Tolkien on "sub-creation"

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"Children (and adults) are capable, of course, of literary belief when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator.' He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true' : it accords with the laws of that world.

You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then in the Primary World again, looking at the abortive little Secondary World from the outside. If you are obliged by kindliness or circumstance to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise looking or listening would become intolerable. But suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed."
JRR Tolkien "On Fairy Stories"

RonB
"There's a story there...somewhere"

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[nq:1]"Children (and adults) are capable, of course, of literary belief when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. ... virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed." JRR Tolkien "On Fairy Stories"[/nq]
Of course, the truth is, the above applies not only to fantasy worlds, but to all fictional worlds.
All such worlds are fundamentally imaginary. They are all bound but a vast number of conventions that are at odds with the everyday experiences of the real world. Things are altogether too ordered. Events jump across time and space sometimes back and forth across time and space sometimes into people's memories. More than that things in stories aren't at all the same as things in the real world. Story "things" and story people have a way of representing other things like ideas good, evil, chaos, order, or what have you.

Real things and real people are just things and people. A black dog that keeps appearing in a story "means" something. It foreshadows disaster.
A black dog that keeps appearing in my neighborhood just means that somebody's lost a black dog.
So the challenge that Tolkien poses above is a challenge for all creators of fictional worlds with or without fairies.

All such worlds are artificial they all come with sets of rules that are unique to them, into which a reader or viewer is invited to immerse himself and which the writer has the capacity to violate and which he violates at his peril.
Becausing having set the rules for one's fictional world and invited your audience to sit comfortably within the rules of that world whatever they might be once you break the rules, you shove the audience back out into their seats. You remind them of where they are and what they are. People sitting in a theatre or in their living rooms, watching a movie.
And that, of course, is usually the last thing you want your audience to be thinking about.
NMS

Tolkien on "sub-creation"

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