Suspension of disbelief, subjectivity and world-building have always been coiled together in a single kernel for me. It evokes for me the Kelantanese Mak Yong where the narrator/performer gets the audience to suspend disbelief by just placing one foot on the stage and saying, “Now I am stepping into Kayangan”. That was his world-building, his suspension of disbelief. One gesture, one sentence, and the audience is transported.
It’s become clear to me that many disagreements on the subject of world-building come from very different positions on how writing should be done and different cultural understanding(s) of what it means to create a narrative/world. It’s like the whole plotter/pantser dichotomy — I will never understand why people need such binary positions when it comes to things like these. I tend to sit in-between such absolutes (happy member of the plantser club!) but I’m very definite about one thing: All creators build worlds. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about the neighbourhood you’ve lived in your whole life or if you’re writing high fantasy in a secondary world. You’re still world-building. My perspective is not just derived from the fact that I have been writing and building fictive worlds since I was 8 years old and declared I was going to be a writer (perhaps even earlier than that since I was staging plays with soft toys and dolls since I was around 4-5 years old). It’s also based on the many readings I’ve done of craft books and the fact that I’ve been teaching creative writing since 2011. Teaching and reading about craft helped me evolve my own practice. And I suppose it has something to do with “Uncle” John Gardner whose craft books I’ve used in my own pedagogy (even if I have furious arguments with those books every now and then, I mean don’t we all argue with Uncles, even honorary ones?).
In The Art of Fiction, Gardner writes:
Whereas the realist argues the reader into acceptance, the tale writer charms or lulls him into dropping objections; that is, persuades him to suspend disbelief. (p.24)
It is not merely in speculative fiction or magic realism or weird fiction that the line between what is believable and what is not needs to be suspended. In order to lull the reader into suspending disbelief, the writer needs to make other components surrounding that one element (to a certain extent) “believable”. In my subjective opinion this means that each work of fiction coheres to some sort of internal logic determined by the author whether consciously or unconsciously. This logic is of course entirely subjective because there’s always a point-of-view, a tone or an implied narrator (whether unreliable or reliable). Even if one was writing literary fiction set in the town in which one grows up, there will be many aspects the authorial imagination inserts into scenes of which other people might object, ways in which recollections grow foggy/inaccurate.
I designed entire exercises for my creative writing students so that they could play with believability and the suspension of disbelief in narrations set in their hometowns. The results range across genres but the lynchpin was always about the suspension of disbelief. Therefore — and I think this is a rule most storytellers have internalised, every time you write a story, you’re in essence building (or re-building) a world. Because human memory and apprehension of events is always subjective, every fictive world is by its very nature subjective. There’s of course a whole other kettle of fish to unload when it comes to subjectivity, whether you’re referring to Levinas, Althusser or looking at it from a feminist poststructuralist angle (Butler, et al). But for the purposes of world-building, I don’t think even Tolkien thought that the world(s) he was building was meant to be objective truth. Of course, there was the Ainulindalë but even that had an implied narrator and each item of the Legendarium had layers upon layers of versions found in his notebooks. Eternally transcribed, and re-created. That sense of palimpsests and re-creation can be found in the Book of Lost Tales I and II. Both in the actual texts and the footnotes/notes he left for himself show there was a spirit of play, and of exploration. That spirit can be found in the trilogy as well, revealing the multiple perspectives around the Wars of Middle-Earth and the different ways in which the different peoples of Middle-Earth experienced the after-effects of the same events. Which is why it is puzzling and often hilarious to me that the legacy of the LOTR has been decades of rulebooks and other aspects of what the Western SFF world see as “world-building”.
My perspective is of a cosmopolitan Malaysian who had lived in two countries by the time she was settled as a teenager in a sleepy agricultural town and discovered speculative fiction and Tolkien. There was no one to play TTRPGs with and in fact the thought of them was so exotic and distant (I have yet to explore that particular aspect of games, honestly). Instead, I wrote. Filled exercise book after exercise book with stories, notes, songs, maps, genealogical charts. In those days, we had to copy down every word our teachers uttered in class. Transcribing notes like secretaries. Making maps again and again to be corrected and yelled at (I had a teacher who would hit my palms with a ruler if my maps were less than perfect — and they often were). Because I had to draw multiple maps and charts for geography and history, I wound up making maps of my own worlds. Every thing I learned, I transferred that knowledge to the worlds I was building. But I never thought there was some objective “truth” to it. It was a game. It was an exploration. It was a way in which I could transcribe my lived experiences into an imaginary world. It was a way to hide from multiple traumas. But then it grew into something else. A way to understand myself and the world around me.
I think by now it should be clear that to me, world-building can never be anything other than subjective. To quote my old buddy Wittgenstein, “the limits of my language means the limits of my world”. And my whole life has been about expanding that vocabulary — but it’s not just lexical or syntactical. It’s that invisible language of how we apprehend the world around us, how we re-create those apprehensions. It is an ontological truth that can never be but subjective. And this returns me to another way in which my world expanded; I was thrown into studying and teaching performance studies because of several unexpected turns in my life/job-hunting journey. I learned about the world of the play, and fell headfirst into the Stanislavski System. The phenomenological aspect of performance and the ways in which worlds are created/re-created on the stage really helped my writing process as well. It allowed me to step into multiple worlds in order to introspect on believability — in more than one of my stories there’s an anchor object or two to help me create that believability for the reader.
How do you anchor a character (and the reader) in any given universe? Is it through concrete objects, through senses, through thought, through emotions? One may say, all of the above. I say, “You decide.”
Many things about writing are dependent on impulse and intuition. When we share an emotional truth or fancy, we do not need to be so deliberate about it. We can “eyeball it”. If consistency is not required in a narrative, then it is not. I adore Calvino’s writings because he rejects so many things that are considered necessary to suspend disbelief. As Gardner would put it: Calvino lulls you, he compels you into falling into his narratives. But I was never overly influenced by the “good old boys” of SFF. My saving grace was the fact that before most of the “good old boys” snared me, Ursula K LeGuin got to me first; I was reading Earthsea around the same time I was reading the LOTR. Before the Nazgul gave me nightmares, there was Ged’s shadow. Whatever (negligible) bad habits I learned while reading scores of “good old boy” sff books, I happily unlearned by the time I was reading Calvino, Eco, Borges, Allende and a whole score of other postmodernists and magic realists. These texts to me were a universe of subjective worlds being built across genres or any understanding of genre.
My Sesen short stories are in many ways my “proof of concept”. I hope to continue exploring that. It’s been years since I’ve made any maps or charts. I do minor conlanging but whatever I do is always at a secondary level to the stories I am telling. In many cases like in my Sesen short stories, every new short story reveals to me something new about the world and I add that detail to the ongoing “legendarium” of my world. And I don’t think I’m unique in that. Even created worlds need to be fluid, dynamic, flawed — like our world. How could we expect otherwise when our apprehending of our own reality could never be anything but flawed?
Curious to read my debut novel Watermyth? Here’s the information on how to purchase the ebook (and how to borrow it from the library) and the print edition.
My Sesen short stories will be collected together for the first time in Tower of the Rosewater Goblet. Stay tuned for pre-orders!
Published in Petaling, Selangor, Malaysia, AUGUST 2025