Magic Between the Lines: Magical Realism in Storytelling
Author Garrett Curbow breaks down magical realism in storytelling by using his own novel as a guide to adding magic between the lines.
Take a story, steep it in reality, and add a dash of supernatural. That’s how you make magical realism. As a genre, it represents the unknown hidden behind the known. The idea that, if you opened your eyes a little wider, you might be able to glimpse this unfathomable world living inside our own. Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab, Whispers of Ink and Starlight, by yours truly—they all ask the same question. What if there is more beyond what we can see? Or the inevitable: There is more beyond what we can see, so what is it?
As a kid, I discovered a second home in the woods behind my neighborhood. I spent hours climbing trees and pretending they were giants. Turning over stones and searching for fairies. I never saw one, but I could feel them there, just out of sight, as if they were watching me. I became fascinated by the concept of something fantastical existing just beyond, or even within, reality.
Theoretically, there is no distinction between what is and what could be. If you can conceive that something could be, then you have already made it real. This was the world of magic I lived in as a kid. I knew the difference between fantasy and reality, but I refused to accept the predetermined boundaries of my world. So, naturally, I started writing.
Whispers of Ink and Starlight was, when I started it six years ago, a novel about a writer and a painter falling in love. There was no magic, no traveling to France, no Scotland, no ink. As a freshman in college used to fleshing out fantasy worlds, I wanted to challenge myself to write a grounded, realistic novel with more emphasis on character than plot. At its core, Whispers of Ink and Starlight still abides by those rules. It is a story about James and Nelle, prioritizing their emotional growth over the save-the-world hero archetype that I was comfortable writing at the time. Fantasy is ingrained in me, though, and as soon as I started writing from Nelle’s perspective, magical realism entered the story.
As characters, Nelle and James are young 20-somethings, searching for their place and purpose in the world, trying to find their voices. Coming from sheltered, controlled backgrounds, they are hungry for autonomy. Nelle has been written into life, her every movement controlled by ink, and it’s up to James to assume the role of writing for her. The magical realism here acts as a physical manifestation of these characters’ internal battles. They want to be free, yet the very nature of their connection prohibits that. As the novel progresses and the depths of its magical aspects are uncovered, Nelle and James change along with their connection to ink. If Whispers of Ink and Starlight had remained realistic fiction, I would have never made it past writing page 10. The magic system became integral to the story, propelling the plot while adding a magical exclamation point to the emotional beats of Nelle and James’s relationship.
I was surprised, as I began interweaving this soft magic system into the novel, that it made the characters and their world feel more grounded. Magic serves the novel’s themes of self-identity and wonder, and through the lens of magical realism, I was able to highlight these human concepts I wanted to tackle. The most magical element of the novel, however, has nothing to do with ink. Whispers of Ink and Starlight was the first novel where I truly fell in love with the characters, where they excavated themselves from the page and became living beings in my mind. Now that Nelle and James exist as words on published paper, they are as real as I can make them. Once they find their way into readers’ minds, they will breach yet another layer of reality.
Magical realism asks questions that bend and stretch our framework of reality. What if a café could allow you to time travel? What if someone is cursed to live forever, but always forgotten? What if there is a woman, in a small rural town somewhere, written into life? It opens the door to imagining what could exist beyond the boundaries of perceived reality, making the known world a little more mysterious and magical.
Check out Garrett Curbow's Whispers of Ink and Starlight here:
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