I find myself spending the most time thinking about and playing around with setting in a magical realism story more than any other genre. I'm not talking about world building or anything like that. But in magical realism something is off with the world we are familiar with or the way are characters are is off for the way we're used to be interacting with our settings. This "off" is a big part of magical realism. I find myself questioning if my setting and my story line up okay after I finish one of these stories. Does anyone else who writes magical realism feel this way? I have not published anything in this genre, but I have written a decent amount of it. However, when I've had people read these stories I get told to take the magical parts out of the story and the setting and make it a more realistic piece or to push it even further in the other direction. But neither of those are what I'm trying to do with these stories. It could come down to I'm not making the unbelievable believable. If you write magical realism, what sort of relationship do you have with you setting? And how would you convince readers to believe the world is flat while you write a great story that fits the bill? That's just a hypothetical setting, but you get the idea. You don't want readers to think you should have kept the world round. They didn't see your setting as realistic. Or maybe they think that was fine, but why stop at the world? You should make all your people flat, too. How would you fix a problem like this?
Magical realism is pretty much the only fantasy sub-genre that I enjoy reading and writing. My short story "Kneadful Things" was published in a now out of print anthology a couple of years ago, and I self-pubbed it on Amazon in October of this year. I think the key for me at least with MR is that it helps to have a character who isn't in on the existence of magic at the beginning. It gives the readers someone to identify with, a person who's seeing or being told about the "off" stuff and saying, "Wow, that's really weird, what the heck is going on here?" If you just drop the reader into a world that's playing by a different set of rules with no explanation, they could get confused and taken out of the story while they try to understand what's happening and why. I'm sure there are other approaches, but my story and ones I've liked reading often take this route.
Broadly speaking, you include fantasy or magical elements in a world that is otherwise portrayed as true to reality (as opposed, for example, to urban fantasy, where it often may look like the real world on the surface but it most certainly is not as you get deeper into it).
Well, I think you should think about things from a psychological standpoint. It's ok if the laws of physics are broken, but not sociology. If you have people with powers that are in demand and can't easily be replicated, why isn't there a market for them? Why aren't people hiring them to do stuff? If there are a large underclass of powerful influential people who approach the upper class in power, why aren't there calls for a decrease in the powers of the nobility, like in OTL where merchants moved against nobility? Laws of physics may change, but people are people.
I'm not very familiar with the magical realism genre, in fact the first story that comes to mind that I'm familiar with, that I'd classify as potentially being magical realism would be Pixar's Toy Story. Which, uh, I'm not sure how many people would actually agree with that assessment. But as far as I can tell, if your readers are complaining about your fantastical elements it could be a sign that they feel superfluous to the story you're telling. How well do you tie the magical parts of your world to the theme? How essential are they to how the story plays out? From what I can tell about the genre, it shouldn't feel possible to tell the story without the magical realism aspects. As in my bad example of Toy Story, it wouldn't be possible to tell that story without the concept of the toys coming to life because the special dynamic formed by the toys and their owner, Andy, is at the core of everything in the movie. That said, the complaints could just as easily be coming from positions of bias. As a lover of fantasy, I would probably want a magical realism story to go further with the magic side of things. Completely missing the point of the genre, because it isn't something I normally read. And I could easily see the reverse being true too.
To me, these questions describe urban fantasy more than magic realism, and I agree that writers of urban fantasy should address these sorts of concerns in their work.
Oh, this is a really good point. If you're getting feedback to take the magical parts out and they feel like you'd still have a story left worth telling, there may not be enough of it there to engage them in your world. I know for Kneadful Things, the story couldn't exist at all without the magical/fantasy elements.
It is South American in origin, popularized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabella Allende, and others (and if you haven't read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, you need to log off, get a copy, a box of tissues, a puppy for emotional support, and lock yourself in a room and read it). It's a cultural thing born from a very spiritual people who revere their dead ancestors. The gag, like @Steerpike mentioned, is the presence of supernatural elements that are not portrayed as being supernatural at all. In other words, the ghosts that follow the characters around are not noteworthy for being ghosts. It's an I-see-dead-people thing where the dead people are as mundane as trees and mailboxes. In a normal story with ghosts, the characters are like, "Why are there fucking ghosts following me, what do they want, how do I get rid of them, and where did they come from?" With magical realism, the ghosts are part of the regular reality and not treated like their horror/fantasy counterparts. It's a tonal thing as much as a genre thing. That would seem to be the issue @deadrats is having editorial wise. Like the others, I would suggest going all the way with magical realism elements or ditch them altogether. I know that isn't very helpful, and her editors have said as much already, but it probably is that simple.
Just a theory, but I think one issue might be that it isn't a very popular genre and with urban fantasy taking off in modern times, it can confuse readers. As if it were a meld of two genres instead of its own thing.
I was recently solicited to submit a short story to one of the literary journals. It's a good journal so I'm hoping I don't blow it, but I'm going to try them with a piece of magical realism. I know this editor likes quirkiness and is asking me for something they haven't seen. I emailed back to say I had something ready if they wanted to check out a piece of magical realism and gave a sentence about the basic idea that makes it magical realism. They want to see it and said the weirder the better. This journal has been around forever, but this editor is pretty new. This story is a little different than what I've read in their pages. The thing with magical realism is that it's more literary fiction than fantasy, in my opinion. And that needs to be true of my short story for them to buy it. I do feel like I'm taking more of a chance by sending in this story. However, it's one of my favorites out of all the short stories I've written. When this editor was working for a different journal I had him informally read a different short story that was also magical realism. With that story, he thought I should take the magical part farther, not so far that it became fantasy but to just push the envelope a little more. I did follow his advice on that, but the story is still far from fantasy. That wasn't an official submission. This time it will be an official submission with my new story (a completely different story). But since the editor has some idea of how I handle this genre and the fact that it's an overall better story, I'm hoping it will fit what he's looking for. I really don't get solicited for work all that often. So, I'm not sure why I'm not playing it more safe. Anyway, the setting of the story I'm sending in is a pretty big deal. It just couldn't work without the setting I've created. I don't feel like you could take the magic or the realness out out of this story. I feel like a writer can say things by writing magical realism that can be even more telling about society and humanity than with straight literary fiction or fantasy. It's the best thing I have that's not currently on submission anywhere else. Wish me luck and thanks for all the responses.
This is by far the best description I've seen of Magical Realism. I never understood it so clearly before.
Those South American writers, like Borges and Marquez, were influenced by Kafka. I’ve seen it argued that magical realism goes back to Kafka.
I can see that, but Marquez would be my favorite? What do you think of the three? I like the genre (magical realism), both reading it and writing it. But it's not usually what the literary journals publish, though, sometimes you'll it. Wait. You like never see it. I don't know what I was thinking submitting that story. Sure, maybe the editor was interested in giving it a read, and since he already asked me if I had something didn't he have to say he wanted to see it. Even if he likes it, it's not likely what he wants to publish. I'm sort of feeling like I might have made a stupid mistake. I don't know why I'm often compelled to engage with these types of stories. I think these stories can be fascinating to both read and write. You can have a lot of fun with it, and by the end it says something. Maybe anything goes in magical realism, but what a hard sell, right? Still, I think of setting and I believe the setting matters most in magical realism. And I'm sure I'll continue to write this crap. I in know way want to go full fantasy. And I like taking it beyond the scope of pure literary. Does anyone have any ideas if selling a magical realism novel is going to be super hard? I'm talking harder than it already is to sell a novel. I've got a failed short story that I've been playing with and it's turning into something longer. Am I in love with the wrong genre?
I like Marquez and Borges the best of the three, personally. Perhaps Borges the best of those two, though it's a close call (and people will argue whether Borges really belongs in the 'magic realism' category--I think some of his works do). Another Latin American author I like is Roberto Bolaño, though he doesn't really fall into the magical realism category. I wonder sometimes if editors of literary journals don't know what to do with magical realism, and are fearful they might accidentally publish a fantasy story. There's no good black-and-white definition I've seen that distinguishes magical realism and fantasy, and that lack of a clear boundary may give editors of journals who don't publish "fantasy" pause over anything the might fall into that category. I think a novel that is well-written and otherwise salable won't be hurt by the fact that it is magical realism. I wonder, though, whether a publisher might be inclined to market it as fantasy to get that market share, so whether they'd want to try to keep it in general fiction and literature. It seems arbitrary to me at times (Margaret Atwood writes science fiction, but we don't call it that or shelve her in SF; Ishiguro; McEwan; the authors have a fear of being labeled SF/F I think). Have you seen novels that are similar in terms of "magical realism" elements, who the agents are, who the publisher are? I think there is a large audience for this sort of work, although a lot of it ends up published as "fantasy." There are a lot of works in the SF/F section that don't go all-out Lord of the Rings or Potter on the Fantasy side of things, but are much more muted and set in more of a real-world setting but where 'magical' elements come into play. Caitlin R. Kiernan shifts in this direction in The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl, both of which I enjoyed and are departures from her earlier urban horror/fantasy works. I've seen Brian Catling's Vorrh Trilogy in both Fantasy and General Fiction at the bookstores, and I've seen it labeled magical realism, surrealism, among other categorizations (it's really too bizarre to fit neatly into one, imo). In any event, that's a long-winded way of saying I don't know, but I like magical realism and I think there are a lot of people who do.
It's more of an element now than a genre, I would say. Marquez was big before urban fantasy exploded, as somebody said upthread. Everything falls under the umbrella of fantasy these days.
