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There's a writing style called Magical Realism... I'm sure you've heard of it. Books like The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez are written in the style. Basically, all it is is writing about the realistic and the fantastic with the same straight face. Most writers will let you know with subtle shifts of tone that "this is out of the ordinary." But magical realism writers can not only write about the most bizzare things with a brick face, but they can reconcile them perfectly with the other 'realistic' elements. One must be able to write in the same way about a man with two heads climbing up a skyscraper as one writes about a husband going out to check the mail box in the morning to pull this off. It's not a union of the real and the fantastic, but a synthesis of them: in these worlds, nothing is impossible, and thus nothing is odd.
For a bit of a visualization, writing about things such as nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence anymore isn't odd at all precisely because it's all real... but imagine how odd it would be to a person in the 17th century who's never even dreamed of any of this stuff. You write about it in a common-sense way, but it's odd to him -- of course, he'd note what was odd wasn't the elements but that the elements were so completely integrated with the real events in the storyline.
If you can't see this ghost detective being a rational part of this 1930s world, even if he is a fantastic element, you won't be able to write it. If you can think about them in the same sense, and as having the same sense of reality to them, you should be able to pull it off.
Just a thought.
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Thoughts: Philosophy is the basis of human morality and thus it is also the basis of human life; loving life is a result of applying a healthy philosophy.
Last edited by Ralizah : 12-03-2005 at 01:24 PM.
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