How children's holiday fantasy teaches us to support our readers' imaginations
World building for adults taught by talking toys
What stories come to mind when I say holiday fantasy? For me, it’s The Nutcracker and The Mouse King, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, The Polar Express, the wintery magic of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, and The Christmas Pig by J.K. Rowling.
What do these holiday-time fantasies have in common? Most are stories about children.
Sure, there are exceptions (Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I’m looking at you). Still, Christmas and kids go together like hot chocolate and marshmallows. There’s a certain magic to Christmas which, as an adult, I can now only experience through memory or via parental empathy.
Holiday fantasy evokes childhood. Is this accomplished simply through kid characters, or is their some deeper magic?
And do these children’s holiday fantasies contain kernels of wisdom for me in my adult fantasy writing?
Here’s what I learned.
Make the everyday magical
It’s a rough night for The Magic Treehouse series at our house. I borrowed the first book in this beloved kids’ series from the library. My six-year-old son opens the first page and declares, “I hate this. I don’t want to read this.”
I make the usual bargain: try a few pages, then decide. Typically my son either falls in love with the new story or at least tolerates it. Unfortunately, The Magic Treehouse is a total bust. He refuses to read and wriggles in obvious discomfort during my narration.
Later, while returning The Magic Treehouse to the library, I ponder why it was such a flop. Stories have overcome my kiddo’s disappointment with black-and-white illustrations plenty of times. Pictures in the book were sparse, but the simple text was easily within my son’s grasp.
What’s worse, I *really* liked The Magic Treehouse. The words painted delectable pictures of faraway, spec-fictional landscapes. That’s when it hits me--my son rejected the book because he cannot (yet) envision a setting built from words alone. He still needs pictures to support his imagination.
No wonder my son is so in love with comic readers right now! His ace reading skills aren’t the point--he hasn’t fully developed the ability to envision story. Thus, his love of richly-illustrated comics and readers (thanks, Dogman!), and his disdain for any story that conveys setting through words.
This challenge for young children to picture a fantasy setting means not only that kids need support from illustrations, but that kids’ fantasies rely strongly on familiar experiences from from their everyday lives. Talking toys, talking animals. Talking food (see my post on When PB Met J). When fantasy world building elements, characters, and plot points incorporate familiar scenarios from everyday life, it supports a developing child’s ability to picture the story.
Remember my list of holiday stories reminiscent of childhood? They’re filled with snowmen who come to life (Frosty), toys who come to life (The Nutcracker, the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolph). Of course, as in all kid lit, talking animals abound.
Your average kiddo doesn’t meet many dragons, but they’ve got experience with snowmen. Kids spend their days pretending their toys can talk, making it a breeze to imagine a Nutcracker doll who truly animates. My youngest still gets mildly offended when he greets a squirrel and the squirrel doesn’t say hi back. Kids are hard wired to anthropomorphize in exactly this way
All those holiday stories evoke childhood because they use the same trick most kids’ stories use: making imaginary worlds easier to grasp by making the everyday magical.
So, what does this mean for adult fiction? We might wax nostalgic for childhood as we gaze through our frosty windowpanes, but when we pack up our jingle bells, don’t adults prefer adult entertainment?
The key to supporting adult readers as they envision your story
Adult fantasy typically seeks to create the opposite experience from kid lit fantasy. Adult fantasy promises to carry us away, bathe us in novelty, whisk us to a world completely unlike our own. In short, when it’s not the holidays, we grownups rarely seek talking toys.
Also, adults are far more adept at picturing a scene or scenario in our heads than young children. Maps are cool and everything, but we don’t really our fantasy worlds to directly correlate to everyday experiences.
However...
When we grownups are introduced to a wondrous, spectacular world, we could still use a little help. Adult readers grope for a handle--something we can use to get the gist of the magical world whose door is opening right in front of our eyes.
This handle could look like a reference. For example, in his series The Magicians, Lev Grossman calls on the well-known world of Narnia to help readers understand his magical land called Filory. Don’t get me wrong--Grossman’s Filory is a delight of its own with a complex magic system. But fantasy readers have a template for Narnia etched into their brains, and Levman makes expert use of this to help readers dive fast and deep into his imaginary world.
Fantasy writers don’t have to limit themselves to referencing fantasy fiction. A whole multicultural world of myth, folklore, fairytale, and other storytelling traditions await the same purpose.
A handle could also be an analogy. Both The Wheel of Time and my beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer portray magic as addiction. Connection to magic becomes a craving for power the magic user can barely control. The details of a complex magic system such as Wheel of Time are extremely nuanced and deep, yet as readers we instantly understand the basic idea of magic as addiction.
Another highly-effective handle is politics. We grownups are all-too experienced in power struggles and sides that battle against each other. Game of Thrones is a fantasy world built on an iron-clad scaffolding of politics.
And don’t forget history. We all know about kings and queens and times when people travelled by horse to inns where they sipped their mead. Tolkien is lord of this style of fantasy that uses history as a handle. With the plethora of cultures at our fingertips, fantasy writers can leverage cultural practices from so many times and places to quickly help readers get a gist for their story world. Once that setting is at least cursorily understood, the real fun of grownup fiction can begin.
The holiday fantasy genre
Most of the time, I’m living in the magic of the stories I’m reading and writing, brought to life by the supportive handles that help me grasp the gist of a world, then deepened with satisfying detail.
As someone who usually dwells in magic, I feel a little let down by the holidays. As an adult I’ve never yet recaptured the wonder and delight I felt as a child on Christmas Eve. Holiday stories are my only bridge back to the holiday magic I remember--the same magic my kids are basking in this season.