Magical realism is what happens when the impossible walks calmly into an ordinary day, and everyone carries on with breakfast.
For magical realism short story writers, that’s gold. You don’t need an elaborate fantasy world or a complex magic system. You just need one foot in reality, one in the uncanny, and the confidence to let both coexist on the page.
This guide is aimed at beginners writing short stories only, not novels. Below are the topics that this article covers:
- What magical realism actually is (and isn’t)
- Core traits your story should have
- How to find strong ideas
- Crafting openings
- Building settings
- Creating characters
- Introducing magic in the plot
- Using themes and symbolism
- Style and narrative voice
- Authors and stories worth studying
- How to revise your draft
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Practical FAQs
Let’s dive right in!
What Is Magical Realism
In magical realism, impossible things happen in an otherwise realistic world, and everyone treats those things as normal.
Think of:
- A dead grandmother who comes home for dinner every Sunday
- A town where it rains flower petals every April
- A man who wakes up as an insect and must still worry about his job and family
The world is recognizably ours: real cities, villages, apartments, jobs, politics, family drama. The magic is treated as an accepted part of that world. It’s not explained, studied, or systematized. It simply is.
Magical Realism vs. Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Surrealism
Fantasy builds invented worlds with detailed magic systems, quests, prophecies, and chosen ones. Characters are amazed by magic, train to use it, and fight with it. Think Harry Potter or The Witcher. That’s fantasy, not magical realism.
Science Fiction relies on technology, science, alternate futures, and rational speculation. The extraordinary gets explained logically: time machines, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence.
Surrealism lets logic collapse entirely. Reality feels like a dream or hallucination, often explicitly internal or psychological.
Magical Realism takes place in a real-world setting with realistic people and everyday concerns. One or a few unexplained magical elements appear. The narrator and characters treat the strange as part of normal life. The magic usually reflects deeper themes: memory, trauma, injustice, love.
If your story could be straight realism except for one uncanny twist that no one explains, you’re in the right territory.
Core Traits of Magical Realism (Checklist)
Before drafting, make sure your idea satisfies most of these:
Realistic World. A present-day or historical setting that feels specific and grounded. No invented countries or elaborate fantasy maps.
Single (or Limited) Magical Premise. One main impossible thing, or a tightly related set of things. A town where no one can die. A woman whose tears become pearls.
Magic Treated as Normal. Characters might be annoyed, inconvenienced, or quietly amazed, but not hysterical. They adapt and carry on.
No Explanation. No origin story, no magic rules, no scientific cause. The story never answers “how” or “why” the magic exists.
Symbolic or Thematic Weight. The magic points at something deeper: grief, oppression, love, faith, identity. It’s not just a cool special effect.
Matter-of-Fact Tone. The narration describes miracles in the same voice as shopping or doing the dishes. No fireworks.
If you can check these boxes, you’re building in the right genre.
Finding Ideas for Magical Realism Short Stories
You don’t need elaborate plots. You need one strong, strange idea welded to real life.
History, Folklore, and Religion
Take a real historical event and add one impossible twist. A revolution where people literally cough up bullets. A drought where prayers cause fish to fall from the sky once a year.
Mine local myths and religious stories. Saints, djinn, yakshi, angels, village spirits. What if they showed up in a modern flat or factory?
Ask yourself: What if my grandparents’ favorite ghost story or miracle actually happened today, in my city, to a very ordinary person?
Personal Life and Observation
Turn strong emotions into literal phenomena. A breakup that cracks a house down the middle. A widow whose shadow refuses to follow her.
Use family rituals or superstitions. The tea that’s “always made for the ancestors”? Let them come drink it. The yearly blessing that “protects the house”? Maybe the walls really do fight back.
Your own small, weird thoughts make better fuel than generic dragons.
News, Urban Legends, and Real Oddities
Watch for real headlines that already sound magical. Rains of fish, mass bird deaths, unexplained lights, bizarre coincidences. A town where everyone wins the lottery on the same day. A statue that appears to cry.
Take one and refuse to explain it. Put it in your character’s backyard and see how it disrupts (or fails to disrupt) her routine.
Dreams and “What If” Questions
Keep a dream or idea notebook. Ask yourself:
- What if everyone’s lies turned into visible smoke?
- What if every time you spoke ill of someone, a tiny stone appeared in your pocket?
- What if your house moved three inches east every night?
Pick one question that hooks you emotionally, then anchor it in a real place and family.
And if you’re struggling for ideas then check out our post on magical realism story ideas and prompts.
Crafting Your Opening
The opening of a magical realism story has to do something tricky: establish a recognizable world while signaling that strangeness lives here. Get this right, and readers lean in. Get it wrong, and they spend the first page trying to figure out what kind of story they’re reading.
The Flat Declaration
One effective approach is to state the magical premise outright, as plainly as you’d report the weather. No buildup, no fanfare.
“The year my brother turned into a tree, the monsoon came late.”
“My grandmother died on a Tuesday and came back on Thursday, apologizing for the inconvenience.”
This works because the calm delivery signals the rules of your world immediately. The reader understands: strange things happen here, and people carry on. I’ve found this approach especially useful when the magical element is central to the story’s emotional arc.
The Delayed Reveal
Alternatively, you can open with pure realism and let the magic slip in sideways, often in a single, offhand sentence.
“The bakery opened at six. By seven, the line reached the corner. At eight, the fresh bread started singing again.”
The ordinariness of the first two sentences makes the third land harder. This works well when you want the magic to feel like an intrusion into daily life, something the characters have learned to live with but haven’t fully accepted.
The Image That Unsettles
Sometimes the best openings don’t announce the magic directly. Instead, they create an atmosphere of slight wrongness through imagery.
“The river had been watching the house for three days.”
“That summer, the shadows in our neighborhood began leaning toward the cemetery.”
You’re not explaining anything yet. You’re creating unease, priming the reader to accept what comes.
What to Avoid
Resist the urge to start with backstory, worldbuilding, or explanation. Don’t open with “Let me tell you about the curse that changed everything.” Don’t open with three paragraphs of normal life before anything interesting happens. In a short story, you have maybe two or three sentences to signal what kind of experience you’re offering. Use them.
The best magical realism openings share one quality: confidence. They don’t apologize for the strangeness or try to ease readers in gently. They simply present the world as it is and trust readers to follow.
Building the Setting and Atmosphere
The more real your world feels, the more the magic will land.
Ground It in Concrete Reality
Choose a specific place: a particular neighborhood, village, block, bus route. Use sensory details. Smells, sounds, textures, weather, local food, slang. Show daily routines: school runs, shop openings, morning prayers, power cuts.
Readers should think: I know this street. Even if it’s fictional.
Introduce Normalcy First (Usually)
Especially in short stories, it often helps to show a slice of ordinary life and let the magic slide in sideways. No drumroll, no prologue. Just one line where everyday life quietly goes strange.
Set the Mood
Use imagery to hint that the world is slightly off. A river that “watches,” a tree that “listens,” shadows that “lean closer.”
Keep the tone consistent: melancholic, humorous, eerie, gentle. Pick one main flavor. Atmosphere is what makes your magic feel inevitable rather than random.
Creating Characters Who Carry the Magic
Magical realism works best when the characters feel completely real.
Ordinary People, Real Problems
Short stories don’t have space for sprawling casts. Choose one main protagonist (maybe two at most) and a small supporting circle: family, neighbor, coworker.
Give them ordinary goals and problems. Paying rent. Caring for a sick parent. Hiding a secret. Wanting to leave town. Then drop the magic into that life.
Use Their Beliefs and Quirks
Magic often grows out of what characters already do or believe. A grandmother who believes in house spirits, and one day actually meets them. A man who talks to plants as a joke, until they answer. A kid who always prays to a certain streetlight, and one night it blinks back in code.
The more the magic is entangled with the character’s psychology or culture, the more natural it feels.
Authentic Reactions (Without the Genre Freak-out)
Characters should respond like real people in their context, without blowing up the tone. They may be startled, irritated, comforted, or quietly terrified. But they don’t spend pages screaming “THIS CAN’T BE REAL!”
A mother finds her baby levitating above the crib and says, “Come down, you’ll catch a cold,” then grabs a sweater. A fisherman complains, “The river’s flowing backwards again; I’ll be late for work.”
Underreaction is your friend. It keeps the magic “normal.”
Character Change
Even in a short story, aim for some shift. A decision made. A relationship altered. A belief cracked open. A grief confronted.
Often, the magical event is the catalyst that forces your character to see herself or others differently.
Weaving the Magic into Your Plot
How do you actually structure the story around your magical idea?
Let the Magic Serve the Story
Ask two questions: What does my protagonist want? How does the magical element help or hinder that?
If she wants to save the family shop, maybe the shop’s sign literally calls out people’s secrets. If she wants to forget an ex, maybe every object in the house whispers a memory.
If you could remove the magic and the plot barely changes, your magic is decorative. Make it causal.
Introduce the Strange Naturally
For a short story, you usually want the magic to appear in the opening paragraph or, at latest, the first scene. Whatever approach you choose, avoid the feeling of “ta-da, plot twist!” Keep it woven into events.
Don’t Explain It
Resist flashbacks to curses. Resist scientists with theories. Resist “It was all a dream/illness/experiment.”
The magic is a given. The story is about what people do with it, not what causes it.
Keep It Tight
A simple structure that works well:
Setup: Introduce character, setting, hint of magic or problem.
Inciting Incident: Magic appears or escalates; disrupts normal life.
Rising Action: Character tries to cope, exploit, hide, or ignore it. Stakes or emotional pressure increase.
Climax: A choice or confrontation linked directly to the magical situation.
Resolution: A new normal. Magic may remain, fade, or change, but the character is not quite the same.
You don’t need big plot gymnastics. One sharp, human decision in the presence of the impossible is enough.
Endings in Magical Realism
Good endings are concrete (often a vivid image: the angel flying away, the house finally still), emotionally resolved (we understand what changed inside the character), and intellectually open (the magic remains partly mysterious).
Think “satisfying but not fully explained.”
Themes and Symbolism: Making the Magic Mean Something
Magical realism is not just “weird stuff happens.” The weird stuff usually stands in for something.
Start with a Real Question
Ask yourself: What human issue is under this story? Grief? Migration? Class? Childhood? Faith? Aging? What bothers or fascinates you enough to write about it?
Then choose magic that embodies that issue.
A woman cannot throw anything away, and her apartment slowly grows teeth. That’s hoarding, guilt, inherited trauma.
People’s tongues turn to ash whenever they lie. That’s truth, self-censorship, authoritarian regimes.
Use Recurring Symbols
Pick one or two recurring motifs that tie to the magic and theme. A specific bird, color, song, type of weather, piece of clothing. Each reappearance nudges the reader’s interpretation.
Don’t over-explain. Let the reader connect the dots.
Don’t Preach
Avoid characters delivering speeches that state the moral. Avoid narrators telling us what the magic “means.”
Trust images and consequences. If the magic hurts only the greedy, we get the hint.
Style and Narrative Voice
Your voice is what convinces the reader the impossible is completely natural.
Matter-of-Fact, But Not Flat
Describe miracles like errands: “By noon, the letters had grown legs and were pacing the kitchen, impatient for the postman.”
No italics, no exclamation marks, no “Little did she know…” Just report what happens.
You can still be lyrical and sensory, but let the lyricism touch everything equally. Cups of tea, traffic, ghosts, angels. When your prose treats a floating grandmother with the same attention as a pot of soup, readers accept both as real.
Point of View
All approaches can work. Close third person is popular and flexible. First person is intimate and works well if your narrator’s voice is strong. Omniscient fits folklore and myth vibes, the “storyteller around a fire” tone.
Whatever you choose, keep the attitude consistent. A cynical narrator stays dry about both tax returns and miracles.
Show, Don’t Lecture
Instead of “The town was cursed,” try: “Every morning, the bread browned perfectly in the oven, then turned to dust the moment anyone bit in.”
Readers should feel the curse through experience, not labels.
Clear, Not Murky
It’s okay for meaning to be ambiguous. It’s not okay for basic events to be incomprehensible. Make sure we know who’s speaking, where we are, what physically happens. Let the why be mysterious, not the what.
Authors and Stories to Study
Reading magical realism is essential. Here are authors worth your time, along with what to notice in their work.
Gabriel García Márquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude and the short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Pay attention to his matter-of-fact tone when describing the impossible. Notice how he never explains the magic, and how his characters respond with pragmatism rather than wonder. His sentences are long and rolling, carrying you through generations and miracles without pausing to gasp.
Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits shows how magical realism can span generations and carry political weight. Notice how the supernatural elements are tied to specific characters’ inner lives and how the magic fades or intensifies depending on who’s telling the story.
Haruki Murakami blends the mundane and the surreal in stories like “The Elephant Vanishes” and novels like Kafka on the Shore. His work shows how magical realism can thrive in contemporary urban settings, not just rural villages. Study his deadpan delivery and how his characters accept bizarre events with quiet resignation.
Toni Morrison used magical elements to explore African American history and memory. Beloved is the obvious example. Watch how she makes the supernatural feel like a natural extension of trauma and collective memory.
Aimee Bender and Karen Russell write contemporary American magical realism in short form. Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves show how to build complete magical realist worlds in under 5,000 words. They’re particularly useful models if you’re writing short stories.
Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate ties magic directly to food, emotion, and the body. Notice how each magical event grows from intense feeling rather than appearing randomly.
When you read these authors, don’t just absorb the stories. Ask yourself: How did she introduce the magic? When did I start believing it? What grounds the fantasy in reality? How does the tone handle impossible events? Keep notes. Steal techniques.
Revising Your Magical Realism Story
First drafts are for discovery. Revision is where you make the magic actually work.
Check Your Tonal Consistency
Read your draft aloud. Does the voice stay steady when describing both the ordinary and the impossible? If your narrator suddenly sounds breathless or astonished when the magic appears, you’ve broken the contract. The tone should treat a levitating child with the same calm attention as a burnt dinner.
I’ve found it helps to highlight every sentence where magic occurs, then read only those sentences in sequence. Do they match the rest of the story’s register? If not, flatten them.
Test Whether the Magic Earns Its Place
Ask yourself: If I removed the magical element, would the emotional core of this story survive? If yes, your magic might be decorative. The magic should be load-bearing. It should create problems, force decisions, or reveal character in ways that nothing realistic could.
Then ask the reverse: Does the magic connect to the theme, or is it just strange for strangeness’s sake? Every impossible element should point toward the human question at the story’s heart.
Hunt for Explanation Creep
Writers often sneak in explanations without realizing it. Look for lines like “perhaps because,” “it must have been,” “ever since the curse,” or “they say it started when.” These phrases inch toward rationalization. Cut them. The magic doesn’t need a backstory.
Audit Your Reactions
Check how your characters respond to the impossible. Are they too calm? Too shocked? The sweet spot is usually mild inconvenience or weary acceptance. If your protagonist spends a paragraph processing her disbelief, you’ve written a fantasy response, not a magical realist one.
Trim the Ordinary
In early drafts, writers often overestablish normalcy before letting the magic in. You probably don’t need three pages of routine before the strange thing happens. Trust your reader to understand “ordinary life” quickly. Get to the good stuff.
Read It Cold
Set the draft aside for at least a few days. When you return, you’ll see where the seams show, where the magic feels forced, and where the story actually lives. That distance is worth more than any checklist.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Here are the traps beginners fall into again and again.
Worldbuilding Like It’s Fantasy
Invented continents, long history timelines, magic systems with rules… that’s fantasy. Anchor your story in our world. Real country, real era, ordinary infrastructure.
Too Many Magical Gimmicks
Levitating houses plus time loops plus talking cats plus prophetic tattoos in 3,000 words? Your story will feel like a collage of neat ideas instead of one coherent tale. Choose one main miracle and build everything around it.
Explaining the Magic
“It turned out her grandmother had cursed the family.” “He woke up. It had all been a dream.” Both kill the mystery.
If you need to know the “why” for yourself, write it in a separate note. Don’t let it into the story.
Using Magic as a Cheap Fix
Protagonist is about to lose her house. Magic randomly gives her money. The end. Readers feel cheated when problems vanish by coincidence.
Let outcomes follow from character choices, even when magic is involved. The magic might open a door, but the character must decide whether to walk through it and what she sacrifices.
Flat, Symbolic-Only Characters
If your characters exist only to carry a metaphor, they’ll feel hollow. Give them mundane wants and quirks that would matter even if no magic occurred.
Cultural Sloppiness
Borrowing myths or spiritual beliefs from cultures you don’t understand can turn into stereotype or disrespect. Start with what you know deeply. If you write outside your culture, research properly, and portray people as full humans, not “exotic scenery.”
FAQs: Magical Realism Short Stories
What must my short story include to count as magical realism?
At minimum: a recognizable real-world setting, ordinary believable characters, one or a few unexplained magical elements, characters and a narrator who treat the magic as part of reality, a consistent matter-of-fact tone, and some thematic or symbolic weight behind the magic. If any piece is missing (especially the realism or the acceptance of magic), you’re drifting toward another genre.
Can I write magical realism in any culture, or is it only Latin American?
You can write it in any culture, but do it with respect and depth. Magical realism has roots in Latin American literature, where writers used it to address colonialism, politics, and history. Today, writers around the world use similar techniques with their own folklore, cities, and social issues. The key is not imitating a Latin American “aesthetic” but finding the magic in your own reality.
Do I ever explain the magic? Even a little?
As a rule: no. You may hint at folk beliefs, rumors, or contradictory theories characters have, but the story itself shouldn’t confirm any explanation. The more you rationalize the magic, the more it stops feeling magical realist and starts feeling like fantasy, sci-fi, or psychological realism. Let the magic remain a fact and a mystery.
How long should a magical realism short story be?
There’s no fixed length, but many fall in the 2,000 to 6,000 word range. For beginners, something around 3,000 to 4,000 words is a sweet spot: enough room to build a real setting, show the magical twist, and complete an emotional arc without bloating. Focus less on exact word count and more on whether every scene earns its place.
Where should I start: with the magic, the character, or the theme?
Any of the three can work.
Magic-first: What if it rained glass once a year? Then choose who that would matter to most.
Character-first: A bitter retired teacher who hoards exam papers. Then ask what impossible thing would crack her open.
Theme-first: I want to write about inherited guilt. Then design a magical situation that embodies that.
Whichever door you enter, make sure the other two catch up. A strong magical realism short story has all three aligned: a real person, facing a real emotional issue, under one impossible but meaningful twist.
Final Thoughts
Use this as your skeleton. As you draft:
Pick your one magical premise. Drop it into a very specific, ordinary life. Refuse to explain it. Let it pressure your characters into revealing who they really are.
That’s where magical realism lives. Not in the fireworks, but in the quiet moment when someone accepts the impossible and still has to wash the dishes.