Fantasy vs. Reality

Every so often, I get asked what the difference is between writing fantasy and writing realistic fiction. It’s a pretty good question, though since I’ve never written anything that wasn’t science fiction or fantasy, I’m not sure why anyone expects me to know. (Of course, I have opinions on just about everything, but that’s another matter.)

There are actually several answers to this question, depending on what sort of fantasy one wants to write. In modern urban fantasy or magical realism, for instance, everything in the story except the magical/fantastical elements needs to be realistic, because the story is taking place in a recognizable version of the real world where most of the background is the same as in real life. For most modern urban fantasy, the magical elements have to fit in the cracks as a secret that is unknown and unaccepted by the general public. For magical realism, the fantastical elements are simply assumed and generally accepted by the characters as how the real world works…but everything that’s not fantastical has to be realistic (that’s the “realism” part of this fantasy subtype).

In an AU (alternate universe) story, whether modern or historical, the writer has a lot more flexibility. The society can look very much like ours, only with an elf emancipation movement or forensic magicians. Alternatively, the setting can substitute magic for technology: flying carpets or dragons instead of airplanes, cooling spells instead of refrigerators, but a history that is more or less the same as in real life, resulting in a political and social landscape that is very similar to ours. On yet another hand, the writer can attempt a rigorous working-out of the political/historical effects of having working magic and/or magical creatures, depending on whatever departure point the writer decides to use for the historical discovery of reliable working magic. At the farthest end of the continuum are the stories in which nothing is the same except the geography, the assumption being that if magic worked, all of history would be completely different.

In a surreal or dreamscape fantasy, such as Alice in Wonderland, all bets are off, unless the writer decides otherwise. As long as what the writer is doing fits the “feel” of the story, mirrors and mice can recite poetry, chess pieces and playing cards can behave like people (rather strange people, but still people), cats can vanish and reappear at will (OK, not so much of a stretch, really), and so on. Very little resemblance to mimetic or realistic fiction is required.

The key element for all types of fantasy is internal consistency. If you say in Chapter 2 that vampires cannot bear the smell of garlic, you’d better not send them out to dinner at a trendy Italian restaurant that serves roast garlic as an appetizer in Chapter 10, and you’d really better not have them suddenly develop a garlic craving in Chapter 15. Not without a lot of explanation, anyway. If you establish early on that wizards cannot work with fire in any form, you’d better not have your wizard-hero throwing fireballs around later in the book, unless the whole point of the story has been for him to find out the secret of working with fire. In other words, in fantasy fiction, you get to make the rules for how the world works…but once you’ve made them, you have to follow them, or you’ll lose a large chunk of your readers.

External consistency is also important in fantasy, but for a different reason: most experienced fantasy readers will assume that any inconsistencies between the real world and the background in a piece of fantasy fiction are deliberate, conscious choices that the author has made, and therefore clues both to the type of fantasy and to the way the author’s particular fantasy world works. If the writer pays no attention at all to “real things” (like the way guns work, or how far a horse can travel in a day), accidental mistakes can result in book-meets-wall moments.

Five brownie points to anyone who can identify where I got some of the examples in Paragraph 3. 🙂