5 Tips for Creating a Sense of Wonder in Fantasy (And Wowing Readers Who Think They’ve Seen It All)
Today’s fantasy readers are inundated with content. On top of that, what they expect from fantasy has (seemingly) changed. Authors who grew up on fantasy permeated by a dreamy sense of mystery are now writing in a genre whose biggest hits are often as gritty and relentlessly bleak as the “real” world’s news headlines.
(How to Mix Romance and Magic in a Romantasy.)
It’s unsurprising if many fantasy writers feel like they’re shouting into the void and at a loss on how to stay relevant.
A sense of wonder is both problem and antidote.
On one hand, wonder—the opposite of that gritty bleakness—is in relatively short supply in recent fantasy. And the popularity of Harry Potter and the continued passion for Tolkien’s Middle Earth are just a couple of examples that show how, when authors manage to evoke wonder, they can speak to more readers on a deeper level than the average bestseller.
Reclaiming this cornerstone of the genre could be just the way to stand out, capture short attention spans with novelty (an essential ingredient of wonder), and offer a much-needed counterpoint of hope to the negativity currently prominent in the genre and other media that surrounds its readers.
On the other hand, how are writers supposed to surprise and wow jaded readers who think they’ve seen it all by now?
This article breaks down the complex experience of wonder into a cocktail of surprise, contemplation, a resulting joy or reverence, and an ultimate sense of vastness—and provides five tips for evoking it.
What is wonder?
Rather than using a dictionary definition, I prefer to think of wonder in terms of what it actually tends to look like in the psyche of characters and readers. I’ve boiled this down to four core elements, which can be viewed as steps in one emotional process.
Surprise.
What always comes first is the experience of something new: a beautiful view of a foreign landscape, a masterful performance by ourselves or others, a first brush with the supernatural, a kiss from one we felt sure would never love us back. Time stops as this novelty consumes our attention. Our senses heighten, taking in details to make sense of what we’re living. Translated into prose, this surprise looks like slowing down to describe the sensory aspects of the wonder-evoking element so that readers can live it for themselves through imagination.
Contemplation.
That “making sense” during the surprise phase becomes contemplation. Unlike a mere startle, wonder-related surprise makes characters and readers think—first about the immediate situation, then about its implications for life in general. What is your character thinking as, or a little after, they experience the wonder-inducing element? What realizations, fears, and desires come up instantly?
Joy or reverence.
Depending on the nature of the wonder-inducing element and the person’s unique reaction to it, contemplation might lead to a kind of joy, such as the exhilaration of flying, or a kind of reverence, such as fearful respect for the power that death holds over us all. In the most potent cases, it might even inspire both.
Sense of vastness.
Joy and/or reverence ultimately resolves into a general sense of vastness. The world has become a bigger place than it seemed before we took this dose of wonder, a place full of more possibility and mystery than our everyday thinking tends to allow. If the conditions are right, our worldview expands permanently, in a way that leads to character change.
Explicitly including each of these steps of wonder in your narrative will already be a huge step toward helping readers feel it, too. The tips below are meant to help you go deeper, ensuring that your wonder-inducing element is as wonderful as it can be and that your characters’ and readers’ reactions to it are meaningful in the context of the story.
1. Be original.
Novelty triggers the “surprise” factor in wonder. One common mistake is to assume there are certain tropes in fantasy that will inherently induce wonder no matter how well-used they’ve become. In reality, seasoned fantasy readers are unlikely to be amazed by the same descriptions of exotic marketplaces and palaces and epic battles that they’ve read a hundred times before.
Write well enough, and some might “ooh” over your skillful prose or feel a pang of nostalgia for when such scenes were new to them. But true wonder is far more difficult to feel in the face of something we’ve come to expect in the genre already.
Instead, focus your wonder-generating efforts on elements of your world and characters that are unusual or even unique. Slow down and explore these through sensory detail, and refine your description until beta readers can accurately describe it back to you and express surprise at the newness of it—or until they comment on it without your prompting!
2. Juxtapose opposites.
Characters, places, objects, and events that encompass both sides of a duality relevant to the theme of your story create a sense of transcendence—and a potentially dangerous yet fascinating unpredictability.
Can a lie reveal surprising truths? Can someone be both hideous and beautiful? Can an experience be the worst pain and the greatest pleasure your character has ever known? Many of literature’s richest and most memorable characters, settings, and scenes have straddled such contrasts.
The transcendence of dualities also gets readers thinking about the big questions of life, and such contemplation that touches on a sense of vastness is part of what wonder is all about. If the juxtaposed opposites involved in your element aren’t immediately clear, use description to point them out to the reader.
As a bonus, this is a great way to ensure description feels less like a laundry list of traits and more like meaningful observation.
3. Tap into curiosity through foreshadowing.
Be it an object, a person, a place, or a scene, your story’s most powerful source of wonder may not be revealed in all its glory until as late as the midpoint or the climax. If you wait until that point to clue the reader in on its awesomeness, though, you’ll miss out on chances to invoke wonder’s close cousin: curiosity.
Curiosity primes us for wonder. Instead of revealing it suddenly or all at once, use foreshadowing to build suspense around your unique, wonder-evoking fantastical element. Let supporting characters who have already experienced the element talk it up to your protagonist. Tell readers tantalizing anecdotes about it.
Raise questions and doubts about it in the point-of-view character’s mind: Is it truly all that amazing? Is it good or bad? Should the protagonist seek it or not?
4. Show how the fantastical element evokes an unexpected emotion.
Another common mistake is to try to evoke wonder in readers by having the point-of-view character experience only delighted or horrified surprise at something wondrous. This is like expecting readers to cry just because you’ve described your character crying at something obviously sad—as any writer who’s tried this knows, storytelling simply doesn’t work like that most of the time.
Instead, evoking any strong emotion in the reader requires a range of indirect techniques. One of those techniques is to show the character reacting with an emotion the reader didn’t expect.
Reach two or three layers deeper than the most obvious emotion your fantastical element would evoke in the character, and focus on that feeling in the reaction beats. If the most obvious reaction to the wonder-evoking element for your thrill-seeking character is exhilaration, describe their fear of the danger it poses instead. The reader will think, Whoa, it’s so dangerous even she is afraid of it! Or vice versa for a more timid character or a more obviously dangerous element.
Alternatively, or in addition, have an archetypal skeptic character experience an unexpected reaction to the element. One way to do this is to have the element reveal a new perspective directly related to that character’s core weakness or misbelief about life, pulling their guard down and opening their minds. If the skeptic of the cast is caught off-guard by something, we know it’s seriously awe-inspiring.
5. Throw some light on the darkness.
As we’ve seen, an experience of wonder can raise emotions both positive and negative, and sometimes conflicting. Overall, though, the positive will usually edge out the negative. After all, a surprising event that evokes nothing but negative emotions, such as fear and disgust, is more likely to come across as horrifying than wondrous.
Have the fantastical element show a real silver lining in the most frightening unknowns and painful truths—such as death, insignificance, and other people’s minds—of humanity. Which painful truth or great unknown you speak to will depend on your story’s theme.
For example, imagine a story that explores the thematic concept of the significance of one person’s actions in the grand scheme of the universe. Such a story world might have a magic system in which a single word can heal or destroy. Or it might have fragile, microscopic creatures whose choices affect the lives of the fantasy world’s humans in crucial ways, unbeknownst to most members of either species.
In the end…
When evoking true wonder feels difficult or when you question if it’s truly “important” or relevant enough for today’s marketplace, remember that it’s one of your readers’ and your characters’ most basic emotions. Even before we were old enough to know true sadness, outrage, or peace, we first reacted to the world around us with a sense of wonder that constantly challenged the smallness of our perspective.
In some ways, our interconnectedness today has made the world feel like a smaller place than ever. Most of us long for stories that can remind us of that first of life’s great lessons: that there’s always, always more to it than we know.