What is Real?

As a fantasy author, I have found that a stereotype about

us is that we have our heads in the clouds. We are not grounded in reality. After all, isn’t that what fantasy is? It’s escapism in its highest form. It is living in a child’s mind when you should have grown up long ago. It’s all true, and all a lie. Sometimes, there are two true things that seem opposed that actually form a greater truth if you can fit their jagged pieces together. I do spend a great deal of time in my imagination, spinning worlds into being while living and operating in reality. Sometimes I multitask and do both at once, which is a kind of grown-up playing pretend, but you would never know it. In that way, I do not escape the stereotype, but I will also push back that, in many ways, I must be more deeply grounded in reality.

Think about astronauts. They live out what many of us

only dream of – going to space and walking among the stars. However, they couldn’t live that dream without physical rigor, a deep understanding of physics, mathematics, natural and physical sciences, and knowledge of the human body. I am not saying writing fantasy is akin to rocket science, just that in a way it is because if you do not know how the subtle laws of the world function, you will never walk among the stars.

All authors, not just fantasy writers, must defy some

semblance of adulthood because we cannot afford to allow our imaginations to atrophy. Most of us allow the decay to begin as early as elementary and middle school and by the time they are adults they are so removed from a child’s wonder that they can only see what is in front of them. That is hazardous as much of what is in front of us is something beyond sight. Hello, bacteria. Yet most adults have no trouble imagining minuscule bacteria on their skin with malicious intent to make them sick during flu season, and yet cannot imagine a world where the sky is purple because of gases high up in the atmosphere that alter the light spectrum reaching the world from the sun. A recent example of this phenomenon played out in my high school classroom.

The other day, I was reading Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

with one of my classes. There is this lovely excerpt from the start of chapter 3, where Meggie and Mo are leaving their house, and they spot Dustfinger by the stone wall at the end of the property. Ms. Funke creates that image in a much more beautiful way by having Meggie tell the readers that, while walking on the wall, she would balance while picturing dangerous things like a tiger or foaming rapids. A skill my students are working on is inferencing, so my warm-up question was “Why did Meggie picture a tiger or foaming rapids when she walked on the wall?” Take a moment to answer it for yourself. I was chagrined to find my students had already fallen into the trap that academia and adulthood set for us all.

That is not to say either academia or adulthood are a bad

thing. I could go on for long stretches about the importance of both. However, you shall see what I mean as I summarize the answers my students gave me. The responses were as follows;

“She was picturing scary things.”

“She is picturing dangerous things, and Dustfinger seems dangerous to her, too.”

“There was a tiger sometimes in the bamboo.”

“There is a river next to her house.”

Are any of these answers wrong and/or not addressing the skill of inferencing? No. She was indeed picturing scary things. The author surely meant for readers to connect the dangerous images in Meggie’s imagination to her fear of what Dustfinger’s presence represents. There was never a real tiger or bamboo by Meggie’s house, but it was a detail from the text that takes the text a touch too literally. A river by her house would be a good inference if we took the description of the rapids as a literal element. However, have you caught the one thing that was neglected in these answers? Not one student suggested that she was imagining these pictures as a part of play. As seniors, my students have learned to grasp the literal; they have learned to interpret deeper meaning to appease their English teachers, and in so doing, they missed the instinctive childhood notion that would have been the most accurate answer to how I framed my question. Did none of them think of play as the answer? Maybe not, but they have also learned fear of failure, and such a notion of her motivation being play likely seemed far too simple an answer to trust.

Now, some of you may feel I have lost the plot. I started by

talking about the air-headed fantasy author stereotype, then diverged to something that sounded a far cry more like science fiction than fantasy, and continued with a classroom anecdote. Allow me to tie these threads together. The question posed by the stereotype of fantasy authors is whether, by the nature of their work, they must deny reality to craft their stories. My illustrations up until now have been to help you see the same thing I do. Fantasy must be deeply grounded in reality to function, and simultaneously, the author must hold onto their childhood wonder to have the depth of imagination to alter that reality.

I am no expert in physics, but if I do not understand the

basics, I cannot know which rules can be bent without creating a black hole or some other catastrophe. Those of you who know my writing know that I fall into the hard-magic-system style. Even if I let the reader have a soft magic experience (where the rules of the magic are not clearly defined), I must know for myself. How else can I keep the magic consistent? If the world I craft has floating islands, I must know what phenomenon enables them, because it will affect other areas of my world.

Teachers are encouraged/demanded to be lifelong learners.

A buzz phrase that means the learning is never done. We are required to continue training and encouraged to pursue more degrees. As a fantasy author, I am a lifelong learner, too. My everyday life does not require me to know any more about science than what I learned in high school, but being a fantasy author keeps me digging. Perhaps I am also just inquisitive. I want to know why bioluminescent algae work, where it grows, what their light radius is, and under what conditions it functions, not because I need it, but because I am writing a book where I want that to be the way a cave is lit in one chapter of a story where the character will never return to that cave. I must constantly be studying people to come up with new characters and ways for them to interact. One of my magic systems plays on Newton's laws and other scientific laws that I must understand, otherwise the whole system falls apart.

I can see some raised hands waiting to tell me that the

stereotype I mentioned does not refer to the type of reality I just explained in detail. The stereotype points more to how fantasy utilizes escapism. To that I say, of course. That is the flavor of escapism I prefer. Yours might be something far more unhealthy, like gambling or cigarettes. What’s your point? What do you think we ever had imaginations for? Humanity is designed for a cycle of work and play. “Escapism” is just one part of the play cycle. If you have no play, Jack may be dull, but the true problem is that it drives you to unhealthy places. You are meant to live in balance. All play and no work is just as bad as all work and no play. The academic in me wants to go find you the articles that will prove this point more heartily, but in honesty, I don’t have the time right now, so perhaps I will do a follow-up post with the studies I have found about on this topic, such as the correlation of chronic illness to poverty. I would do that right now, but then we would both be spending all day with this one post, and, like you, I must work. I think you can accept my point for now, based on common sense and faith.

I deny the accuracy of the stereotype on the grounds that

spending time with fantasy requires the writer or reader to evade reality. I postulate that we have a keen awareness of reality, perhaps too keen, and it tips our scales so toward the too much work side that play must happen to keep our sanity. For me, crafting fantasy comes from asking questions, and a good many of them have to do with why our world works the way it does and what if it worked just a little differently. There is so much left to learn that a better question may be "what is real?" There is so much beyond our five senses that we must reconcile with, and science has done a good deal to explore. It may be that as we delve deeper into the universe, the worlds we have relegated to pure fantasy become scientific reality. Therefore, my argument remains that we must have a stronger grasp on reality to escape it than to remain inside it. It is easy to keep our noses on our own grindstones and let the world be as it is and understand none of the world more deeply than what is in front of us. It takes true understanding to weave between the every-day and the imaginary. Only a lack of understanding toward reality muddles the two. You may claim this whole argument is utter nonsense. However, I have managed to escape the looming threat of reality for over an hour writing and revising this post. So, I must now return to reality as this escapism comes to a close with absolutely no fantasy involved. Where will you go next - deeper into your imagination, or back to reality? I'll meet you there.