Believable

In a 1981 interview published in the Paris Review, Gabriel García Márquez tells Peter Stone how his grandmother inspired the narrative voice in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family and presents its fantastical elements with utter naturalness. Márquez wanted to write the novel’s magical narratives “with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.” Write a short story that incorporates mystical or supernatural elements while maintaining a tone based in reality, in which these elements are considered commonplace. What themes and truths about your characters are easier to express in this imagined world? As you write, consider what Márquez says about storytelling: “A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe it.”