I’ve had some somewhat contradictory reading experiences of late. On the one hand, I’ve read several wonderful short stories in a fairy tale or folklore tone that inhabit a vague and floaty world in a beautiful way. On the other, I’ve written a few different feedbacks for After Happy Hour submissions where one of my major issues was a lack of grounding—that the world felt too floaty, to the point I couldn’t picture the world the characters were inhabiting.
The right level of worldbuilding and description is a tricky balance to strike for writers in any genre, and I think particularly so for those in speculative worlds. Not every type of story lends itself to lush, lengthy descriptions, either. In some modes, sparse details are a defining characteristic of the genre. Stories that stem from an oral storytelling tradition tend to fall into this category, which includes genres like folklore and fairy tales. Mythic voices give more flexibility for detailed descriptions, but even so it can break the effect to spend too many words grounding the reader. There are other genres that need this kind of deft hand, as well. Magical realism is one example—the rules of the world need to be established enough that the reader isn’t confused, but if you explain too much then it can lose the “magic” part of the name, or start to read like a different type of fantasy.
What's especially challenging about fairy tale writing is that a vaguely defined setting is a common genre trope. Fairy tales often take place somewhere “far away” and “once upon a time”, intentionally placed outside of a historical context. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but the more solidly a story is tethered to reality, the less like a fairy tale it seems.
I was doing some wandering this past week and ended up in Portland, Maine, a delightful town that, among its other attractions, is home to the International Cryptozoology Museum. While there are plenty of smaller museums dedicated to specific monsters and critters, the ICM is the only all-purpose cryptid museum in the world, so I knew I needed to make a point of stopping in while I was in town.
And I’ll tell you: I wasn’t disappointed. The museum is relatively small but jam-packed with very neat displays and artifacts. Even as an avid student of cryptids, there were a few creatures featured in the museum’s exhibits that were new to me. I also picked up a new reference book with even more new finds, Loren Coleman & Jerome Clark’s Cryptozoology A to Z:
Yesterday, I went to the second annual Squonkapalooza in Johnstown, PA. Similar to events like the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant or the Flatwoods Monster Convention in Flatwoods, Squonkapalooza is a celebration of a regional cryptid—the squonk, in this case, which is one of my favorite critters and one I highly recommend checking out if you’re not already aware of it.
One of the things I went to at Squonkapalooza was a talk by Ronald L. Murphy, Jr. on the meaning of the squonk. During the talk he mentioned some of the animals that used to live in Pennsylvania and are now extinct, like the woodland bison and wolverine. There are others that are officially extinct in PA but are still occasionally sighted, like the mountain lion and wolf. As he said it, if you see a wolf in Pennsylvania in 2024, then you’ve seen a cryptid: a creature that shouldn’t exist in a given place, time, or understanding of reality, and whose existence has not officially been proven.
Brownies have always been one of my favorite mythical creatures. Part of this comes from being a natural night owl and introvert; I feel a certain kinship for beings that only work at night and unseen. But they also intrigue me from a metaphorical standpoint. They work selflessly, never demanding credit for doing chores—but that doesn’t mean they’re creatures you can take advantage of. Ignore them too long, or treat them poorly, and brownies turn into bogarts: malevolent tricksters that steal and make milk go sour.
Brownies are just one of the many little people in world myths and folktales. I’m in the beginning stages of a new novel project that will use a variety of little folk. I’ve been reviewing my folklore research in preparation and thought other writers might also find inspiration in some of these lesser-known little people from around the world.
I’ve been particularly fascinated by ghosts of late. They’ve always intrigued me to some extent—as an avid horror fan, I’ve enjoyed plenty a ghost story over my lifetime, though I haven’t played with hauntings in my fiction until the last few years. I mostly avoided them because of how widespread they already are. It’s just like dragons, vampires, or zombies—the world already has so many stories about them that they can quickly veer into tired cliches if a writer isn’t bringing something new to the trope.
One thing that sets ghosts apart from other fantastic creatures is that they’re one of the supernatural elements most likely to feature in literary fiction. From Hamlet’s father to Sethe’s daughter in Beloved, there are ample examples of hauntings across the literary canon. I see two potential reasons for this:
A lot of people don’t think of ghosts as speculative. In a 2021 survey, 41% of respondents said they believe ghosts exist, a similar percentage to those who believe in demons. That’s lower than the percentage who believe aliens exist (57%) but much higher than belief in bigfoot (13%), vampires (8%), or werewolves (9%).
Ghosts and haunting are easy ready-made metaphors for emotions like grief, regret, loss, and nostalgia. This is reflected in our euphemistic language for these feelings—you might say someone is “haunted by the past” or that a place is “a ghost of what it once was.” Ghosts are reminders of what used to be, unchanging intrusions of the past on the present.
Their ephemeral nature makes it easier to insert them into a narrative. The “suspension of disbelief” factor is lower with a ghost than something corporeal because the reader has less of an expectation that it would leave physical signs and evidence. This also allows for more play between what’s real and what’s imagined by the narrator, especially in first-person narratives.
