It's Magical

Exercise Your InkTank

Gabriel García Márquez: “My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic.”

One of our earliest impulses as storytellers is to fantasize. We imagine alternate worlds in which the seemingly impossible can happen or we imagine the entry of impossible elements to our own world. The magical realism so popular in literature today is not so different. It’s a kind of writing that performs a variation on a basic rhetorical maneuver: it melds the “real” with the “unreal” in order that one may reflect certain properties of the other in a meaningful way. By the end of Márquez’s short story, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” for example, the old winged man manages to seem more humane than the humans who trap and torture him; the “unreal” element casts a critical gaze on the “real” elements of the story. And in Percival Everett’s “The Fix,” the addition of the “unreal” element into the “real” world—a man who can fix anything, including death—has the effect of turning the “real” world into a disturbingly unreal and comically overblown place. Both stories can be read as kind of social critique, but the messages they may seem to convey aren’t as straightforward as you might think—they can’t be reduced into simple morals or lessons. At the same time, the sense that these stories aim to tell us something about ourselves is palpable. We’re compelled—directed by the storyteller—to think about the stories after we’ve left them.

It’s one thing to recognize how magical realism works and it’s another thing to pull off the trick of convincing readers to suspend their disbelief when fantastic or absurd elements come into the storytelling. After all, a good reader is a critical reader—one engaged enough with the story to ask the logical questions. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re attempting the absurd:

o All worlds, no matter how fantastic, have rules and boundaries. Once you establish rules, you can’t change them without jeopardizing your own authority as the storyteller.
o You’d be surprised how far you can get by simply adopting an air of authority in your writing. If you effectively treat a fantastic element as though it’s entirely ordinary in the world of the story, your readers will follow you. Or, if you simply predict their concerns and questions—perhaps by embodying them in an incredulous character—you’ll be able to assuage their concerns. Failing to answer pertinent concerns will loosen the story’s grip on the reader.
o Persuasive details need not be directed solely at the physical. In fact, leaving a little room for the reader’s imagination to become involved can enhance the world of the story dramatically. Many writers rely upon familiar (or traditional) stories to fill in the blanks for them.
o Choose your mysteries wisely. If readers feel as though the storyteller is withholding pertinent information, they’ll begin to lose trust. Always reveal, never conceal.

Let’s Get Fantastical

Many writers complain that they can’t write magical realism because they can’t think of anything interesting or fresh enough to write about, or because they can’t write about fantastic elements convincingly. Here’s what I have to say to that: Many of the most effective stories in this genre begin by depicting the ordinary and the everyday astutely. When they veer into the extraordinary, we may not expect it, but we’re inclined to follow because they’ve already established their authority. Even if you don’t trust your imagination to create something effectively “unreal,” you can probably trust yourself to recognize the real. Begin with what you know and then allow yourself to stray into the unknown. Let’s start with an average, everyday moment (one we’ll think of together) and then gradually introduce an “unreal” element.