Blog
How to Write Magical Realism: Lessons from a Poets & Writers First Fiction Author
by Writing Workshops Staff
2 days ago
Poets & Writers has named P.C. Verrone to its First Fiction 2026 list, the magazine's twenty-sixth annual roundup of the summer's best debut fiction. His novel, Rabbit, Fox, Tar (Catapult), reworks the old Br'er Rabbit and tar baby folktale into a fable set in a Black neighborhood marked by the real history of communities razed to make room for American highways. Critics keep reaching for the same two words to describe how the book casts its spell: magical realism. That makes this a good moment to slow down and look at how to write magical realism well, because the genre is easy to name and unexpectedly hard to do. Verrone teaches it at WritingWorkshops.com, and his own debut is a working model of the form.
Most failed attempts at the genre share one problem. The writer treats the magic as decoration, a strange image dropped into an otherwise ordinary story to make it feel literary. Real magical realism works differently. It lives at a seam, the precise place where the impossible enters the ordinary world without tearing it. Everything that follows is about how that seam is built and held.
What is magical realism, and how is it different from fantasy?
Magical realism keeps our recognizable world fully intact and lets a single impossible thing stand inside it, unexplained and unchallenged. Fantasy does something else. It constructs a separate world, whether a kingdom or a galaxy, and gives that world its own consistent rules. A dragon in a fantasy novel obeys the logic of its invented universe. A man who ascends into the sky while folding laundry, as happens in One Hundred Years of Solitude, breaks the logic of our universe, and the novel simply lets him go.
The distinction matters for a practical reason. In fantasy, the writer owes the reader a system. In magical realism, the writer owes the reader almost nothing by way of explanation, and that restraint is the whole discipline. The genre asks you to resist the instinct to justify. The moment a character stops to wonder how the impossible thing is possible, the seam splits and the spell is gone.
Why does magical realism rely on a matter-of-fact narrator?
Tone is the engine. A magical realist narrator reports the extraordinary in the same register it uses for weather and breakfast. Gabriel Garcia Marquez often credited his grandmother, who told him outlandish things in a flat, certain voice that made them impossible to doubt. He spent years failing to write One Hundred Years of Solitude until he understood that he had to narrate the unbelievable with a straight face, the way she had.
Kafka offers the cleanest demonstration. The Metamorphosis opens with Gregor Samsa transformed into an enormous insect, and the very next thing the narration attends to is his anxiety about missing his train to work. No screaming, no gasping at the mirror. The horror lands precisely because the prose refuses to panic. For the writer, this is a usable rule. Calibrate the narrator's calm to the size of the impossibility. The stranger the event, the flatter the sentence that delivers it.
I love the misty, vague spaces between genres. That is where magical realism lives.
– P.C. Verrone
Want to study tone, voice, and structure with award-winning authors? Our online fiction workshops run year-round.
Browse Fiction WorkshopsHow do magical realist writers keep the impossible grounded in the real?
A flat narrator gets you partway. The rest comes from the ground the magic stands on. The most durable magical realism is rooted in a specific social, historical, and cultural world, so the one impossible element has something solid to press against.
Louise Erdrich threads Ojibwe cosmology through the daily texture of reservation life, so that a vision or a haunting reads as continuous with land claims, family debts, and church politics. Han Kang, in The Vegetarian, lets a woman's refusal to eat meat tip slowly toward the botanical while keeping the story anchored in the ordinary pressures of a Seoul family, the in-laws, the marriage, the dinners. The strangeness never floats free. It grows out of recognizable lives.
Verrone's own debut shows the same principle at work. Rabbit, Fox, Tar escalates its folk-magic elements gradually, and the magic holds because the novel grounds it in the documented history of Black neighborhoods displaced by highway construction. Publishers Weekly singled out exactly this move, noting how he develops his central figure through real history alongside folklore. The lesson for any writer working in the genre is that research is not separate from the magic. The more precisely you render the real world, the more weight the impossible can bear.
Get to know the writer behind the workshop, including how he built the magic in his debut novel.
Meet P.C. VerroneHow can you start writing your own magical realism short story?
Here is an exercise to take to the page this week. Pick a single departure from the real, one thing only. A grandmother who does not cast a shadow. A town where it has rained for ten years. Introduce it early, state it plainly, and never apologize for it or explain its rules.
Then spend the rest of the draft on consequences rather than mechanics. Do not ask how the rain started. Ask what it does to a marriage, a harvest, a funeral. Keep your narrator unbothered throughout, and surround the impossible element with concrete, verifiable detail: real streets, real money, real grievances. Restraint is your strongest tool. One well-placed impossibility, held steady inside a fully realized world, will do more than a dozen scattered flourishes.
This is the spine of Verrone's six-week workshop. Students read magical realist short fiction by Garcia Marquez, Han Kang, Louise Erdrich, and others, break down the elements that make each one work, then draft a short story of their own and bring it to workshop for close, generative feedback. The class meets live on Zoom, so the reading and the writing happen in conversation rather than in isolation.
Study the genre with a Poets & Writers First Fiction author. Exploring and Writing Magical Realism begins Tuesday, September 1, 2026, on Zoom. Seats are limited.
Reserve Your SeatAbout WritingWorkshops.com
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
