Utilizing Magical Realism to Tell a Story
I brainstormed, outlined, and drafted my debut novel Between You and Us, all without knowing which genre it fit into. While I wasn’t new to writing, I was new to writing fiction and still had much to learn about its wide array of categories and related parameters.
My novel is about a grieving mother who time-travels to a different outcome of her life where her daughter is still alive. With this kind of time travel, plus a minor character who used the word “multiverse” a couple times, I assumed my book was fantasy or science fiction. However, those labels didn’t quite fit right, like mismatched puzzle pieces forced together by a fist. I hadn’t dreamed up the kind of futuristic technologies found in a science fiction novel, nor any mythically-built worlds as in a fantasy.
My protagonist was simply navigating her life with its array of complicated relationships. And she was doing it all in the city of Milwaukee.
Defining the Genre
I finally learned the vocabulary my novice brain was missing when I signed up for a fiction intensive that included a one-on-one coaching session with an experienced author. She said, “Don’t call it science fiction or fantasy. Call it contemporary women’s fiction with a twist of magical realism.”
Magical realism—I set out to learn in the years since—is a century-old genre with roots around the globe, including a rich influence from Latin America. While the internet debates the official history and rules of the genre to death, what many experts seem to be able to agree on is that it sprinkles elements of fantasy within a real-world setting. Things outside the realm of possibility happen in an ordinary world.
That simplistic description fit the pieces of my story. I now had a genre. Or at least, a sub-genre.
It does not please me to admit my lack of knowledge out loud. Knowing genre is important for a literary agent placing the manuscript into the right editor’s inboxes, as well as properly marketing the published product to the right audience. As well as respecting the history of where the art we enjoy originates from. But the magic of being real with you now is the encouraging reminder that every author starts out a beginner; as well as the fact that—while the hope is to always have a learning mindset regarding craft—our moments of naivety can have their creative benefits at times too.
As Madeline Miller wrote in her novel Circe, “Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.”
Picking the Metaphor
In my case, my lack of knowledge meant I’d only implemented elements of fantasy that were crucial to the specific story I wanted to tell. My protagonist didn’t time-travel to a different outcome of her life where her child was still alive for the fun of it. (Though, who could blame a mother.) She traveled to a different outcome of her life as a metaphor for exploring grief. It allowed her wounds a chance to breathe in a world where grief is often painfully rushed.
Grief has a way of invading its host with painful what if questions. Those what ifs might be wondering what life would be like if that one thing had never happened, or if that one choice had never been made, or if that one loved one was still here.
What if different outcomes of our lives existed?
What if we were able to visit those outcomes?
This makes magical realism and its elements of fantasy a unique way to explore grief through fiction. It allows readers to ask their what if questions in what if kinds of worlds.
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Grief isn’t the only difficult topic that can be explored through magical realism, though. In fact, the genre itself is ripe with historical books that use magical elements as metaphors for social critiques of unjust societies. The possible themes, as well as the use of magical metaphors used to explore them, are as endless as human experience itself.
Determining the Explanation
An author implementing fantasy into their otherwise realistic novel will have to think through the rules of how those elements work to ensure consistency throughout their story. However, it’s a different decision altogether to decide how many of those rules are spelled out in its chapters out versus remaining hidden in a document on the author’s computer. For a book to closely follow the rules of magical realism as a genre, the magic goes largely unexplained. Unlike low-fantasy, time-slip, or a science fiction bent, the fantastic is an ordinary part of the landscape, and the characters aren’t surprised by its presence.
The question—again—is what’s crucial to the story. In Between You and Us, I had to decide the rules surrounding my protagonist’s time travel and then determine how much of those rules to reveal. Over-explaining the mechanics might pull readers out of the story, as well as create unnecessary arguing over whether or not the rules actually make enough sense. Yet, there were specific plot points that depended on the rules of time travel I’d created, and therefore needed to be shared as an explanation.
It set up the impossible choice my protagonist faced: stay in a world of grief with the husband she loves, or the world with other devastating hardships with the daughter she lost.
Check out Kendra Broekhuis’ Between You and Us here:
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Making the Magic
The genre of magical realism is an invitation to make magic with your stories. All it takes to begin is to ask yourself a few questions:
What relatable themes could be explored?What elements of fantasy could you use as meaningful metaphors for those themes?How can you include those elements without over-explaining the magic?And, what kind of real-world setting would be best to ground the story in?