Writing | Television

Worlds Live Between Story and Genre

How audiences suspend their disbelief

“Sadler’s Wells Theatre” (1810) by Thomas Rowlandson. Source: Wikimedia.

Every story is set in another world. And those worlds are always built.

For most of us, the term worldbuilding conjures images of fantasy authors drawing maps of imagined lands or sci-fi movies exploring technological what-ifs. But it’s not just works of speculative fiction but stories in every genre and every medium that are founded on worldbuilding.

Take, for instance, AMC’s Breaking Bad and its prequel, Better Call Saul. These series are ostensibly set in a part of the world we live in: Alburquerque, New Mexico. The story’s world comprises a common set of characters, locations, recurring situations, and atmospheres. Some are real to Alburquerque (e.g., most locations), some are unreal (e.g., specific crime families), and some are creatively reimagined (the Albuquerque DEA). Together, these elements form an imagined space resembling Alburquerque, constructed through close observation of the real thing and different in the ways needed to tell the story.

It’s no wonder, then, that the authors of great “realist” novels, such as Jane Austen and Mark Twain, are master worldbuilders. They are keen observers of their own time and culture, able to actively construct and communicate an essence of their world to future generations of readers.

But there is a key difference with worldbuilding in these more grounded stories — crime thrillers, romances, historical pieces, and so on. Our experiences in our own lives transfer to these stories mostly intact, allowing us to understand and buy into the fiction. The storyteller doesn’t need to explicitly establish the laws of physics, the impacts of technologies, or the cultural dynamics at play if we’re already familiar with them.

This, however, is only half the story. Our lives deliver some of the exposition, so to speak, necessary for us to suspend our belief, but not all of it. Genre provides more.

Genres are best understood as sets of expectations in the form of tropes and conventions. There will be lawlessness in a western, lovers in a romance, and so on. Because genre tropes are embedded in our culture, we don’t question them. Consider La La Land. The story takes place in a version of modern-day Los Angeles — that is, in a world very much like our own, that most Americans will have some intuitions about. But the film also features spontaneous singing and dancing in the streets. No one expects these activities to occur on the real streets of LA, but we don’t question them in the film because La La Land is a musical. The trope comes with the genre’s territory. Within those familiar borders, we can suspend our disbelief without much effort.

This language of expectations also gives us a powerful way to relate stories, worlds, genres, and life experiences to one another.

Four layers of expectations

Each of those four elements provides a layer of expectations for the fiction superseded or modified by those at the levels inside it, as pictured below. Together, these interlocking expectations shape what the audiences take for granted and where they struggle to suspend their disbelief.

The hierarchy of expectations in fiction. Credit: Sam Hollon.

At the broadest level are the expectations we gain from the experience of life. These expectations are what we relate to personally. This includes basic physics and logic — we’re taken out of a story when something unexplained and implausible happens — as well as emotional logic — we recognize believable human relationships because we’ve lived them.

Next comes genre. As discussed above, genres include all the tropes we expect a certain type of story to have, based on our cultural experience with similar ones. Genre expectations come bundled together. For example, if a story opens in the American West and has a stranger-come-to-town as its protagonist, the audience will be cued to view the story as a western and will expect some kind of dramatic “showdown” between the hero and the villain, probably involving guns.

Crucially, well-communicated genre expectations override those we bring from our own lives, as long as the storyteller delivers on them well. Most of us have never personally experienced a western-style duel, nor would we expect most people in our daily lives to be brave in the face of one. But we expect that of the hero of the western at the crucial moment in the climax. And if this expectation isn’t met, we’ll notice (Huh, he’s a bit of a coward, isn’t he?). Even more starkly, in fantasy stories, magical happenings that make no sense in our own life do in the genre, so we accept them in context.

Within the genre lies the world: the canon of everything that is communicated to the audience as true within the fiction. By establishing what is, the canon also shapes what the audience imagines could be and thus the sorts of stories consistent with it. For example, before Better Call Saul was released, audiences expected that the series would expand on key elements that its predecessor, Breaking Bad, built — not only a few beloved characters but also new plots and characters that would fit both the facts and the vibes of the established world.

It’s sometimes said that “every story is a genre unto itself.” But we can be more precise: every story lives within a world, and that world functions like a genre, but is more specific. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul exist in the crime genre (mostly). So, they share tropes and themes with other stories about drug crime set in the Southwest, such as Sicario. All these stories have an inciting crime, characters comfortable with violence, representatives of the law hunting the main criminal, desperation that drives just-minded people to unjust acts, and so on.

But Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul add elements all their own. Some of these are concrete, such as fictional crime families like the Salamancas. Others are subtler tropes of story logic and tone not (yet) general to the genre, such as a certain black humor and a humanizing-yet-condemning portrayal of criminals. Once we get familiar with a world, we begin imagining new situations involving its elements. What are the Salamancas doing elsewhere? In what darkly comedic way could such and such come crashing down? The world’s internal conventions override those from the genre and we expect more specific things from stories set in it.

Story, the innermost layer, comes with the most specific expectations, ones most writers will already be familiar with. Think setups and payoffs. What happens in a single book, movie, or other piece of fiction creates expectations for what will happen later on. In Breaking Bad, Walter White’s cancer and his relationship to his DEA agent brother-in-law, Hank Schrader, are both part of the story layer.

Applying the four-layer framework

Using this four-layer framework, we can diagnose distinct reasons why the audience might struggle to suspend its disbelief for a given story:

• The story contradicts life experience without justifying the contradiction through genre conventions, worldbuilding, or story stakes or characterization. We can call this the “This is unrealistic” reaction.
• The story contradicts genre conventions without justifying the contradiction through worldbuilding that diverges from the genre or story logic. Here, we have the “This couldn’t happen in this sort of story” reaction.
• The story contradicts its world’s canon without justifying the contradiction within the story. Here, we have the “This couldn’t happen in this reality” reaction.
• The story contradicts itself, through continuity errors or by failing to pay off a setup. Here, we have the “This couldn’t happen with this character/situation/plot” reaction.

With this tool for diagnosis, we can talk productively about how existing stories meet, subvert, or violate audience expectations.

For example, the critically acclaimed Star Wars series Andor broke with much of its world’s soft canon while retaining the explicit facts of the sci-fi world. There is still an Empire and a Rebellion, but both are filled with morally grey characters facing stakes that feel more human (getting a promotion or living with a micro-managing mother).

For a segment of die-hard Star Wars fans who place a lot of value on the franchise’s canon (e.g., Star Wars Theory), Andor’s divergence violated their expectations. The series didn’t feel like the Star Wars they knew. But for the rest of us, the writers put in the work at the story level, through characters, plots, and dialogue, to create new expectations that justified the divergence from existing (soft) worldbuilding and thus maintained our suspension of disbelief.

Where worlds come from

In closing, let’s use the language developed above to make sense of where we began: Every story is set in another world. And those worlds are always built.

As we’ve seen, every story lives in a fictional world, an imaginative landscape that tells us what exists and invites us to imagine what else could be. The elements of the world’s canon may be communicated overtly to the audience, by delivering exposition or showing us magic or technology in action or simply the lives of our characters.

Alternatively, elements may be inherited from a higher level of expectations, the genre or life experience, that preexist the story. In this case, the worldbuilder leaves gaps in the explicit canon, the audience fills them in, and the two build the world together.