This mini fiction writing workshop dives into one of the genre's: magical realism. I was unfamiliar with it, until one of my fellow Write Club members recently posted a writing prompt that described the genre:
A literary genre or style associated especially with Latin America that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction.In other words, the setting and storytelling in magical realism stories is realistic, but the events can be fantastic — things that would never happen in real life. Let's explore this!
When I first read the story prompt, it was with a sense of dread. I can't write fantasy stories. I'm solidly in the literary genre.
But I was wrong about a few things.
Tsvetan Todorov, a literary theorist famous for his treatment of the fantastic, said that magic realism disrupts the reader’s sense of reality whereas fantasy creates another completely enclosed reality.To put it even more simply, whereas fantasy stories typically create a whole alternate world, magical realism sits solidly in reality and introduces elements that are not possible.Whereas fantasy “imposes absolute closure” and “implies complicity on the part of the readers,” the literary fantastic seeks reader hesitancy.” The story begins in the “real world” and when something unreal happens and the reader is never sure if the cause is supernatural or natural, such as a psychotic break or a drug induced hallucination.
And yesterday, I wrote this 250 word micro-fiction story: On the way home. The story is very real. It's just the story of an old man walking along a road and talking to a young girl. Nothing unusual at all. Until the very last line.
A boy is walking in a forest. He hears the sound of a brook nearby, crickets, birds warbling. Then from far off there is another sound. Hooves. Many of them, perhaps hundreds. As he crouches behind thick bushes, a herd of stampeding satrys runs by.
Play with it. See what you come up with.
Here's another quote from the Luna Station Quarterly article that provides several great examples:
Magic realism is often the intersection of culturally competing definitions of reality and that creates an inherent tension. In the case of [Gabriel García Márquez's], 100 Years [of Solitude], it’s the intersection of indigenous and Catholic culture. This is the kind of tension you find in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (the tension between White and Black culture) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (the tension between Native American and White culture), even Karen Russel’s story, Reeling for the Empire, about Japanese women sold into slavery and turned into human silk worms by poisoned tea.What do you think? Will you try it? Or have you, in fact, written stories in this genre? I would love to hear from you.
Oh! And if you do enjoy writing micro-fiction, please check out my weekly contest. Last week's prompt is here. I issue a new prompt each week, with the #microfiction tag.
Thanks for reading!
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Note: The image is sourced from Pixabay.
