By Ploi Pirapokin
If pigs can fly, how might farmers secure their livestock at night?
During my time as a student at the Clarion Writers Workshop, Holly Black, most known for co-authoring the middle-grade fantasy series The Spiderwick Chronicles , offered us a set of questions to organize magical elements as a working system in our stories. Her questions were helpful in determining causality, point of view, and plot in fantastical fiction, but her last question about creating a magic system applies to both speculative fiction and nonfiction: “What does the magic say about the world?”
As a writer and teacher of both fantasy and realism, I’m interested in the impact “ our imaginings can have in our lives ,” and finding ways both genres can support, elevate, and expand each other without violating the agreements we’ve made with our readers on the genre they’re reading.
In fiction, I approach Black’s questions top-down in fiction, using her questions to guide my draft to fill in the gaps in my world building. Great world building sustains a reader’s suspension of disbelief by making magic believable through its rippling effect on setting and characters, a text space to explore what could possibly unravel us in real life. I’ve been answering her questions bottom-up to generate new personal essays that could be defined as speculative nonfiction: “writing in which actual or verifiable material is not at war with material invented/extrapolated/speculated/fantasized. In this nonfiction territory, invention does not negate actuality, but expands its truth and its uses.”
In our personal essays and memoirs, we’re often referring to our shared, current world, even if our realities within this world differ. We’re exploring what happened—making sense of the mess, the unexplained happenstances of life. There are already techniques writers use to engage the unknown, like perhapsing , split-toning , and employing forms that mirror the interior landscape of the writer to elicit emotions from readers. When teaching memoir and personal essays, I encourage a fictional exploration of what could be true—not just through speculations (what-ifs); style (inverse storytelling); and comparative commentary (this could be true, that is false)—but by using fully realized fantastical elements with Black’s questions in mind: what impact did magic in your lived experience have on your world? What impact can it have on ours? What can it say about our shared realities?
What can our surreal experiences, our imagination, and our magic, say about the world?
In my essay “ Children of Light ,” for Ninth Letter Online , I wove two parallel threads unfurling in linear time. The essay juxtaposes two points of view: Ploi in the early days of lockdown, and Player Ploi, an avatar in the game, Sky: Children of Light . Real World Ploi, like everybody else, was sequestered to a room and lived on-screen—her actions (or forced inaction) had consequences, but so did her avatar in the game. How was Real World Ploi impacted by role-playing a celestial child, a child with her own separate narrative, history, and friends, and the only connection to the outside world? The power of magic in memoir and personal essays is not only in its allegorical and metaphorical properties. Magic also offers a chance to form new relationships to memories.
Writing my essay meant I had to finish the game; finishing the game meant Avatar Ploi had to die to win; and winning showed me that our lives were not defined by loss, nor death, but by how we lived:
Kingdoms become wastelands we must build from. Beginning in our minds, where the architecture can’t be contained. What is real can be made into belief. What is make believe can grow real.
While memoir and personal essays are about the individual—the I, who has experienced what is documented in these words, the I, who shares my perspective on these truths as a part of these intersectional identities, lineages, and heritages—fantastical fiction, is about the world that makes the I, the You, the We, possible. Jami Nakamura Lin uses mythology to paint a portrait on living with bipolar disorder and grief in The Night Parade . Akwaeke Emezi invites readers to “imagine being ogbanje, like me,” recontextualizing tensions with gender identity, wealth, and literary success in Dear Senthuran . Ingrid Contreras Rojas documents the aftermath of amnesia through acquiring supernatural gifts and reclaiming an indigenous heritage in The Man Who Could Move Clouds . Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House uses form and structure as magical recantations and recalibrations, to unpack the effects of abuse within a same-sex relationship. All these memoirs could have been written in a traditional narrative mode, organized in linear time, but they are not.
Instead, these authors have found in their myth making and world building a way to restitute what’s real for their cultures that may have been considered “magical” for others. They created a space where their marginalized voices can be embraced for their subjectivity, fallibility, and total authority on their subject matter. I believe we can all turn to magic in nonfiction for the same reasons.
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Ploi Pirapokin is a speculative fiction writer, lyric essayist, and creative writing teacher with publications in Tor.com, Ninth Letter, and The Art and Craft of Stories from Asia: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology from Bloomsbury Academic.
Magic, fantastical, and fabulist tropes in your writing can elevate your stories and essays and help them resonate with readers. Join Ploi for the CRAFT TALKS webinar to play with non-naturalist elements in your stories and essays. Enchant, Engage: Make the Fantastic Believable in Prose. 2PM December 20th, $15 Early Bird/$25 regular. More info/register here.
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