it can feel forced. Yet this speaks to necessity in writing.

It’s possible that someone asking “Why did that happen?” could be given the glib response “Because the script needed it to.” And while that shouldn’t be your go to explanation, there is an element of pragmatic truth in it. If our tormented horror characters don’t go down into the spooky badly lit basement because they heard a noise, and instead stay in the well lit ground floor or just nope the heck out of this creepy place, the story potentially loses all its momentum or comes to a complete stop. 

It might feel illogical for them to investigate, but you can also reason that they don’t know they’re in a horror film, they didn’t see multiple characters get gruesomely decapitated already and can’t hear the eerie background music, and if someone heard a noise in their house, their first assumption wouldn’t be it’s a terrifying abomination from the hell dimension, or whatever. If something occurs in a script purely because it needs to and it’s evidently been awkwardly shoved in, then the solution can be to find a convincing explanation for it, go back into the script, weave in a justification to a necessary level. Build up some depth and detail about what’s occurring. Oh my goodness, that’s the next subject, let’s split up and investigate further.

Thinking About Depth and Detail

So we began to see that believability isn’t just about how long someone can breathe underwater or how long a flight to New York takes. It’s about how the composite parts of the script come together so that everything feels convincing. Think of it this way, say you’re in the last quarter of your script. The hero Caruthers is being pursued by his arch nemesis and attempting to escape. The only way out is through a small vent. Now, really you want a showdown with the nemesis, so escape would prevent that. Caruthers could simply refuse to climb through the vent, but that would leave the audience frustratedly asking “Why didn’t he just climb through the damn vent.” 

In the moment Caruthers could declare he’s claustrophobic. That is an explanation sure, but to introduce it now could feel like you wrote yourself into a corner and plucked an idea out of nowhere to save yourself. So to remedy that, you could have a moment earlier in the script where he has a claustrophobic panic attack. But in isolation this could feel incongruous or like it is literally just there to set up this vent dilemma. So giving the panic attack more significance in the moment could be the solution. Can he not get in a lift? What impact does that have? Is he mocked or pitied, inconvenienced somehow, or incredibly fit because of the number of stairs he has to climb. 

At this point it’s possible to go further and ask is it necessary to explain how he developed this claustrophobia? Maybe, maybe not. But if we do, how do we learn about that? Does Caruthers explain it to someone, or do we see it in flashback? But then is it taking up too much time and focus just so we know why he can’t go through a vent? Does it become a fundamental element of his character? Does the story even become about overcoming his fears, so he eventually can crawl through the vent and escape? Or is that shifting focus and emphasis too much, as the writer gets too caught up in an elaborate fix. Indeed, if this is all becoming a massive unnecessary complication, is the answer simply to remove the vent, have another means of escape, or no escape route at all! This is how exploratory logic comes into play, thinking through the rationale of what is happening, finding ways to justify or circumvent potential inconsistencies in the reasoning. 

So if you do find yourself writing into a problem which needs a solution it probably shouldn’t just occur in that moment alone, but looking at the story as a whole and deciding what makes sense and helps deal with the problem. And yes, that does mean reassessing, adjusting and potentially adding to what you have already written. Sometimes it can be a jumping off point to expanding ideas and adding more depth, other times it may just lead to a simpler solution like eradicating the complication. It’s all a means of strengthening the logical fabric of the story and fending off those naughty fingers looking to poke holes. While the aim to have bullet proof reasoning can make a script robust, it can also be impossible to preempt every single hypothetical flaw someone could find, and it’s perhaps better to feel confident in your handling of the topic rather than worry too much about a doubting Thomas asking “But why didn’t that happen?”

In fact a bigger concern can be not when the audience asks why didn’t they just do that but rather, why would they do that? Or why did that happen? This isn’t so much about failing to identify a hypothetical issue, but creating an inconsistency which can cause a bigger jolt to the audience and take them out of the moment if they are unwillingly made to question the veracity of what they are witnessing. That was a pretentious sentence. There are two big tools which can help a writer avoid these kind of issues, emotional reality and internal logic. So let’s think about those.

Thinking about emotional reality and internal logic, as I just said.

Emotional reality, as the name suggests, speak to a truthfulness in character’s behaviours. It might be dramatic for them to scream and shout at the slightest provocation, but is that an authentic response? It could be, but that should ideally be based in the understanding of the character that the writer has built up. Can the audience empathise with someone so tightly strung? Is there evidence and reasoning behind why they behave the way they do. Do we know of something in their past that shaped them this way? Have we seen the circumstances which have pushed them to the end of their tether? This technique is based in psychological understanding of emotional states, influenced by the question of what someone would do in real life and why. Again it’s a two stage process for the writer, to first generate the emotional makeup of their character, then figuring out the optimum way to present that so the audience get that clear sense of the character and are never confused by their behaviours.

Of course strength and consistency does not necessarily equate to stoicism. Someone in your script can do something outside of their usual behaviours. We talk about people acting out of character in real life. But again the logical assumption would be that something has caused them to act this way. A loyal character could betray another, if there is solid justification. Ideally we would likely see them being mistreated or unappreciated, offered something which could persuade them to turn against another, even misunderstand a situation and consequently lash out. Then we can imagine that they could give a speech about how they were always overlooked, but without any witnessed demonstration of this, it could read a little hollow. But a blatantly signposted showing could make any twist all too obvious. An ideal is when something may take us by surprise in the moment, but our brain quickly adjusts to realise there were prior explanations which in context offers solid justification. A tricky thing to pull off of course. Yet we’re likely all aware of scripts where on a second viewing little moments make new sense, and people love that, don’t they?

Emotional reality is another tool for avoiding the story influencing and leading the characters, rather than the other way around, but it also taps into that need to comprehend human behaviour which is so vital to being a believable writer.

Internal logic springs from the idea that a writer essentially creates their own universe when they write something, which has the potential to follow whatever rules you wish. Of course if you are aiming for a realistic piece, then it is more bound by the logic of reality. But if it were a melodrama then within that reality characters could scream and fight and rant, as there is a general heightened emotionality which determines people’s behaviour. It may not be emotionally realistic, but it fits the vision being created. If it is a world where magic exist then people can fly and turn into frogs, but there is still logic and limitation to what they can and can’t do. (And this is the rare situation that another joke excuse of why something unexplained happens in a script, “A wizard did it” can be valid.) In something like Tom and Jerry, a cat can have a fridge dropped on his head and survive unscathed, so the logic is anything goes. With Paddington bear, a talking bear exists, but also, although that’s slightly unusual, he is still able to mingle with humans without them being particularly troubled by his existence. In the plays of Shakespeare, characters can deliver lengthy monologues which no other characters can hear. 

Problems arise when this internal logic is shattered. If one person saw Paddington and shrieked “How come this bear is talking, let alone eating marmalade sandwiches?!” it disturbs the created reality that no one else is bothered. If a character was seemingly addressing the audience then another character apparently heard them, the rules are broken (Though of course that does happen in Fleabag, in order to make the audience question what is happening - oops, there’s our weekly Fleabag reference, everyone stick fifty pee in the Fleabag jar) 

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is an interesting example. From the off we recognise this is a world where humans and cartoons co-exist. There are tensions between the two species, which influences relationships, but in general it’s the accepted status quo. While the humans are inherently mortal, mostly the cartoons are invulnerable, allowing all manner of harmless silly comedy violence. However, the introduction of the sinister dip shows there is a means of killing cartoons. This therefore creates jeopardy where there otherwise might be little - Roger needs to clear his name or face all too deadly justice. For the most part the logic is robust and easy to follow. There is a section where Bob Hoskins’s character Eddie enters Toon Town and is then effected by cartoon physics, which stretches the eternal logic a bit, but doesn’t quite break it. So this shows lines can be walked without breaking the logic, but it can be a tightrope which requires caution.

Ultimately the argument would be that, yes, a writer can do whatever they want, but once they’ve decided what that is, it’s useful to be consistent within it if you want to comfortably take the audience along for the ride and not have them wondering exactly what the rules are every moment. Of course, some times that might be exactly what you want to do, and shattering realities can have a profound effect… as long as it’s intentional. Social science suggests people are generally more comfortable with clear definitions and rules, and as ever such rules can be broken by art and writing, but this perhaps involves recognising that it may put some audiences off, but it can still appeal to the more subversive amongst us. Deviants! Lovely.

Thinking About Believable Dialogue

One other factor when it comes to believability is the idea of believable dialogue, which again can cause audience irritation. “People don’t talk like that, by jigged jingo!” as the youths of today say. Of course we can suggest in most scripted situations characters do not speak like real people. We humans umm and err, repeat ourselves, stumble over words. It could be tempting to replicate that and compose scripts full of people saying “Ummmm, yeah, like, well.” and so on, but a note of caution, as it’s not necessarily the nicest thing to read and when performed it can ironically feel more fake than the actors being allowed to add their own hesitancies as they see fit. This can often be seen when a line is interrupted “But you were going to…” “I know that!” Obviously it depends on the calibre of the actor. But as ever when it comes to such approaches, you do you. Arguably believable dialogue doesn’t mean realistic dialogue, but rather something which fits within our understanding of scripted speech. And there is room for lyricism, artistic interpretation and dramatic approaches in speech without making everything feel unbelievable. To restate a point I’ve made before, if the writer is trying to write realistic dialogue and it doesn’t ring true, that’s a concern. If they’re knowingly writing florid and unrealistic dialogue, well realism is less of a concern, evidently.

When we talk about unbelievable dialogue it’s often heavy exposition, check out the episode for Thinking About Exposition for more on that, where the words feel forced or where the hand of the writer is too apparent. But it can also be something which simply feels a bit off and not a great representation of how people speak. This can be clumsy or even just too dull and functional. We may also talk about the rhythm or flow of dialogue, how conversations progress, develop, escalate and conclude. Again this mirrors real life conversation and without it dialogue may feel stilted or that it’s simply leaping around from topic to topic without a clear intention. And yes, that is arguably natural, but if it is making the audience confused about why a conversation is relevant, that’s potentially unhelpful. So again, balance helps.

Often it’s necessary for the writer to work on their ear for dialogue, how to compose something which does emulate real life speech, or repaints it in a way which is basically interesting to listen to. And how might we do that? Well, through ear-wigging quite often, just listening to how normal people speak, the quirky turns of phrase they might use and recognising what is unspoken in the way we communicate too. So there you go, I’m encouraging you to intrude on other people’s private conversations, how reprehensible.

So that’s covered most of the bases on believability, time to ask how important it really is.

Does Believability Matter?

So believability allows the audience to cast aside their doubts for a while and be transported into a world which can interest excite and move them, so it can be important. But it goes deeper than simple factual accuracy. Characters shouldn’t be automated blobs, scurrying around to serve the plot. Their actions should be driven by understanding and emotional depth. So when we talk about believability in essence we’re really talking about understanding how human behaviour works and then replicating it in a convincing manner. And at the same time it’s a matter of appreciating audience interpretation, the way people understand and enjoy stories. Even if they may not express concern about the internal logic or the emotional reality, they can still feel when something is amiss, that it doesn’t ring true or it feels overly contrived. To allow them to feel immersed and engaged, to enjoy and consider, it’s a writer’s job to smooth as many of the problems which could prevent that as possible. 

Anything which feels particularly clunky or artificial can be honed and finessed so it simply isn’t a problem anymore. Yes, writer’s may make decisions and push characters in certain directions to create the plot or explore the ideas which interest them, but by thinking of these characters not just as pieces on a chessboard but fleshed out beings with depth it gives the moves they make all the more weight and believability. And that’s why it’s something worth thinking about. Oh my gosh, I’ve authentically reached that entirely natural conclusion, which must mean it’s the end of the episode.

So there we go, believability or consistency or logic, we thought about it, and it seems to be a good thing. Can you believe it? I can. Thanks as ever for listening, I hope you were able to suspend your disinterest, by which I mean you found it interesting. If there’s anything here you’d like to discuss then get in touch on the social meeds, @writing_pod on Twitter, there’s a Facebook page I set up somewhere, and our long winded email thinkingaboutwritingpod@gmail.com  Rate and review the episode if you’re that way inclined. Most people aren’t, but you might be! And join us in the future times for more crazy creative considerations. And in the mean time… I implore you to do some writing. Flesh out those characters, iron out those logic bumps and create a world we can all believe. If you’ve got the time. Okay, take care, bye bye.