By Duncan Whitmire •

Nothing is more disruptive to a reader than the emergence of the cynical voice inside their head—and nowhere is this more true than with books that traffic in magic and speculation. Some readers call it the throw-the-book-across-the-room moment. In more technical terms, they might say their suspension of disbelief was broken. When an author can’t hold up their end of the bargain in a contract of believability, a novel fails.

So, how does an author pull it off? A Google search and a survey of popular craft books will tell you little more than to have your characters react authentically to the existence of magic. Sound advice for sure, although not particularly helpful. The question of how to establish the magic itself remains, and can only be answered by reading through teetering stacks of magically endowed novels. After studying a couple dozen of my favorite fantastical and speculative books, I realized most of their approaches to magic could be categorized as leaning into three distinct strategies: persuasion, camouflage, and inoculation.

Persuasion is defined by the arguments that arise in the wake of an encounter with the supernatural. Characters act as a stand-in for the reader’s reaction: they doubt, debate, and search for explanations. At the other end of the spectrum, a writer may use camouflage for magical elements they don’t want the reader to waste time questioning. Textual patterns normally reserved for describing everyday occurrences are deployed to articulate the bizarre, signaling to the reader that these fantastical elements will appear with regularity in the world of the story. Inoculation lands somewhere in between: this technique foreshadows the introduction of the magical in order to lessen the shock of its appearance.

In the hands of skilled writers, these strategies orient the reader toward magical elements in the story without triggering skepticism, each with the added benefit of serving character development, form, and theme.

Persuasion

Persuasion is perhaps the most common device for introducing magical elements across all forms of media. We see examples of this approach as far back as the early nineteenth century, notably around the birth of science fiction with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel which emerged in the wake of rationalist and materialist trends in literature, when people sought realism, even as they pushed the boundaries of what could be told in story. Persuasion’s long-standing appeal may be attributed to its inherent verisimilitude. The author gives us the most realistic response to the uncanny: the characters don’t accept the phenomenon but do interrogate its cause and meaning. Through this process the author may earn the reader’s trust, so long as the questions in the reader’s head are acknowledged on the page.

Salman Rushdie provides an excellent example of persuasion in Midnight’s Children. Persuasion has always been central to Rushdie’s style and his examination of the post-Partition Indian identity requires the presentation of different viewpoints and explanations. His characters, in order to demonstrate agency through their magical gifts, must question what those gifts mean and how they should be used.

The novel is full of magical characters, from narrator Saleem Sinai and the 1,001 children of midnight—born at the stroke of Indian independence and possessing a wide spectrum of supernatural talents including telepathic noses, deadly knees, shape-shifting, and teleportation—to members of Saleem’s family and people they encounter in their travels.

The introduction of this robust cast is integral to the establishment of the book’s magic. Early in the story, Saleem tells his girlfriend, Padma, that his grandmother telepathically spied on his mother and her sisters through their dreams:

“She eavesdropped on her daughter’s dreams….” Yes, there is no other explanation, stranger things have been known to happen in this country of ours, just pick up any newspaper and see the daily titbits recounting miracles in this village or that—Reverend Mother began to dream her daughters’ dreams. (Padma accepts this without blinking; but what others will swallow as effortlessly as a laddoo, Padma may just as easily reject. No audience is without its idiosyncrasies of belief.)

In this aside—typical for Saleem when disclosing the supernatural talents of friends and family—we see how eager the narrator is to contextualize skepticism both as it relates to the reader, and his listener, Padma. Conscious of the fact that it defies credibility that a person may learn their daughters’ secrets by tuning in to their dreams at night, he waves this off, saying stranger things happen all the time. But Saleem also acknowledges that credulity varies from reader to reader. It’s almost as if Rushdie is saying, This detail may or may not be for you—whatever the case, your reaction is valid and you’re not alone; now, on with the story.

Saleem maintains this pattern of describing supernatural events, then peppering his testimony with caveats and explanations ranging from local gossip to divine intervention to scientific phenomena and everything in between. He anticipates doubt and validates it head-on, thus preventing the reader’s skepticism from gaining a solid foothold.

Rushdie understands that persuasion, as a literary technique, is not about cajoling the reader to adopt a certain worldview or endorse a particular character’s actions: the purpose of persuasion is to convince the reader that the author is in control of the story. In this trust, the reader finds a measure of safety and can settle into the story, no matter how fantastical.

Camouflage

Some fiction doesn’t have time for Saleem’s caveats and questions. In many novels, magical phenomena occur early and often, barely registering a response from their characters. Authors of these books succeed through camouflage, creating textual clues that signal what is “normal” in their world, and what is not. Camouflage refers specifically to the patterning of prose to mimic quotidian description, even when confronting the extraordinary. This technique lends itself to writing that is rich in metaphor, as it allows the writer greater license with spectacular imagery without requiring as much by way of exposition. Camouflage also pairs well with humor, taking advantage of the natural irony in talking about fantastical things as though they are common occurrences.

The earliest use of camouflage might be considered fairy tales and fables, which mimic the authority of religious allegory in telling their stories. Red doesn’t ask how a wolf is able to speak and costume itself in the same way Moses doesn’t meditate upon the acoustical logistics of the voice emanating from the burning bush. The point is not to ponder these practical mysteries, but to learn specific lessons from an authority figure, be that a priest, teacher, or parent. This conception of camouflage translates easily into modern fiction, where it is integral to fabulism, exemplified by writers like Kelly Link, Helen Oyeyemi, and Jesse Ball. Camouflage is equally essential to surrealist fiction like that of Kobo Abe, Kathryn Davis, and Franz Kafka, whose novels keep a loose tether to the real world and don’t spend much time articulating their own plausibility.

Camouflage’s richest vein, though, is magical realism and in The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende offers a classic example of what can be accomplished in this style. At an early age, Clara Trueba demonstrates an uncanny connection to the spirit world. Through Allende’s prose, the reader comes to understand that Clara’s fantastical traits should be seen as well within the boundaries of normalcy in this world:

Clara’s strangeness was simply an attribute of their youngest daughter, like Luis’s limp or Rosa’s beauty. The child’s mental powers bothered no one and produced no great disorder…. It was true there had been times, just as they were about to sit down to dinner…when the saltcellar would suddenly begin to shake and move among the plates and goblets without any visible source of energy or sign of illusionist’s trick. Nívea would pull Clara’s braids and that would be enough to wake her daughter from her mad distraction and return the saltcellar to immobility.

First we see Clara compared to her nonmagical siblings, Luis and Rosa; Allende admits that Clara’s difference is notable, but only in the way you might notice a common disability or an uncommon beauty. Then she’s quick to add that Clara isn’t disturbing anyone, signaling to the reader that the conflict to track in this chapter lies outside of the girl’s paranormal abilities. The final image is crucial: at family dinner Clara is able to move the saltcellar with her mind, and rather than questioning how that’s possible, her mother tugs on her braids to make her stop, as any parent might do to pause a child’s distracted behavior.

Unlike persuasion, where an author explores objections a reader might have toward the credibility of fantastical elements, camouflage takes magic for granted. Nobody in The House of the Spirits asks whether Clara is literally clairvoyant, and the narrative voice isn’t interested in providing alternative theories or interpretations. Rather, author and reader alike can focus on the book’s vibrant metaphors, decade-spanning character development, and political themes.

Inoculation

Inoculation is a narrative technique in which the author plants the small seeds of magical elements in order to prepare the reader’s brain for their eventual arrival. This approach allows the author to preserve the shock of an unexpected fantastical turn while minimizing the amount of discussion or exposition once that element arrives. Of the three strategies outlined here, inoculation appears to be the newest form, although we can find hints of it as far back as modernist novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The shell-shock-induced hallucinations of Septimus Warren Smith make more palatable the surrealist passage detailing the imperial goddesses Proportion and Conversion. The device is much more common in contemporary fiction like Richard Powers’s The Overstory, in which biological communication between trees is scientifically described before ghostly tree apparitions begin speaking to one of the characters. Other multiple-point-of-view novels like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Cesar Aira’s Ghosts are further case studies in the technique.

An example of how an author can use inoculation to efficiently and credibly introduce surprising magical and speculative elements without relying on cumbersome exposition is Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel-in-stories, How High We Go in the Dark. The book chronicles a catastrophic global pandemic and its aftermath, beginning with the story of a father traveling to Siberia, where his daughter has just died during a research expedition. From there, Nagamatsu drops into scenes of perseverance and grief as a mysterious virus spreads and humanity reels. What starts in a realistically grounded scenario will evolve toward shape-shifting aliens, telepathic pigs, and parallel universes—not to mention speculative concepts like speed-of-light interstellar travel and the colonization of distant planets.

If that sounds like a lot of tropes to pack into one slim novel, that’s because it is. Additionally, each chapter is told through a different point of view, making the space reserved for exposition precious. As with the other high-volume point of view examples listed above, Nagamatsu doesn’t have time to litigate each new revelation as one might when using the persuasion approach, and so he uses inoculation. The magical elements that come to light by the end of the book almost always appear first through seemingly unrelated idioms and pop culture references. These subtle notes have the effect of warming up the reader’s brain to encounter the real deal down the road.

In the first chapter, the narrator, Cliff, makes passing references to Star Wars and Ancient Aliens. In the second chapter, “City of Laughter,” a theme park operator named Skip talks to a kid about the Fantastic Four and how their spaceship traveled through a storm giving them superpowers. He asks the kid what power he’d want, and the kid says, “I’d want to shape-shift.” Innocuous on their own, these brief references signal the interstellar adventures and extraterrestrial beings that will become narratively prominent in the latter half of the novel. Very little exposition is given to quantum travel or alien physiology, but their appearances in the second and third act of the novel feel inevitable, largely in part to the small doses measured out by Nagamatsu in earlier chapters. Inoculation focuses the reader’s attention, showing them the scope or flavor of what is possible in the story. This pattern of intentionality goes a long way toward earning a reader’s trust.

Why has inoculation recently emerged as a common device for introducing magical elements? If we can trace camouflage to the most foundational allegorical forms of storytelling, and we can see persuasion emerge among the modernist and materialist authors of the age of scientific discovery, then inoculation may also point to larger cultural trends in storytelling. If the twentieth-century advent of quantum physics signaled the end of traditional Newtonian science (defined by empiricism and materialism), perhaps literature is following suit. While it’s difficult to quantify what percentage of novels employ the techniques above, we have a little more data when it comes to readers’ changing worldviews. In the United States, religious affiliation is down significantly, and when asked, many among Millennials and Gen Z describe their beliefs as something akin to The Force from Star Wars. In other words, theism and materialism are giving way to science fiction and fantasy. According to polling data, American belief in ghosts has quadrupled since the late 1970s. It seems that society is entering a period in which readers are more credulous toward the supernatural, while simultaneously abandoning the need to adhere those beliefs to traditional religious contexts.

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Belief in fiction itself is a paradox: the nature of fiction is that the reader knows what they’re reading is fabricated. Reading a book is an investment of time, and its main appeal is as a form of immersion. The method by which an author chooses to introduce fantastical elements depends on the structure of the book, its characters, and its themes. How well an author matches their technique to the structure, characters, and themes of their book will determine how successfully they earn their reader’s trust. Importantly, they need not convince their audience that aliens walk among us, or that magic incantations can awaken dragons—but they do have to show readers a fully developed world in which these things are possible. These techniques are not a substitute for worldbuilding, but a lens through which to show readers a fictional world, as well as a tool to communicate its topography and inhabitants. The stakes couldn’t be higher: one false step and the spell breaks, the lens shatters, the doorway to the world is closed, and the book flies across the room.

 

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DUNCAN WHITMIRE’s stories and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Colorado Review, Quarterly West, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Earlier this year, he received an MFA in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. He’s currently working on a speculative novel about climate change and Millennials’ struggle for agency in the world we’ve inherited. Find him on Instagram @duncanwhitmire.

 

Featured image by Dollar Gill, courtesy of Unsplash.