Realism in Fantasy

I’ve seen debates and confusion over the use of realism in fantasy writing, and after being reminded of it recently, have decided to post my own thoughts about it.

The most common misconception I’ve run across is the tired battlecry of “it doesn’t have to be real, it’s fantasy!” This, to me, is absolute bullcrap. Just because a story may involve dragons or magic doesn’t mean you can throw all believability out the window. In fact, with fantasy you often have to work harder to convince the reader to suspend their disbelief and agree to go along for the ride.

You want to use dragons? Great! They’re excellent beasties. Just be sure to lay out consistent rules for them. Readers will accept impossible skills; firebreathing, anyone? But creating a race of dragons who can only firebreathe for 30 seconds, and then creating a dragon character who can amazingly breathe fire for an hour breaks the rule you set and with it, your reader’s trust. It’s no longer believable, even by the special terms you’ve created for it.

By the same token, this doesn’t mean you have map out every detail for the reader to prove you’ve created a solid, working fantasy world. Internal consistency is the key, not hard proof that your world could exist. Too many explanations unrelated to the main story at hand will turn off a reader as much as deus ex machina. Going back to the dragon example, you wouldn’t want to pause during a scene where a dragon is about to roast the hero just to explain how a dragon can breathe fire without crisping its lungs. Nor is it smart to devote a full chapter expounding upon insignificant details. The worst example of this I’ve found in a book so far would be from Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, in which there is a chapter devoted to nothing but saddlemaking. Nothing of the plot, story, or even character development can be found, only a how-to on what is needed to ride a dragon. A subject that could have been dealt with in a few sentences is instead given pages’ worth of description, for no reason other than to show off a bit of worldbuilding.

I’m not saying you should never explain the way things work in your world; I just think that any explanations or tidbits should always flow with the story, not against it.

A similar issue I’ve seen is the line of thinking “to be believable, I must prove exactly how it could exist”. In other words, a writer must be able to explain every detail of their characters and world in order for a reader to accept and believe the story. I don’t agree with this at all, because I’ve read many great stories that offered little explanations for their worlds, yet still pulled me in like a fly to jam. One example of this would be China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, which contains a race called the Khepri, women with living full-bodied beetles in place of their heads. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? Obviously impossible, and the author never even attempts to explain how such a creature came into being. But you know what, it worked. Instead of laying out a scientific explanation for how a person with a beetle for a brain could exist, Mieville instead painted a rich picture of Khepri culture, and gave readers a strong, vivid Khepri character to empathize with. He took an impossible race and fucking rocked with it.

I think the key to creating realistic fantasy is to not worry about whether it could exist, but in fact treat it like it already does exist, and use that as a springboard. The average person doesn’t know the mechanics behind their ability to breathe, but they sure know that if, for one reason or another they can’t breathe, they will quickly die. And look at all the situations that arise from this fact; a fear of drowning, the ability to suffocate, certain habitat limitations, etc. Basically, even though a person may not know the cause for their need to breathe, they are aware of the many effects. It can be the same with a fantasy world or race. A reader might never know why a dragon can breathe fire in your story — and probably won’t care if you make the effects exciting enough.