One of my favorite subgenres of fiction is magical realism. Popularized by well-known Latin American authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende, magical realism has since blossomed into the preferred literary style of writers all over the world. Additional notable writers of the genre include Ling Ma, Aimee Bender, and Haruki Murakami, but the list is a long one.
As a genre, magical realism is a type of fantastical writing that’s sometimes hard to pin down, a literary mashup that combines the real with the surreal and draws in readers by treating the extraordinary as if it were ordinary. While realism is based on the world we encounter on a daily basis, adding in a touch of the impossible can shape a story and its characters in new and interesting ways. Oftentimes, you don’t know something is magical realism until a few paragraphs or pages in when the laws of physics or rationality are put into question, when the new normal ignites a plotline you couldn’t have imagined but now can’t put down.
As a reader, consuming magical realism can be a dazzling experience. The world is mundanely predictable and then it’s not. As if experiencing an earthquake, the ground shifts, the knickknacks fall off the shelves, and the walls surrounding our usually tidy, normal lives crack and groan and tumble. What’s left is the wonder of a novel experience, one that resembles a former life but with the introduction of new rules, customs, and possibilities for readers to travel through.
One of my first eye-opening experiences with magical realism was Kelly Link’s indie-hit collection of short stories, Magic for Beginners, which introduced me to the genre in a relatable, 21st-century way. In one of the book’s stories, “The Faery Handbag,” a friend group of young adults peruses a second-hand store in hopes of finding a long-lost magical heirloom. As the story’s narrator explains, “The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness. Fairies live inside it. I know what that sounds like, but it’s true.”
The thought of a simple, discarded accessory capable of conjuring up a whole other world is delightful. Plus, the story’s thrift store setting is a mundane location on one hand but magical in another sense (if you enjoy thrifting, I’m sure you’ve experienced the magic that comes with the thrill of discovery). Beyond that, Link’s playfully colloquial language welcomes readers into the familiar coming-of-age experience of young adults figuring out their place in the calamity of the world. After this first dose of magical realism and what it could entail, I was hooked.
The more I’ve read contemporary authors playing within the limitless bounds of the genre, the more I have come to enjoy the uncanny qualities of magical realism.
I savor the ways in which this type of fiction can lead to more complex, nuanced, and thought-provoking findings than ever imagined. Authors can do this in a variety of ways of course–through word choice, imagery, scene, scenario, and so forth. Take Ling Ma’s short story, “Los Angeles” for example, where the narrator lives in a three-winged house with her husband and her one hundred ex-boyfriends. She explains her suite of roommates: “Aaron. Adam. Akihiko. Alejandro. Anders. Andrew. Those are just the As.” Sometimes a fantastically absurd premise is the prize itself.
Not long after I discovered magical realism, I tried to untangle the difference between magical realism and surrealism. Were they just two names for the same thing? It’s all fantastical, right? Well, sort of. I learned that while surrealist art tends to highlight the illogical and the dreamlike, often abandoning a coherent sense of reality, magical realism integrates that very fantasy as a fact of its world. Like many of us writers whose minds inhabit both highly analytical and highly imaginative spaces, magical realism became my gateway to a heightened enjoyment of writing that I’ve carried with me ever since. It became the basis for many of my own short stories, which often begin in an ordinary world before something implausible is introduced.
Whether you write fantasy, mostly poems, or are a strict memoirist, dabbling in magical realism can be a great exercise in creativity for any writer.
Subverting expectations for yourself is arguably just as valuable as doing it for any of your readers, and the potential for discoveries abound.
With that, I leave you with five magical realism prompts to respond to, tweak, and turn into interesting writing. I hope you’ll use them and enjoy playing on the page.
- A woman is taking a train to visit her ailing mother. Once aboard, time slows and reveals a pivotal moment in her personal history.
- Every night, a man dreams the same dream. One day, new neighbors move in next door and begin changing his dreamscape, revealing buried secrets.
- Several dead whales wash up along the outskirts of a landlocked rural town.
- One summer’s day, a group of teenagers decides to wade into their town’s murky lake. What they discover are fragments of the townspeople’s repressed memories and abandoned hopes.
- A small vegetable garden grants a single wish to anyone who plants a seed in its soil, but every granted wish comes with a heavy price.
Nicole Rivas is a writer of short stories, novellas, book reviews, and more. Her debut fiction collection, Tender Hoof: Stories, was published by Thirty West Publishing in 2024. Nicole’s flash fiction has been anthologized in W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America (2023), Best Microfiction (2019), and The Best Small Fictions (2019). To read more of her prose, visit www.nicolemrivas.com.
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