Suspension of disbelief

Suspension of disbelief is "a person's intentional setting aside of critical thinking, logic, or real-life expectations when experiencing a work of fiction, in order to better enjoy it and be absorbed into its narrative." Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase in Biographia Literaria (1817), recalling his half of the Lyrical Ballads project: to write supernatural characters so truthfully that readers would grant "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." The article also records Tolkien's objection in "On Fairy-Stories": he replaced suspension with "secondary belief," belief in an internally consistent fictional world, arguing suspension is only needed where a work has failed.

That is the craft reading worth keeping: readers will grant enormous premises, but once granted the world must stay internally consistent, the discipline behind worldbuilding and quieter registers like magical realism. Every broken rule spends the account down.