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Magical realism continues to intrigue us as both readers and writers. It invites us into a world of subtle wonder, with familiar favorites like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Snow Child continually offering nostalgia and comfort to modern readers. But often, magical realism is difficult to define and even more challenging to write. So what defines this genre, and what separates it from the other various subgenres of fiction?
In this article, editor Sadé Omeje takes a deep dive into magical realism as a form of fiction writing, sharing her best tips, favorite books, and tidbits from our writers and editors. Before joining The Novelry, Sadé edited and acquired manuscripts at two imprints of HarperCollins: 4th Estate, home to authors including Hilary Mantel, Anthony Doerr, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as the William Collins imprint, home to authors including Brian Cox, David Attenborough, Christina Lamb, and Max Hastings. Sadé channels her love for magical realism in this article for The Novelry.
What’s so great about magical realism?
A literary world where reality and fantasy blend seamlessly is where magical realism greets us. Where the extraordinary hides within the ordinary and where enchanting characters and interactions bring the mundane to exceptional heights.
Magical realism has always been a favorite form of fiction for me.
It’s expansive and limitless but contained, governed by the essentials needed to capture what the feeling of it truly is, like a child feeling completely boundless, running freely, yet being able to turn back to their parent and know that they’re there: yes, this must be real, this feeling of elation and limitlessness must be real because I’m feeling this, but there is also my mother, so if she’s here, and that black bird soaring overhead is talking to me, that talking bird is, without a doubt, as real as my mother smiling back at me.
When I worked on the memoir A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel Garcίa Márquez and Mercedes Barcha, I was immediately drawn to learning more about the globally recognized writer of magical realism, both as a father and a husband, and how the world of his imagination influenced his marriage to Mercedes.
When the memoir reaches the point of memory after both of Rodrigo García’s parent’s deaths, I remember reading the passage and being immensely moved by the way Rodrigo’s words brought to the page the grief that etches the face, the three souls looking back at him in the mirror, and the inescapable magic of his imagery and prose that I have no doubt draws from his father’s legacy:
The death of the second parent is like looking through a telescope one night and no longer finding a planet that’s always been there... It has vanished, with its religion, its customs, its own peculiar habits, big and small. The echo remains. I think of my father every morning when I dry my back with a towel the way he taught me after seeing me struggling with it at the age of six... I remember my mother each time I walk a guest to the front door when they’re leaving, because not to do so would be inexcusable, and whenever I pour olive oil on anything. And in recent years, the three of us look back at me from my face in the mirror.
—Rodrigo García
Defining the magical realism form
Magical realism is a commonly misunderstood form of storytelling. Or, let’s say it’s a form of storytelling commonly understood to have many different points of view and opinions of what it is and what it isn’t.
For me, it’s a literary style of storytelling where the magic integrates so seamlessly into the tapestry of the story that the two feel inseparable.
When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean ‘magic’ and they don’t hear ‘realism,’ whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It’s both things. It’s not just a fairytale moment.
—Salman Rushdie
Dissimilar to fantasy or science fiction, magical realism is often delivered in a matter-of-fact tone, grounded in a mundane, everyday setting that subtly sets the perfect foundation for magical events to unfold.
Similarly, this is different from surrealist literature, a style in which ideas, images, and objects are combined in a strange way, like in a dream, often disjointed and irrationally juxtaposed with fantastic imagery and dark humor, to confront themes across existentialism and purposelessness, like Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, or Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (considered a classic work of magical realism, but also a surrealist masterpiece), Insel by Mina Loy, or The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector.
The origins of magical realism
Where did it come from? And why does it still persist today?
Let’s first dive into the origins of magical realism, which initially started in twentieth-century art movements across Germany.
First used by the German art critic Franz Roy in 1925 to refer to a painterly style known as New Objectivity, an alternative to expressionism, it was a style that captured in accurate detail, in a type of photographic clarity, a portrayal of the ‘magical nature’ of the rational world.
The movement started as a response to the post-WWI conditions in the newly formed nation’s first democracy, a country nestled between two world wars, and quickly began to grow. As a form of expression, it boomed during the years of Weimar Germany until it was subsequently condemned by Nazi Germany as ‘degenerate’ after the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor in 1933, leading to the permanent destruction or loss of hundreds of artworks between 1933 and 1945.
The ‘objective’ idea of life was often combined with surreal, mysterious, or magical qualities and brought works of art that displayed an uncanniness to real life and our everyday environment. This backdrop of growing political unrest and extremism is the bedrock of magical realism as we know it in literature, but for writing, it wasn’t Germany that brought this about, but somewhere about 9,240km away in Colombia, known as the heartland of literary magical realism.
Often cloaked in folklore with a visceral feel of oral storytelling, it has undoubtedly existed in numerous cultures throughout history, but I think what established Latin American writers in the 1950s as the pioneers of this style, such as Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Isabel Allende (Chile), and Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), were the patterns and forms of writing that appeared over and over again, bringing these intimate, intricate worlds to life.
That is the best part of writing: finding the hidden treasures, giving sparkle to worn out events, invigorating the tired soul with imagination, creating some kind of truth with many lies.
—Isabel Allende
The essential ingredients for magical realism
Like any other form of storytelling, magic realism comes with its own set of specific pointers for crafting a brilliant novel.
So what are those, and how can you make sure yours is packing in those essentials, too?
Let’s simplify the approach. Think of it like your most basic ingredients for any good cake: flour, eggs, butter, and sugar.
- A mundane, real-world setting 🌾
- Ordinary yet complex characters, often with fantasy or magical traits placed upon them 🥚
- A non-linear, cyclical, or fluid sense of time 🧈
- Distinct, polished prose with an authorial voice 🥄
Let’s break this down below to find out exactly how these essentials make or break a magical realism novel.
1. A mundane, real-world setting
Let’s start with your flour—as in, the thing that provides the structure to your baked goods and provides the framework (thank you, gluten!) to stretch, expand, and rise the way it needs to. Your flour is a mundane, real-world setting.
Magical realism couldn’t exist without a place or setting that feels familiar to the reader. For example, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, when Gabriel García Márquez placed his characters in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo, he constructed a town that draws from his own childhood town, Aracataca. A place that’s on my bucket list to visit!
Personal dreams aside, constructing a town so familiar to himself but equally familiar to readers for the domesticity of the setting, the rural town, and the family home allowed the supernatural, magical happenings to be transformed and feel much more otherworldly by contrast.
In this ordinary town, a rainstorm could last exactly four years, eleven months, and two days. A flask, forgotten in a cupboard for many years, can become so heavy that it’s impossible to move. Or, as happens in one of the most incredibly memorable and vivid magical realism moments in this novel (of which there are many), a man’s blood can be described as traveling through a town along a technically impossible path before landing at his mother’s feet, capturing the emotional truth behind the magic—the logic behind the magic (which I’ll get to later), that a son’s blood must return to its mother, while she’s in the middle of cracking 36 eggs to make bread.
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
2. Ordinary yet complex characters, often with fantasy or magical traits placed upon them
On to the next ingredient! Butter, butter, butter. Why do we use it?
Well, in baking, it’s there to give richness, tenderness, and additional structure to the baked good you’re after. The power of butter is also in choosing how and when to combine it with other ingredients and at what temperature. For me, ordinary yet complex characters, often with fantasy or magical traits placed upon them are your butter!
Writing complex characters
I wanted the narrator of this story to transcend time and be able to tell the story wholly, while also being a chronicler and teacher of history and the civilization of the Igbo people. The chi affords me this liberty—it has lived for many centuries, has reincarnated many times, and ensouled many characters ranging from one who was a slave to a soldier who fought during the Biafra war. It has, as it says frequently, seen things many times.
—Chigozie Obioma
In Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities, told from the perspective of Chinonso’s 700-year-old chi, characters commit actions with cosmic implications of which they are often unaware.
Or, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the ghost of Beloved is Sethe’s eldest daughter, who haunts the family home until she’s reincarnated as a human girl again, with disturbing, uncanny characteristics. But what makes this different from a ghost story? A horror-gothic-infused tale of folklore? It’s the characters themselves and the metaphor they represent.
Characters in Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beloved is a manifestation of the trauma suffered by the African American community and a reminder of the inescapable nature of past trauma that lives in the body. When she first arrives at Sethe’s home, Sethe’s waters ‘break’ all over again, as if she’s about to give birth or as if her released waters are about to cause a flood, a great flood, and the imagery and symbolism of water and liquid in the novel continues to be reinforced as a central nod to the Ohio River.
Beloved is set against the mundane backdrop of a mundane Ohio town, with a mother and daughter living at 124 Bluestone. The characters then add richness to this setting, from Sethe to Beloved to Denver and Paul D. Their complexities add additional structure and propel the story forward.
And, for some reason she could not immediately account for, the moment she got close enough to see the face, Sethe’s bladder filled to capacity. She said, ‘Oh, excuse me,’ and ran around to the back of 124. Not since she was a baby girl, being cared for by the eight year-old girl who pointed out her mother to her, had she had an emergency that unmanageable. She never made the outhouse. Right in front of its door she had to lift her skirts, and the water she voided was endless. Like a horse, she thought, but as it went on and on she thought, No, more like flooding the boat when Denver was born. So much water Amy said, ‘Hold on, Lu. You going to sink us you keep that up.’ But there was no stopping water breaking from a breaking womb and there was no stopping now. She hoped Paul D wouldn’t take it upon himself to come looking for her and be obliged to see her squatting in front of her own privy making a mudhole too deep to be witnessed without shame. Just about the time she started wondering if the carnival would accept another freak, it stopped.
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
Your characters make for the most uniquely flavored magical realism novel.
Let’s look at another compelling character from a completely different book whose love of cooking seems to be parallel with my own: Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Tita de la Garza, the main character, is repressed by her mother, unable to express her own opinion and live a life of her choosing, condemned to obey her until death.
On the one hand, Tita represents the people of Mexico, as the story itself can be read as an allegorical examination of the Mexican Revolution, and on the other, she represents the lives of Latin American women during this time.
Esquivel explores the change in women during this period, where some became soldiers, and some were still kept in traditional roles.
When Tita cooks a rose-petal dish for the family, the result is a manifestation of her physical desire for Pedro, the man she loves and is forbidden to marry. The preparation of this dish symbolizes her passions and desires but also her solidarity with her younger sister, Gertrudis, an independent, liberal-minded young woman with a desire for independence. After the meal, Gertrudis feels a sensation akin to having had a strong aphrodisiac, essentially absorbing her sister’s feelings through the food.
Still brimming with heat and desire from the rose-petal quail, she has an extraordinary moment in the shower, drizzling with magic during such an ordinary, everyday task, that results in her fleeing with a militia man, Captain Juan Alejandrez, a crucial step for her to escape her current situation in life.
The only thing that kept her going was the image of the refreshing shower ahead of her, but unfortunately she was never able to enjoy it, because the drops that fell from the shower never made it to her body: they evaporated before they reached her. Her body was giving off so much heat that the wooden walls began to split and burst into flame.
—Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
3. A non-linear, cyclical, or fluid sense of time
We have our flour, we’ve made breadcrumbs with our butter; now what?
Eggs! The eggs in your baked goods bind everything together, stopping your batter from falling apart and helping it rise. They help to thicken, emulsify, and add moisture to your cake, acting like glue or a glaze to the most delicious types of treats. For me, your eggs are your non-linear, cyclical, or fluid sense of time.
Playing with non-linear narratives
The events in magical realism novels aren’t always shared in chronological order. The narration can skip, spin, and twirl around, and it’s not uncommon for the dead to be walking side by side with the living, like the ghost in Beloved or Clara in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, who is clairvoyant and can commune with the spirits, appearing as a ghost for her loved ones even after she dies.
The non-linear sense of time is often treated as an ordinary thing. Magical realist texts are known to disrupt the universally adhered conceptions of time and space, so our ability to grasp these two usually unquestionable concepts is eroded by the presentation of the mundane as magical and the magical as mundane.
Time in One Hundred Years of Solitude
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, time is circular and recurrent, creating a sense of maddening inevitability that prevails throughout the text.
This, in turn, is reflected through the repeated generations of the Buendía family, representing the historical inevitability of repetition and characters who cannot break free of their family’s inherited behavioral patterns—a microcosm for Márquez of the political landscape at the time in Colombia.
It creates an intense and gripping reading experience that encourages the reader to continue both inward and downward at the same time: a dizzying, exciting experience.
Time in The House of the Spirits
In The House of the Spirits, Allende sets up the confrontation between Latin American and Western cultural understandings of time.
The novel takes place in Chile, where globalizing forces are increasingly influencing the country, shown to us through the house that once existed within a polychronic time (where several things can be done at once) becoming a monochronic one (doing one thing at a time) due to the forces imposed upon it.
A sense of mystery and confusion can be created here that works to mirror the feeling of a people, a country, a historical period, of the time being depicted.
The way we visualize time is of course very progress oriented. We think about the future being ahead of us and the past behind us. But there are many cultures that don’t see it that way.
—Ruth Ozeki
Time in An Orchestra of Minorities
This confronting of Western cultural homogenization and how this is often explored through magical realist literature subversion is similarly explored in An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma, shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.
The novel blends Nigerian Igbo folklore with the narrative structure of Homer’s The Odyssey, enriched through the non-linear storytelling consistently shifting between earthly and supernatural realms from the perspective of the main character’s guardian spirit.
It engages with a mythic style of folklore, with the narrator having lived for hundreds of years, offering a perspective on the events that are both real and magical.
By following a non-linear structure, you can create a heightened sense of awareness in the lives of your characters, and maybe even your readers, to life’s connectedness and inner web of hidden meanings and, well, magic.
Also, on a technical level, the chi is all that you mention: it breaks the boundaries of narrative perspectives. It is telling its own story as well as the story of its host, Chinonso, so is both a first person and third person narrator. Then, sometimes when it addresses the high court of spirits, it becomes a second person narrator.
—Chigozie Obioma
4. Distinct, polished prose with an authorial voice
Sweet, sweet, sugary prose. We all know and love that sugar offers a sweet, enjoyably tantalizing tastebud experience, but what we’re trying to find out is what it does when combined with our other ingredients. That’s when we really understand just how important it is as part of a whole.
Sugar binds, and it binds well, which does two very important things for your baked goods: it locks in moisture, keeping everything from drying out and crumbling to the touch, and it inhibits the development of gluten (what our flour provided) to keep everything soft.
Distinct, polished prose with an authorial voice is the sugar.
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Writing magical realism
As a form of storytelling, magical realism is closer to literary fiction than to fantasy (a genre fiction), and so the style of writing is another essential component of writing your novel.
With this style, you’ll want focused character development, an evocative writing style, an irresistible voice, and a deft approach to language and structure that feels propulsive and compelling to read.
The style is often beautifully rendered, poetic, and smart. Critically, these types of novels are often longlisted, shortlisted, or awarded for literary prizes, such as Mariana Enriquez’s The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a short story collection shortlisted for the International Booker Prize that was superbly translated by Megan McDowell. Or Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, winner of the 2017 National Book Award and shortlisted for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Or Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form & Emptiness, winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
The tone is often un-astonishing to uphold the ordinariness of the magical events, often featuring fantastical creatures, with an irresistible, attention-grabbing voice.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
—Ernest Hemingway
Writing vs editing magical realism
You’ve got your essentials. In fact, you’ve written your first draft—so what happens in the editing process? And what changes from the writing process to the editing?
Georgia Summers, editor at The Novelry and bestselling author of The City of Stardust, says:
From a writer’s perspective, it is about convincing your reader of your world. And that means making sure they understand fundamentals, and the logic is sound. I personally hate working on the logic, but it is SO important to get right because if the logic doesn’t work, the entire conceit of the world falls apart.
—Georgia Summers
With this in mind, consider the purpose of your story. As we’ve looked at from the examples we’ve explored above, magical realism novels are often used to critique society, politics, and institutions of power. The magical elements are always, in some way, serving this purpose through helping to develop your characters, moving the plot forward or keeping the reader engaged, and feeling what’s happening to them. It’s important to know what your essentials are and how they’re being constructed, having a clear, realistic world (the more mundane, the better—or, at least, the more familiar) before you begin to play around with it.
Francine Toon, editor at The Novelry and bestselling author of Pine, echoed the same sentiments when I asked her about the writing process of magical realism.
I spend the most amount of time on establishing the magical logic and making sure that feels watertight.
—Francine Toon
Simply expecting your reader to ‘go along with it’ isn’t going to fly! (Even if your character does.) As we’ve looked at already, each part of the magical elements of any novel is in some way justified, whether relating to the setting, the sense of time and place, or the character arc. You have to earn your reader’s trust, so start small and go big, go slow, and let the magic unravel.
It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.
—T.S. Eliot
When it comes to what she’s looking out for as an editor, Georgia says:
I think having that singular element of magic or science fiction is really exciting, but it’s important to understand both sides of that genre coin because your readership will include SFF readers who are very familiar with genre conventions—and they will know if something is missing! When it comes to explaining the speculative element, I don’t think it has to be in-depth; The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is a great example of this, as the main character straight up says at the beginning that they can’t explain how the time travel works—and it works in the context of the narrative and the main character’s role.
But the logical connective tissue has to be there, and really, really importantly—you have to convince the reader that your characters accept and understand this slantwise reality. Which means some explanation, to a degree. It’s important to really engage with that speculative element, as these more high-concept books are like thought experiments (what if?), and often we don’t see people going far enough to consider how their concept interacts with and changes the world around us.
—Georgia Summers
Magical realism books to read
As well as the books we’ve mentioned here, there are a few firm favorites of mine that I’d recommend reading if magical realism is what you’re after. Of course, the classic magical realism books that we’ve mentioned still remain hugely popular, but if you’re looking for how magical realism writers are engaging with the storytelling form today and how they’re continuing to explore the literary genre, some of those which I’ve hugely enjoyed are:
- The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez (pub. 2009, English translation 2021)
- The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehesi Coates (2019)
- Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi (2014)
- The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender (2010)
Each of these novels explores magical realism in beautifully unique, special ways. The storytelling is diverse, playful, considered, and full of the ripe offering that magical realism has for both writers and readers.
Ready to start your magical realism novel? Check out our writing coach Ella McLeod’s writing prompts for magical realism.
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