Being Somewhere Else
I’ve been reading Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer in which she says that she read voraciously as a child “to repeat the dependable out-of-body sensation of being somewhere else” (italics hers). I think that’s true of any kind of story, but I think it’s true in spades of fantasy. The key is to not make Somewhere Else so different that it’s not understandable. Okay, that’s a terrible sentence but you get my drift.
So Buffy is working in the real world, but the real world is Sunnydale and full of demons. Nick in Grimm is working in Portland, but it’s Portland full of hexenbeasts and reapers and Monroe. (Come to think of it, Leverage is in Portland this season, too. Is Portland giving great film tax credits or something?) The Doctor ends up god-knows-where every episode, but there’s always a human-like hierarchy and psychology at work; it’s never completely alien to our understanding. The Discworld is insane, but it’s clearly an analog of our world. Farscape is a big quarreling family trapped together in an RV, alien members not withstanding.
So is part of the lure of fantasy that Somewhere Else, that somewhere new but not too new, a place we know but different or a place we don’t know but not that different?
(I may be obsessing on this fantasy thing for awhile, so apologies to those of you who aren’t supernatural wonks.)
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We all want a world that has a little magic in it, whether the sorcerous kind or simply minor miracles. It helps us to live in the mundane world just being able to occasionally escape to a place that is different from our regular lives, but can still have its positive potentials, like love, family, compassion and strength. We can experience feelings that otherwise we might never know and accomplish great feats without having to work so hard to obtain them! A world without imagination would be so empty.
That was a little rambling but I hope you catch my drift.