The central conceit is something that you HAVE to sell.
It can be as improbable as talking flamingos or a functional Communist revolution, but the author has to be able to lean firmly into the idea and make the reader believe as well.
If you can do THAT...it doesn't matter how insane it is, the reader is there with you. They'll accept it as long as you play by the rules you've established.
I find "Miss Buncle's Book" by D.E. Stevenson to be so full of contrivances that my mind characterizes it as fantasy rather than post-war fiction. But it is so much fun! (The other books in the series start off fine but get less fun the further they get from Miss Buncle.)
Dodie Smith's "The Hundred and One Dalmatians" (the original book) stays *just* this side of possible, not to mention probable. It's fun and cute, and full of snarky lines such as saying that of course the Splendid Veterinarian was *delighted* to come out on Christmas Eve to wash puppies. But the second book (which I've not read) veers into sci-fi with dogs from space and things like that. It was written about ten years after the first, and snarky me wonders if she had her mind on the possibility of more Disney money rather than getting herself in the proper mindset to make the book work. I know, I'm being unkind.
Sometimes they become conventions. The heroine is trapped in an isekai as the villainess of a dating sim! And never thinks about how this happened, who did it, or why!
Conceit, conceits and wild coincidences. As you know, though there's far more of such in real life than we admit, than we'd never ever buy in a book.
We the readers and you the writers all know we're ever so much smarter, informed, knowledgeable than those who lived and those who wrote back then, today. Hence being in the right place at the right time suspension of disbelief stretches well past the breaking point.
I was pretty much just riffing writing that, but there might be a germ of how it is for every following generation in the above.
The central conceit is something that you HAVE to sell.
It can be as improbable as talking flamingos or a functional Communist revolution, but the author has to be able to lean firmly into the idea and make the reader believe as well.
If you can do THAT...it doesn't matter how insane it is, the reader is there with you. They'll accept it as long as you play by the rules you've established.
A lot depends on tone, and what is expected.
I find "Miss Buncle's Book" by D.E. Stevenson to be so full of contrivances that my mind characterizes it as fantasy rather than post-war fiction. But it is so much fun! (The other books in the series start off fine but get less fun the further they get from Miss Buncle.)
Dodie Smith's "The Hundred and One Dalmatians" (the original book) stays *just* this side of possible, not to mention probable. It's fun and cute, and full of snarky lines such as saying that of course the Splendid Veterinarian was *delighted* to come out on Christmas Eve to wash puppies. But the second book (which I've not read) veers into sci-fi with dogs from space and things like that. It was written about ten years after the first, and snarky me wonders if she had her mind on the possibility of more Disney money rather than getting herself in the proper mindset to make the book work. I know, I'm being unkind.
Sometimes they become conventions. The heroine is trapped in an isekai as the villainess of a dating sim! And never thinks about how this happened, who did it, or why!
Conceit, conceits and wild coincidences. As you know, though there's far more of such in real life than we admit, than we'd never ever buy in a book.
We the readers and you the writers all know we're ever so much smarter, informed, knowledgeable than those who lived and those who wrote back then, today. Hence being in the right place at the right time suspension of disbelief stretches well past the breaking point.
I was pretty much just riffing writing that, but there might be a germ of how it is for every following generation in the above.