A-ha Moments

Agent Rachel Vater is discussing "a-ha" moments on her blog. I experienced one a little while ago while reading Kelly Link's excellent Magic for Beginners. This was something I felt I understood on some level for a long while, but it hadn't really crystallized for me consciously.

When you set a story in a world not our own, you deal with rules. They may be spoken rules, like the three rules about Gremlins that everyone knows and no one obeys, or they may be unspoken and even vaguel amorphous. But there are rules. When I speak to published writers of fantasy, they believe in these rules. I even have one friend whose entire fantasy series was inspired by the fact that she was so annoyed with fantasies that have no rules.

I digress. So you have these rules. At some point, you have to tell the reader the rules. Explicitly, implicitly, doesn't matter. They need to know them. Even if you're writing some really well-known otherworldly creature like vampires, because by this point there have been so many vampires that every reader of your story comes to the vampire situation with an entirely different idea of how vampires are made, how long they live, how often they eat, whether they're undead or aliens or diseased or monsters or ancient Greek gods or what, and what will really kill them.

And this is where the lightbulb moment comes in.

If a reader knows the rules, jknows them like they're natural, they will react to your book on an emotional, gut level. When readers real non-fantasy books, and a character is hurt or betrayed or whatnot, they react instantly. When you are reading a "real world" book and a character jumps off a building, you're scared, because in the real world, when characters jump off buildings, they splat. But if a character walks out into the sunlight, they aren't scared.

But in a good fantasy novel, if you have set up the world and told the reader the rules, when that vampire walks into the sunlight, they are going to get scared. They aren't going to be in their real world "sunlight is harmless" mindset. They aren't even going to stop and go, "Wait a second, in this permutation of the vampire myth, vampires die in sunlight." They aren't going to think at all. They're just going to be scared. Instantly. Organically. Elementally.

I know, I know, it seems basic. But it was cool for me.