Suspension of Disbelief – Writing Vs. Visual

Just had something weird happen to me the other day concerning the zombie novel I’m nearly done, Dead Living.

Dead Living takes place twenty-three years from “today”. Basically the idea of the novel is zombies have taken over everything. I wanted to explore what would things be like. What would someone’s personality be like if they grew up knowing only zombies?

Anyway, since this is a post-apocalyptic type novel, I had to do some research on what things might be like. I watched a lot of that TV show “Life After People”. 🙂  Good show. I did some other research too, but a lot of it, of course, will come from the imagination. That’s the beauty of writing. 🙂 I can create any kind of world I want. Now, obviously, I want the zombie world to be familiar, and I’m not changing the laws of gravity, but I have no doubt there are things in Dead Living that stretch the imagination. I have no idea whether a high school would be a good shelter against zombies, but I think it’s cool.

Now here is what got me thinking. A friend of mine has been going through Dead Living. One of the things he said was that I might need some tuning on the world I made. For example, I don’t know much about morphine, and how long it will last. According to what I’ve read, it has an expiration date. However, if you keep it out of direct sunlight, store it properly, etc., it can go far beyond the expiration date and not lose potency. Is twenty-three years a stretch? It probably is, but I figure if I have a world that has corpses walking around, I’ll stretch a few years out of my morphine. 🙂

But here’s the kicker.

He compared Dead Living to “The Book of Eli”. Awesome movie. He thinks that everything that happened in that movie is representative of what life would be like after World War III. This got me laughing a little, as I’m sure people much smarter than me can point out some things in that movie that require suspension of disbelief as well. But since it’s a movie, he seemed more easily able to accept the world thrown at him.

So my question is, is suspension of disbelief more difficult to obtain for us writers as opposed to people making a movie or TV show? It seems to be that people, when reading, will say “I don’t think that would happen”, as opposed to when they watch a movie, which is “Wow that is cool.”

What do you guys think?