
What’s the relationship of reality to a fantasy novel?
My narrative structure, much of the “magic system” (a term I dislike, because I tend to think that neither magic nor the world nor any religion or mythology is very systematic unless we deliberately make it so and leave out all the complicated parts) and some of the tropes in the Crane Moon Cycle duology are inspired by xianxia danmei (as I will shout to the world! because it is an amazing genre and I love it!), but many of the settings, geographical and historical, were inspired by real places and actual history. In fact, the first iteration of the book was as a historical fantasy or alternate history, set fully in real places and in an actual historic timeline (well, timelines, since there’s a thousand year gap between Hong Deming and Aili). I did a ton of research on my designated eras, read books and scholarly articles, studied a new language, toured historic museums, tried to gauge the distinction between where the dormitories had been at one point on the naval base and where the women had lived (off base, as it happened), discerning at what year train service stopped to a certain small town, what were the ways in which burns were treated, at which year did the dynastic succession actually occur and how much time was there between different battles…
However, in the end, this novel became more and more clearly fantasy. This was partly because there was no way I could have the narrative work and still have anything like fidelity to the actual timeline of historic events; I kept making little footnotes about where I had diverged, imagining the historical essay I would append to the final product. Geography became similarly constraining, because I couldn’t estimate travel times under different conditions, identify where roads had been at certain eras, have battles occur where I needed them to. By the time I reached the point in the novel where Tairei leaves Aili in a whirlwind of fire, I had already given up trying to keep it real.
But there’s still a constant connection between the fantasy and the real, things I’ve seen and thought about and learned and experienced. The very first piece of the story, the phoenix binding her lover to immortality with her blood beneath a tree, came to me staring out of the window of a car at a coast oak standing alone, green and dusty, between yellowed hills in drought. When I first wrote those early pages, I visited the places I imagined Aili Fallon to have been born and raised, and they inspired both the description of Fallon (which ironically is also a real place!), and the spirit world, with its strange rocks embedded in golden hills. The crane in flight is something I have seen dozens of times; the Sorrowful River in flood is not only a historical event in the real world, but the floods of the past few years near where I live; the pools where Zhu Guiren and Tainu bathe are outdoor springs under the stars in New Mexico; Yisue’s dragon gate is just off the coast of the picture above, which is also near where Zhu Guiren finally builds a house; the red dragonflies the children chase in the village where Liu Chenguang waits for a thousand years was a mountain village in Luzon; the narrow valley gorge at sunset of Crane Moon is the arroyo I climbed ten years ago, catching the sun on waterfall over sharp rocks at just the right and only time.
There has to be emotional reality, too, something even in the most fantastic of beings and relationships that echoes truthfully with something I (as the author) and the reader have experienced in common. One of the bits of reality I wanted to explore further with Aili and Liu Chenguang was the reality of a love that lasts a long time, either in terms of years or in terms of life spent together, moving from a first love – because emotionally they were both pretty young when they finally fall a second time – to a mature and committed relationship that can bear a different kind of stress and challenge. In the next book in the Crane Moon world, which is not a direct sequel to the duology, that’s part of the story. And the place in which they’ve built their home, as I imagine it, is somewhere near that picture above, overlooking the ocean, in a world imagined three hundred years later.
Tiny bits of reality are woven together with fantasy, and vice versa, in any kind of story, I think, not only those explictly about magic and other worlds. Any story is a life taken apart, and put back together in a different order, to say a different thing.