Make Believe?

Every kid loved the land of “make believe” in Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, a place where you can go and experience all kinds of things that you wouldn’t in the real word, a child’s paradise! So maybe believable means that one can believe in that which is not realistic as long as they are thoroughly convinced to do so. Since I love thrillers and mysteries if you can convince me to believe in a character, no matter how macabre or out there it works for me. In fact, I want to stretch my imagination a bit when I’m reading, it is so passé to guess what will happen next and be right on target, I’d rather be thrown for a loop. When a writer builds a character they are likely coming from past experience in their own lives or someone they knew or wanted to know. Sometimes characters don’t make sense in a story which brings in the “believable” factor. In Daphne DuMaurier’s novel Rebecca she chose not to name his new wife, I didn’t even realize it until after watching the movie a few times! It was then I realized it gave the story that little “something” that it needed to add to the mystery of the novel, similar to not having any picture of what Rebecca looked like, only the descriptions provided throughout the text.

As far as making a plot believable the writer has more leeway. As a reader I am more concerned about the ending of a story, you can tell when more time was spent building the body and less attention was paid to the conclusion. This doesn’t mean the plot is not important. Now that I think about it maybe it’s a badly chosen plot that causes the writer to rush an ending, because they run out of ideas and struggle with creating an authentic end to their story.

This certainly gives me more food for thought when I think about character, plot and believability in my own writing.

Cindy Davis