We don’t will our suspension of disbelief. If the story is strong, if the teller has style and craft, our suspension of disbelief just happens to us. Think of the metaphors we commonly use to describe what stories feel like. Narrative transportation is always something don’t to us, not by us. It’s a force we’re subject to, not something we control.
We think of storytellers as metaphorical bruisers who overpower us and hold us down—they hook, grip, rivet, and transfix.
Or we think of them as metaphorical Svengalis—they hypnotize, engross, mesmerize, and entrance.
Or storytellers are lovers—they infatuate, besot, intoxicate, and seduce.
Or storytellers are forces of nature—they’re rivers or winds that sweep us up and carry us away.
Or storytellers are powerful witches—they enchant, charm, bewitch, and spellbind.
We reach for metaphors when we lack language for direct description. We say not that story is X but that it’s like X. But in the above collection of metaphors, we get a good sense for what story actually is: it’s a drug.
[…] Of course, story doesn’t count as a drug if you narrowly define drugs as chemical substances. But stories are still something we “take” to literally change our brain chemistry. Like other drugs, we use story to relieve our pain, loneliness, and drudgery. And just like other drugs, story lulls us into an altered state of consciousness that bears comparison to a hypnotic trance—or even a psilocybin trip. When transported into the hallucinatory realm of story, our minds empty, our endlessly burbling streams of consciousness go still, and time races by. When the “active ingredients” of a story—the plot, theme, character, style, and so on—are expertly compounded, we slide into highly receptive brain states that bring us under the storyteller’s power.
