The Vital Role of Rules in Fantasy Fiction
Thank you, Patrolman McGann
“It all began with that shoe on the wall. A shoe on the wall…? Shouldn’t be there at all!
~Dr. Seuss
What happened to the fantasy story I loved?
A few weeks ago I unearthed a beloved childhood book from our local library. I brought it home and proceeded to hide it high on the dining room shelf.
Why would I hide it? Because, gosh darn it, I wasn’t gonna let my kids talk me into reading them their first Wacky Wednesday on a Thursday, a Saturday, or a Tuesday. No way. Some rituals have to be properly observed. Especially when it comes to one of the first fantasy stories I ever read.
I hadn’t cracked the cover of Wacky Wednesday since elementary school. Despite that, the book left a strong impression on me. In particular, I remembered the Sutherland sisters walking down the street, one missing her legs, the other her neck. Their denial that anything strange was going on, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, was a spine-chilling thrill. The zany, mysterious, sense of dangerous fun in Wacky Wednesday has lingered in my psyche for decades.
Finally, Wednesday rolled around (as it always does) and, with a frisson of anticipation, I reached for Wacky Wednesday and settled into the bean bag chair with my son. From page one, he was deeply engaged. I, however, began to panic.
Reading as an adult, I was no longer sure Wacky Wednesday qualified as a fantasy. In fact, I could barely call it a story. Other than its MC emoting some unease about shoes on walls and worms chasing birds, Wacky Wednesday seemed nothing more than a search-and-find game.
Young readers were prompted (by clues written with Seussian rhythm and rhyme), to find all the “wacky” things hidden in the illustration. These illustrations depicted typical scenes in a suburban home, school, park, etc.. Oddities included a shoe on the wall, a worm chasing a bird, and a palm tree growing out of the potty (my three-year old particularly loved this).
Fun puzzles. But, what happened to the spine-tingling, delightfully dangerous, fantastical feeling I remembered from childhood? Where was the fantasy story I remembered?
Fantasy makes no excuses
Fantasy is one of the two main subgeneres of speculative fiction. Spec fiction specializes in guiding readers to experience awe and wonder—that spine-tingling stuff I remembered from my childhood read of Wacky Wednesday.
Fantasy’s speculative cousin, science fiction, generates its sense of wonder by imagining a world which is dissimilar to ours. Fantasy does the same thing, but goes about it in a different way.
Science fiction is obliged to explain *why* the world of the story is different from ours. These explanations can be deeply detailed and technical (think hard sci fi), or can be as simple as: it’s the future, and the world has changed. Science fiction writers draw a direct line between the world we know and the world of their story.
Fantasy writers create worlds different from ours. It must be different, but there’s no obligation to explain why. Magic exists. Period.
In this regard, Wacky Wednesday is a fantasy. A child wakes up to find a world filled with impossible things. Palm trees don’t grow in potties (as my three-year-old will tell you). No one asks why the palm tree is growing out of the potty. It just is.
As I played search-and-find games on the beanbag with my son, he giggled, pointing a sprinkling sprinkler fed by a hose that had been cut. Seuss had fulfilled my basic definition of the fantasy genre: provided a world where magical things happening, wasting no time explaining why.
That could only mean one thing. I was missing part of the definition of a fantasy story.
Fantasy stories need rules
Dr. Seuss really pulled one over on me with Wacky Wednesday. Turned out, I hadn’t misremembered or misunderstood anything. Wacky Wednesday was and is a delightful fantasy story. However, one key element of its genre didn’t show up until almost the end the book.
Here’s how Dr. Seuss turned a search-and-find into a fantasy.
After that shoe appeared on the wall on page one of the book, Dr. Seuss began challenging his young readers. Can you find three wacky things on this page? Great job! Can you find four on this page?…five?…six?
Seuss wisely trained his young search-and-finders to flex their observational muscles. He started with simple scenes and small goals. As we turned pages, my son was eager to prove his mettle by finding more. Seuss gradually amped up the difficulty, so there were no sudden frustrating stumpers.
Soon we were finding ten wacky things per page. Twelve. And then, six pages from the end of the book—the story appeared. The story arrived in the form of Patrolman McGann.
Patrolman McGann is the Guide figure in Wacky Wednesday. The wise Guide figure—Gandalf, Moraine, Dumbledore—is the mentor who clues the hero in on how to defeat evil and save the world. In an adult fantasy, readers expect to meet the Guide fairly early on. We also know that guide will almost certainly be taken from the hero before the final battle.
But this is a story written for children delighted by palm trees in potties. To keep things light, Wacky Wednesday introduces us Patrolman McGann at the final battle.
What is that final battle? What must young readers do to defeat wackiness and put the world back in order?
Find twenty more wacky things in the picture on that very page. Find them, and the antagonist (wackiness) will be soundly defeated.
The moment Patrolman McGann appeared (with his hand in his shoe), the whole sense of magic, of wonder, of zany, mysterious, dangerous fun came back to me. If I couldn’t find those twenty things, you see, the wackiness would win. And finding twenty things in a busy picture isn’t easy for a small child.
Although they weren’t explained until rather late in the game, the world of Wacky Wednesday had rules. Simple rules: spot enough wacky things, make the weirdness go away. But without those rules, there was no story. No quest. All readers had until Patrolman McGann gave us the rules of the world, were some search-and-find puzzles and a vague sense of unease.
A fantasy story, then, as defined by the guts of the child-me (who is not yet entirely lost to time), must have a magical world—no why’s required—and that world must have rules. Consistent, logical rules governing a magical world make or break a fantasy story.