Looking for a fresh way to spark creativity in writing? Whether you’re a writer trying to shake off some cobwebs or a teacher hoping to add a new twist to class activities, whatever brought you to this post, I hope you’ll find something useful in it.

TLDR… There’s a Podcast?

The world is a busy place so I’ve recorded a vlog/podcast of this post so you can listen as you do other things. You can listen to the podcast episode, or watch it as a YouTube video at the end of the post. You’ll also find links to teacher resources that you can use with your class as well

Magical Realism

If you’re sharing this with a class, it helps to start with a clear idea of what a ‘genre’ is. For what we’ll be working on today, it’ll be sufficient to say that a genre is a category of story. Book genres include categories like fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, and many more.

‘Literary fiction’ is a genre often found on university reading lists. It can sometimes be seen as the more ‘serious’ side of storytelling. One of its sub-genres, magical realism, mixes everyday life with magical moments in a way that is fascinating and quite different from typical fantasy books. The magic is subtle, unspoken, and completely mixed in with the ordinary and everyday.

‘Genre fiction’ is a term typically used for all the books that live in their own worlds outside of ‘literary fiction’.

‘Genre fiction’ tends to dominate bookshop shelves. These are the books readers seek out because they already love that type of story, whether it’s crime, romance, fantasy, or horror. ‘Genre fiction’ is easy to advertise and fairly easy to describe.

Unlike a ‘genre fiction’ category like fantasy, magical realism isn’t about big, magical worlds or epic quests. Instead, it features magic that’s accepted as part of daily life, whilst never being fully explained. The magic isn’t the focus. It’s just part of the world.

I first came across magical realism thanks to a high school teacher (Mr Johnstone), and I was hooked. Some fantasy authors, like Terry Pratchett, have poked fun at it. In fact, Terry Pratchett once joked that saying you write magical realism is “…a polite way of saying you write fantasy…” I can see what he means, but there is a clear difference between the two.

But what is Magical Realism?

Magical Realism is a literary style famously associated with Latin American writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Isabel Allende.

The most notable element of the genre is that when magical or fantastical events occur in an otherwise ordinary setting, no one within the story takes much notice (including the narrator).

In magical realism, the magic is ordinary. It’s not questioned. Characters don’t wonder how it works. They don’t even point it out. The narrator treats it like toast popping out of a toaster—normal and unremarkable.

The focus is always on the human experience. Even if there’s a ghost living in a tree or someone floating into the sky, it’s all part of the background, not the point of the story.

Take “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez. It includes flying grandmothers, ghosts, and prophetic scrolls—all treated as normal parts of life. That’s magical realism.

So, is it just ‘literary fantasy’?

So, is it just ‘literary fantasy’? It can feel that way. Books like “The Watchmaker of Filigree Street” by Natasha Pulley or “Before the Coffee Gets Cold”  by Toshikazu Kawaguchi clearly feature magic. However, they focus on people, relationships, and daily life, not magic systems or worldbuilding.

That’s also probably why they’re considered literary fiction; they treat the magic as background, not plot.

Even Terry Pratchett, who joked around about magical realism, often blurred the lines himself.

Pratchett’s Discworld books sometimes let magical elements go significantly unexplained. What’s more, every single Pratchett book I’ve ever read gives a deep and clear connection to the human (or troll, or dwarf, or golem, or even lowly goblin) components of the story. All of this lets some of Pratchett’s own work edge ever so closely into magical realist territory.

Other books for younger readers do this too. Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” and Garth Nix’s “Keys to the Kingdom” series both dip into this space. They sometimes avoid explaining how the magic works, letting the mystery remain.

Is Magical Realism a genre that would work for Kids?

All of this said, magical realism in children’s books is rare. Why? Kids are still figuring out how the real world works. They need some explanation about almost everything that happens in a story, whether it’s ‘real’ or magical. Plus, learning how magic works can be a fun part of the story in itself.

In my own books, Jack starts out in our world and learns about magic bit by bit. Some things are left unexplained, but I explain enough to keep younger readers clued in. That much explanation is definitely more like traditional fantasy than magical realism.

So are there any magical realist children’s books?

The one exception to the seeming rule about the difficulties of creating magical realism for kids is Roald Dahl. His stories often treat magic as normal, but his gritty, sometimes unpleasant real-world details make his stories feel oddly grounded as well.

Roald Dahl’s writing is so distinctive that I’ll be exploring it in more detail in a later post.

Fantastical stories lift us out of the everyday, but they do it in a way that helps us see human behaviour more clearly.

Whether we’re worried about a basilisk in the basement of the school, a ghoulish creature hiding in our garden, a dog that somehow switches off all devices nearby, or if we’re gingerly climbing the slopes of Mount Doom, all of these experiences make their own sort of sense. We can see the real human parts all the clearer when everything else seems strange.

Magical realism, in contrast to fantasy, holds on tight to the mystery of how the magic works. For some young readers, that might feel unsatisfying. However, it’s still strange enough to make the feelings of the characters stand out all the stronger.

With this in mind, we can write magical realism with considerably less explanation than a fantasy story. You can basically jump straight into the strangeness and show the real human emotions all the more clearly.

Here’s a writing activity to try:

The Magical Object Writing Challenge

PART 1: The Magical Object

Give your main character a magical object. It can be weird, strange, or subtle (it doesn’t even have to be an object; it could be a creature of some sort like my story).

Here’s a tip for part 1: To imagine how to use your magical object, it can help to think about how we might describe something more ordinary. Think of a phone. Most of us don’t fully understand how it works, but a single phone can have some fairly big effects in a story.

PART 2: As Ordinary as a Pen

The character doesn’t know their object is magical. They’ve always had it, and they’re so used to what it does that they think it’s as ordinary as a pen or a pair of shoes. No one explains it. Not even the narrator.

Here’s a tip for part 2: To make this easier for yourself, avoid naming the object in the title. Avoid describing it early. Let it blend into the story naturally.

PART 3: Real Life Drama

Write a story about an ordinary day. Come up with something dramatic (yet ordinary) that could be going on. Show the object doing something unusual, but don’t explain how or why.

Here’s a tip for part 3: Your magical object can be part of the solution, but be sure to look at the feelings of the people in the story more than you talk about the object.

PART 4: Emotions

Focus on how it affects people. What are all the main characters feeling at the end?

Here’s a tip for part 4: A story’s conclusion is often when there’s an emotional change. The more dramatic the change, the more dramatic the ending. Anger to joy, sadness to humour, you can decide what feelings you’d like to see your characters show.

EXTRA NOTE

The quadrants on the worksheet don’t have to be the order your story goes in. Once you have notes in 1, 2, 3, and 4, you could grab a separate piece of paper (or a jotter) and write up a story there.

This way, notes from 3 could be your beginning, followed by the object ideas you noted in 1, you can use notes from 2 to help you move the story along, whilst remembering to keep the magic subtle, and then finish your story using notes from part 4.

The order in which you use your four sets of notes is up to you.

A Simpler Choice for Quicker Storytelling

It can feel strange to restrict your writing a bit. One of the amazing things about writing fiction is how wild and open it can feel. With a blank page in front of you, you could take the story anywhere.

However, sometimes, when you have too many choices, just making a single choice can feel like the hard part.

Cutting your options down can force you to sharpen up what you want to say, and the sort of story you want to tell. This can also tell you a little bit about how you felt when you were writing too.

What did your story teach you about yourself?

It can feel strange to restrict your writing a bit. One of the amazing things about writing fiction is how wild and open it can feel. With a blank page in front of you, you could take the story anywhere.

However, sometimes that freedom can be a bit of a problem. When you have too many choices, just making a single choice can feel like the hard part.

Cutting your options down with something like the writing challenge we’ve just looked at can force you to sharpen up what you want to say, and the sort of story you want to tell. This can tell you a little bit about how you felt when you were writing too.

If you chose something creepy, maybe you needed a little jump scare to wake up your brain a bit. Perhaps your story had a little sadness in it, so maybe you needed a chance to let out something upsetting. Maybe you went for a humorous story, so you might have needed a laugh.

Writing fiction lets you deal with real emotions in imaginary ways, and magical realism offers a slightly different way to do that than more traditional genres.

I hope you enjoyed the activity, and sometime soon I’ll be adding a portion to the podcast where I showcase listeners’ stories, so feel free to share your story using the contact links that you’ll find on social media and on the website.

Final Thoughts & Questions

How did you (or your class) get on with the writing activity? I’d love your feedback.

Do you know of any children’s books that feel truly magical realist?

Which book genre translates well to children’s books, and which doesn’t?

Let me know in the comments or message me on Instagram.

As always, thanks for reading, and don’t forget you can buy a copy (paperback or Kindle edition) of my own Fantasy book ‘Jack Reusen and the Fey Flame’ over on this page, or you can see all of my books on my Amazon Author page here.

All the best,

John

Files for Teachers

Here’s a Canva link to access the presentation file.

You can also follow this link to download classroom printouts in either black and white, or colour.

If you can’t access the Canva version, you can also download either a PowerPoint or PDF copy of the presentation for your smartboard to accompany the sheets using the Google Drive link above.

Watch or Listen to this post instead

Below are YouTube and Spotify versions of the vlog/podcast so you can listen to it as you do other things: