The March Hare

My friend Nikki, who is an amazing visual artist, said this about art the other day:
"People look at my drawings and say, 'Why did you decide to make that beetle blue? Beetles aren't blue.' Then I have to explain that it isn't a beetle, it's a drawing."
This makes so much sense to me. I play with magical realism and surrealism in my stories and novels, and, generally, when I'm having someone read them, they want to know why this totally unrealistic thing has happened in the middle of a realistic story. "Well, you see, this isn't a story about real life. It's not journalism, so I don't have to make sure that everything is the way it would be in the world. It's a story, and it's my story, and so I can make these characters turn colors, or ghosts could appear, or they could go away to Fairyland if I wanted them to. It's all my decision."
What I'm concerned with in my writing, prose writing, anyway, is being lucid and concise. I want to be understood, I want the reader to see the weird stuff immediately, recieve the images represented by the words in their minds' eyes, and then to read on. The surreal fails without a real; it has no rules to break. The reader should have the notion of the real world with them when they come to the story. In that way, we are already halfway to an understanding of what it is I am attempting to communicate.
The other half is that willing suspension of disbelief that makes bad movies seem very good when viewed on the giant screen at the theater. It is much easier to believe that the little girl from 'The Ring' is coming for you when you've seen it in the dark, many times larger than life, with other people who also appear to beleive. For me, this experience begins as soon as I open a book. I never question. I only move forward, and my judgement of a good or bad book relies more on how many times I had to read over difficult sections in order to grasp their meaning, or how many pages I skipped that turned out to be unneccessary, as I knew what was happening anyway. These things are errors in communication, as far as I'm concerned.
But, then again, that's the way they wanted to write it.
I think this is the core of what art is, exactly; the contrast between what is observably real in the world outside of the work of art, and what is observably real in the world within it.