Anyone who reads fiction engages in a practice called the willing suspension of disbelief, sometimes called just the suspension of disbelief. This means readers know a story or movie they’re reading or watching isn’t real, but at some level, they pretend it is.

It’s an agreement you make with your readers: you’ll entertain them and they’ll believe what you write.

But if readers don’t achieve suspension of disbelief they’ll quickly lose interest. Few people want to be thinking about the implausibility of your story as they’re reading. Therefore, your fictional story or book must ring true to life.

Here are some ways to help convince your readers to suspend disbelief:

1. Provide background information

In one of Robert Heinlein’s superb science fiction works, “Tunnel in the Sky,” characters instantly teleport across the galaxy. Who’s going to believe that’s possible? We know it can’t be done. So Heinlein wisely tells us, in a flashback, about how the technology was invented. Knowing the background helps readers believe in the concept of teleportation. Note that technology doesn’t have to be physically possible; it only has to be believable, and Heinlein helps us believe it.

You don’t have to be writing science fiction for this technique to be useful. Say your story has a character who falls in love at first sight. How can that happen? Explain that the character’s late spouse looked remarkedly like the person he or she fell instantly in love with. Or maybe the character has been carrying around a mental picture of what their ideal lover looks like, and the other person fits that picture perfectly. In any case, the background provides credibility.

2. Make your characters act consistently

If a character hates his job, performs poorly, and argues with his colleagues, he can’t wake up one morning eager to go to work. Nor can he win the employee of the month award the next week. Characters must always behave in a similar manner. Of course, if your plot has a character slowly transforming over the course of time, that’s a believable development. But even then there must be credible reasons for the change.

3. Don’t write contrived scenes

Say your character’s child needs an operation, which costs $10,000, to correct a birth defect. The character doesn’t have the money, so she places a plea on a website that exists to raise donations. Three months later they have the money and the operation is performed. That’s believable. But don’t have your character walking down a dusty road and kicking an old tin can that—surprise—turns out to have $10,000 in it.

4. Make sure you have no plot holes

A plot hole is when a non-logical event occurs. I’m a fan of a certain police show from the early days of television. The shows are entertaining, but perhaps in TV’s infancy writers didn’t understand the nuances of plot holes. For example, the police may be puzzled about who committed an armed robbery, and the lead character says, “How about Bill Smith? Maybe he did it,” without any logical reason to think so. So the police go to Smith’s house, and sure enough, he’s the bad guy. The show loses me there.

How do you know if you’ve violated someone’s willing suspension of disbelief? There’s no way to know for sure, because everyone’s threshold is different. But follow these guidelines and most of your readers will believe your story, even though it only came from inside your head.