The Blurred Line between Fantasy and Reality

One of the reasons I love the fantasy genre is because it takes you out of this world, with its wars, injustices, and strident opinions, and transports you to a place where these things exist but can be put right. Good always triumphs over evil. The person everyone overlooks becomes the hero. There is magic and possibilities.

Arthur C Clarke once said, “Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.” If a person from the Middle Ages were to suddenly appear in our modern world, I don’t doubt that they would view our technology as magic, or the work of evil spirits. Even someone from the latter half of the 20th century might wonder at phones taking pictures, meetings happening in the comfort of home, cars powered by electricity, and AI writing books or creating pictures.

One would think that when writing in the fantasy genre, we could simply make things up. After all, none of it is true. Millions of people enjoyed the Harry Potter books without worrying about the technical aspects of the world or how the magic actually worked, after all.

Readers want to be able to lose themselves in the worlds we create, suspending their disbelief to let the story take over. This can’t happen if every few pages problems are conveniently solved without effort, or our hero suddenly has the power to do something they couldn’t do in the last chapter. Deus ex machina is lazy writing.

There have to be some boundaries to this fantastical world otherwise there would be no tension, no need for a hero and no story. Fantasy isn’t just about dragons and portals, It’s about people with hang-ups and problems, quirks and habits, falling in love and seeking justice. It’s about people like us who are lifted out of the ordinary and get to experience the extraordinary.

We want the magic to have a system and our world building to appear believable. Consequently, despite our stories landing in the fantasy genre, they have to be grounded in a reality that makes sense. There also has to be limitations and/or consequences for the use of magic. If everyone can create light at will, what happens to all the candle-makers? If I can summon gold with the wave of my hand, what happens to the economic framework of the world?

It might surprise you to know how much research goes into creating a fantasy world. When I wrote Reez’s story in the Zelannor series, I spent a huge amount of time learning about plants and their properties, smithing and metals, and discovering the strange and the wonderful. I even created a system of cataloguing library books which never made it into the final manuscript.

Interestingly, the magical aspects are more often than not rooted in facts. There really are plants that only bloom once a year at night en mass. Reez’s “goldenflower” exists in our world and is found on sites with heavy metal content. These hyper-accumulators are being deliberately planted to counter soil pollution issues. The rare metal that doesn’t react to heat but can be “melted” with lye actually exists, and the phenomenon of lenticular clouds, that remain in one spot, hovering over a mountain despite wind variations, is also fact.

What seems to be magical and impossible is actually true.

When I came to do a major edit of my first book after a couple of years of writing and learning, I ended up deleting so much. At one point, I even wondered whether I would have a book left at the end. The process, instead of destroying it, made it tighter and stronger. Much of what got cut was my research that I had proudly included to show that I knew what I was talking about. The thing is, it slowed the book down and was unnecessary in the grand scheme of things.

So why, if it doesn’t end up in the book, do we bother with research at all?

Readers need to believe that somewhere in time and space, this could happen with the right set of circumstances. When I decided to introduce a blind, wingless dragon that spewed acid instead of fire into my draft of The Shaking Spear, I looked up subterranean creatures and creatures that used acid or venom as defence or attack. When it came to destroying such a creature, I had to find something that would work, but also have an underlying truth. Especially as I was looking for a dramatic event, like an explosion. It turns out, acid and fire don’t mix well! (Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait quite a while before this one will be ready to publish!)

Science, history, politics, geography, criminology, and religion are just a few of the topics I have looked at since becoming a writer. It’s true, my browsing history can look very alarming some days, but all of it informs my work and helps my readers to stay connected to the story.

And I get to learn something new every day!

Next time you pick up your favourite fantasy and find yourself thrilled by a dragon’s flight or desperately trying to breath for the hero who is about to drown, give a thought to the hours spent trawling through books and websites in order to capture your imagination and make you want to know more.

Magic, it turns out, is real after all.