The best advice I ever received about writing fantasy fiction was from Christopher Noel, a fine writer and great teacher. Chris had a lot to say about fantasy, but I’ll try to crystalize one of his major lessons down to a single sentence: In order for fantasy to work, it must be rooted in reality.
Having read a lot of good and bad fantasy (and its first cousins—magical realism, science fiction, and horror)—I can say that Chris had it absolutely right. Whatever wonderous worlds, delightful magic, scary demons, or charming elves, dwarves, wizards, or warlocks you have created in your fantasy novel, it is going to bore the horcruxes out of your reader if it doesn’t have reality at its heart.
To clarify what I’m getting at here, let’s look at three very different, well-known works from the related genres I mentioned earlier: Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass; Stephen King’s Carrie; and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games.
In the first of Pullman’s trilogy, we are introduced to an alternative world that, while eerily similar to our own, is also strikingly different in many ways—not the least of which is the fact that every human has an animal companion who is constantly with them—a physical manifestation of their soul. This concept alone is one of the most original premises to appear in fantasy literature in a long time. Add talking armored bears, a machine that can sever children from their souls, and gateways to alternate universes, and you’ve got yourself a feast for the imagination. But with all this, the driving force behind the novel—the thing that makes people keep reading—is the bright, courageous, and utterly convincing young heroine, Lyra Belacqua. The fact that Lyra appears to be parentless and alone in the world is what makes our hearts go out to her. And her realization that her best friend has disappeared is the event that sets the plot in motion.
Absentee parents, the loss of friends. Those aren’t fantasy things: They’re real things, part of our everyday world. So magical “alethiometers” that tell the future and glamorous broomstick-riding witches aside, at the heart of The Golden Compass lies a very real story.We could say the same thing about Carrie. Yes, the title character, Carietta White, has supernatural powers and the novel culminates with (spoiler alert—but does anybody out there really not know?) her burning down the high school gym with her mind, but the novel is also about a problem we know too well from the ordinary world: bullying. Carrie is a lonely girl from a horrible family, and is relentlessly humiliated and picked on, as are many young people in the real world. Carrie’s reaction to the bullying she experiences may be supernatural, but what she is reacting to has nothing fantastical about it.
Finally, there’s The Hunger Games. While this powerful young-adult novel is set in an imagined future, the core of the novel is, once again, about life as we know it. There is hunger in our world, as there is in the one Katniss Everdeen inhabits. There are dictarorial and abusive governments in our world as in hers. And there is fear. There is also the same kind of profound love that Katniss feels for her younger sister, Primrose. All that real-world material supports the speculative aspects of The Hunger Games. The novel works not just because it lets us live for a time in a world that exists only within its pages, but because that world intersects with the one we actually inhabit.
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