Nonsense just doesn’t work with reality. With the constructs we have created and the workings we have not yet destroyed. Reality is written and documented regularly and religiously, argued and worked and never something that is set in stone. Yet nonsense does not work with reality. Magic doesn’t work with the world we have created, make-belief doesn’t work with reality, we can’t become great heros and we can’t save worlds. Yet Dr. Seuss said “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of the telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.” Reality doesn’t work with fantasy, but that doesn’t mean it has to be like that in books.

That doesn’t mean that we have to conform to the constraints of reality by ignoring the magic we can create. By exploring our imagination and stretching our reality to its limits we could have the freedom to do what we wish. We could create the gateway to wonders and stories just beyond the narrow conventions of this world. We could redefine the boundaries, have a much needed escape and explore the expressions of what we find beyond the veil, beyond our imagination and into worlds of magic.

We redefine reality because we hunger for more, new skills, new places, new things to see, we’re still growing, and we won’t stop, not for a long shot. This outward exploration, this hope beyond the boundary creates an expectation that we can see human change, we can hope that one day we cure cancer, and walk on the rings of Saturn, that we see human change.

But we cannot ignore reality entirely, and writers would find it more than hard to do so. We have lived here our entire lives and no amount of reading has truly taken us away. We can see all around us the reality we live in; with war, hunger, strife, and so many more terrible things that can be a lot closer to home than we realize. That is mirrored in writing and we cannot truly escape, but we can find a way to bring a new parallel into it, a new perspective, a new way of looking through the telescope.

We can reexamine our limitations and find a way to push through. Deconstruct our stereotypes, expectations and terrible connotations to create new things, to go past our prejudice. Fantasy allows us to go down to our base, to our very bare foundations and examine what we truly made, what have we done, what is wrong with this world? And there- then and there we can see the problem and we can see how we can finally fix something like this.

That’s why writers write what they write, we write to freshen our perspective, to gain the creativity we wouldn’t have otherwise, after all, “fantasy is hardly an escape from reality, its a way of understanding it” Lloyd Alexander.