on Writers Helping Writers:

Readers come into a story eager to greet a new world, willing to temporarily suspend their belief in the way the world works to explore your vision of the alternatives. They place their trust in you to make it feel plausible. Could that character really turn into a fly? Would this one really give up stardom for her love?

Stories that fail to ring true break that trust. These brittle, hollow stories break reader immersion again and again before finally driving readers away.

It’s easy to blame the tinny, artificial quality of an unconvincing story on external factors: plot holes, improbable scenarios. We just don’t believe that the plot could happen that way.

But dip into any well-written speculative novel or a tightly crafted psychological thriller, and you’ll see that readers are keen to be led into all sorts of farfetched nooks and crannies. They’ll overlook a certain amount of hand-waving and even step willingly over minor plot holes as long as the characters are all in.

If characters forge a fathomable path into the story through their thoughts and reactions and emotions, readers will dive in alongside them.