Small Impossibilities
By Mark Griffiths - May 14, 2012
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May 14, 2012
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How do you achieve the impossible?
Surely in fantasy fiction it's easy? Anything can happen, can't it? Perhaps. But if your story is to be appear real and not the febrile outpourings of an overheated brain (yes, I'm looking at you, the film Avatar), it pays to keep two factors in mind.
The first is to place your fantasy within a believable setting. Jaws works so well because the (pretty fake looking shark) inhabits a world steeped in 1970s realism, with unstarry actors messing about with semi-improvised dialogue. Compare this to 2005's War of the Worlds. Tom Cruise is so uncannily perfect a specimen of manhood and such a massive Hollywood mega-celeb that he appears scarcely less alien than the Martians chasing him. The vital contrast between reality and fantasy is lost. In Ursula K. le Guin's remarkable 4th Earthsea novel Tehanu, there is precious little magic as the story concentrates on the central character's everyday practical and emotional problems. When magical things do eventually happen, you believe them and they astonish you.
The second factor is to keep your impossibilities small. We're all used to seeing epic space battles, rampaging herds of dinosaurs and cute fish singing Randy Newman songs, but none of us (over the age of 4, at least) believe any of those things are actually possible. Reduce the scale of the impossibility, however, and fantasy suddenly begins to fit into the everyday world we inhabit. The early episodes of The X Files are so creepy because they keep the CGI hokum to a minimum. A billion spaceships overhead is somewhat far-fetched but seeing a man impossibly stretch his fingers by just a few centimetres (as in the episode Squeeze) is far more more terrifying for being so slight an oddity. In Susanna Clarke's superb Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel, magic is a highly tricky business to master and often ends in disappointing results, just like any other area of human activity.
One of my favourite examples of this 'less-is-more' approach to the impossible is in Magritte's painting The Human Condition. In it, a painting on an easel placed in front of a window impossibly shows the view through the window it covers with perfect precision. We might think it is simply a plate of glass on an easel in front of the window - except, a tiny strip of the painting covers a portion of the curtain to the left of the window, and yet we can still impossibly see through it to the sky beyond. That strip of canvas covering the curtain must only be a centimetre or two in width and yet it is all Magritte needs to show us something impossible.
Mark Griffiths's debut novel "Space Lizards Stole My Brain!" was published in January 2012. The sequel "Space Lizards Ate My Sister!" is out in August 2012.
Surely in fantasy fiction it's easy? Anything can happen, can't it? Perhaps. But if your story is to be appear real and not the febrile outpourings of an overheated brain (yes, I'm looking at you, the film Avatar), it pays to keep two factors in mind.
The first is to place your fantasy within a believable setting. Jaws works so well because the (pretty fake looking shark) inhabits a world steeped in 1970s realism, with unstarry actors messing about with semi-improvised dialogue. Compare this to 2005's War of the Worlds. Tom Cruise is so uncannily perfect a specimen of manhood and such a massive Hollywood mega-celeb that he appears scarcely less alien than the Martians chasing him. The vital contrast between reality and fantasy is lost. In Ursula K. le Guin's remarkable 4th Earthsea novel Tehanu, there is precious little magic as the story concentrates on the central character's everyday practical and emotional problems. When magical things do eventually happen, you believe them and they astonish you.
The second factor is to keep your impossibilities small. We're all used to seeing epic space battles, rampaging herds of dinosaurs and cute fish singing Randy Newman songs, but none of us (over the age of 4, at least) believe any of those things are actually possible. Reduce the scale of the impossibility, however, and fantasy suddenly begins to fit into the everyday world we inhabit. The early episodes of The X Files are so creepy because they keep the CGI hokum to a minimum. A billion spaceships overhead is somewhat far-fetched but seeing a man impossibly stretch his fingers by just a few centimetres (as in the episode Squeeze) is far more more terrifying for being so slight an oddity. In Susanna Clarke's superb Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel, magic is a highly tricky business to master and often ends in disappointing results, just like any other area of human activity.
One of my favourite examples of this 'less-is-more' approach to the impossible is in Magritte's painting The Human Condition. In it, a painting on an easel placed in front of a window impossibly shows the view through the window it covers with perfect precision. We might think it is simply a plate of glass on an easel in front of the window - except, a tiny strip of the painting covers a portion of the curtain to the left of the window, and yet we can still impossibly see through it to the sky beyond. That strip of canvas covering the curtain must only be a centimetre or two in width and yet it is all Magritte needs to show us something impossible.
Mark Griffiths's debut novel "Space Lizards Stole My Brain!" was published in January 2012. The sequel "Space Lizards Ate My Sister!" is out in August 2012.
