It’s Fantasy, but it CAN’T Be Whatever You Want it to Be
There is a phrase I have come to detest in the genre fiction discourse: “It’s fantasy, so it can be whatever you want it to be!”
The problem isn’t that the statement is false, because it isn’t. The issue is how the phrase is used. It is either used to reject or belittle an author’s creative choices (or, put another way, “It’s fantasy, so it should be whatever I want it to be”), or it is used to excuse lazy storytelling, worldbuilding, and/or character development.
(In fact, I hate the phrase so much that to a degree my latest novel, The Fairy Godmother’s Tale, is a rebuttal to it. It is historical fantasy with an emphasis on the “historical,” and the characters and worldbuilding are bound to the setting’s time and place.)
The reality is that, yes, any fiction is a product of the author’s imagination, and therefore can be whatever that author wants it to be. However, if the story is to be any good, the author is going to need to apply rules and limitations, and stick to them. And to understand why, we need to first look at how readers consume stories.
Reader Expectations
“Subverting expectations” has become a much-maligned catch phrase of late, but the truth is that understanding reader expectations is key to being able to tell a good story. More specifically, one must understand how reader expectations work.
To take an example from Robert McKee’s excellent book Story, in the movie Jaws, the moment you have the sheriff discover the existence of the shark, the audience expects the sheriff to fight the shark. This is an expectation that must be met, or the story will feel incomplete. How the sheriff gets to the point of fighting the shark, and what happens when he fights the shark, are up to the writer, and the best stories come about by subverting expectations in both of these. Or, as McKee put it, to give the reader what they really wanted, but didn’t know they wanted.
All parts of storytelling create reader expectations, from genre to characters to worldbuilding. If the genre is epic fantasy, the reader will expect to see a sword and magic at some point. Likewise, in a romance novel, the reader will expect a love story — it doesn’t have to end well (and, indeed, it could be far more memorable if it doesn’t), but love does have to be involved. If a character is a villain, they are expected to do bad things. A hero is expected to do good things. An author disregards these expectations at their peril.
The Need for Conflict
Stories need conflict. In fact, they cannot exist without it. The reason for this is simple, but often goes unstated or misunderstood: conflict is story structure.
Conflict does not need to be one person fighting another. In fact, the basic definition of conflict is that a character wants a thing, and there is some opposing force preventing them from getting it. This force can be anything at all — it can be the protagonist’s own hangups, it can be a lack of building material — but it does have to be present. The inciting incident that starts the conflict signals to the reader that the story has begun. Likewise, the resolution to the conflict signals to the reader that the story is over. Once this happens, all that’s left is to wrap up remaining story threads.
If an author resolves the primary conflict midway through the story, or has the protagonist be so overpowered that the opposing force isn’t even capable of slowing them down, this signals to the reader that the story is done, and the reader disengages from it.
To be clear, a story does not need to finish with the same conflict that it started with. For example, the primary conflict in The Fairy Godmother’s Tale doesn’t start until the beginning of the second part, after the tragic conclusion of the conflict in the first part. But there should be some level of overlap or transition from one to the other — this tells the reader that the story isn’t over yet, and there is more to come, which in turn prevents them from disengaging (call it a “sequel hook,” if you will).
The Perception of Reality
The reader’s perception of their reality is all-important in telling a story. An author ignores it at their peril.
“Perception,” however, is the operative word. Reality is bizarre and random. Outlandish things happen as a matter of course. For example, I was doing research for a potential horror novel I might write in the future, and this brought me into contact with the Malleus Maleficarum, AKA “The Witches’ Hammer.” My plan was to take the Medieval concept of witchcraft, and then ramp it up to be as horrifying as possible. What I did not expect to find was a reference to witches having boxes or nests containing dozens of penises, which writhe around and eat seeds. Centuries ago, people thought these nests or boxes were real, but in the here and now nobody would be able to take the idea seriously — it would turn horror into comedy.
All human beings build a perception of reality, making sense of the randomness by fitting it into cause and effect. This is how we experience the world. As such, it is also how we experience fiction. No matter how fantastical the setting may be, we expect it to make sense in the same way that our world makes sense.
For character interactions, this means that characters are expected to act with internal consistency, and to respond reasonably to what happens around them based on that internal consistency. A hero who has spent the entire novel saving people should not react to innocent people being killed in front of them by cheering on the massacre.
Likewise, we expect characters on the page to reflect the types of people we encounter in our day-to-day lives. We have an image in our head of what a strong woman (such as a military veteran or a first responder) is, and if a “girlboss” in fiction doesn’t reflect that image, we don’t buy into the character.
Worldbuilding likewise works through the same mechanisms. We have a perception of how the world around us works on a basic level. So long as a fictional world also works on the same basic level, we have no trouble suspending our disbelief. But, the moment there is a disconnect, that suspension of disbelief is weakened, if not broken. We know, for example, that each variation of skin colour has a geographical origin — it therefore follows that for a multi-ethnic society to have a variety of skin colours, travel from far-away places must be involved. If an author creates an insular human society with a vast variety of skin colours that has been isolated in one place for hundreds of thousands of years, it doesn’t pass the reader’s sniff test.
Again, this does not mean that you cannot have outlandish fantasy worlds, or colourful and remarkable characters. But on a basic level, people are still expected to act like people, and societies and worlds are expected to have consistent rules and make logical sense based on the reader’s perception of reality. If a character is supposed to be a genius, they have to act smart in the same way that the reader perceives intelligence to work. If a waterfall is going to flow up instead of down, there has to be a mechanism of some sort (magic, gravity manipulation, etc.) causing it.
The Paradox of Fiction
This all creates a situation where well-written and compelling fiction is far more constrained than reality has ever been. Real people are complex and contradictory. Fictional characters must act with internal consistency. The real world is filled with random events. Fictional worlds have to work according to the rules of narrative logic. The evil crime boss in reality can keel over from a heart attack or get hit by a drunk driver in the middle of a gang war, but in fiction he has to live long enough to fight the protagonist in the final battle.
This can sometimes feel like it puts the author into a no-win scenario. Readers want creativity and imaginative new worlds to explore, but they also want them and their denizens to be grounded in their perception of reality. Go too far into the fantastic and the reader rejects it. Go too far into the real, and the reader gets bored.
And yet…One Piece exists. It’s outlandish, fantastic, the characters are sometimes living cartoons, and it’s very, very good.
The trick for the author is to remember that realism vs. imagination is not a binary. It has never been an either/or. It is true that a good story needs internal constraints and rules for a reader to accept it. It is also true that any fiction can be whatever the author wants it to be, and should be.
The key to good storytelling is, and always has been, striking the right balance between the two.
Robert B. Marks is the author of The Fairy Godmother’s Tale, which is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle formats.
