Guest post by author JP McLean
JP (Jo-Anne) McLean is an urban fantasy and supernatural thriller author best known for The Gift Legacy series. The first book of the series received Honourable Mention at the Whistler Independent Book Awards. Her short story, Boone Park, won Honourable mention from the Victoria Writers’ Society. Reviewers call her writing addictive, smart and fun. Her books include endorsements from Ethel Wilson awardwinning author Jennifer Manuel and bestselling author, Elinor Florence. The series has been described as fantasy light and is a good introduction to the genre for the uninitiated. JP’s body of work was included in the centennial anthology of the Comox Valley Writers Society, Writers & Books: Comox Valley 1865–2015. She is a member of the Federation of BC Writers and the Alliance of Independent Authors. Her articles have appeared in WordWorks Magazine, Wellness and Writing hosted by Colleen M Story, Mystery Mondays blog hosted by Kristina Stanley, and others.
Do you dream you can fly?
I’m not referring to the get-on-a-plane type of flying, just you. Flying.
It’s a common dream, right up there in the top ten (for humans anyway). And if I’ve tweaked your curiosity, the other nine common dreams are: being chased, falling, being naked, failing exams, thinking you woke up but you didn’t, being unable to run, snake dreams, dreams of the dead, and dreams of a murder. Except for the snake dream, I’ve experienced all of them.
But my flying dreams are different. They are vivid and have been recurring since I was a child. In them, I hover upright or fly prone. Sometimes I speed toward something, but other times it feels like I’m playing, sweeping upward, swan diving, or following the contours of my dream landscape. I might be indoors, but often I’m outside. Flying is a wonderful sensation, and when I wake, I’m disappointed that the dream is over.
The closest I’ve come to re-creating that flying feeling in my waking hours is when I’m scuba diving. At the point when you reach perfect balance in buoyancy, you achieve that sensation of floating. On a dive from Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands, I once rode a gentle current at about sixty feet down, just over the edge of an underwater cliff. It felt remarkable to hover there and let the current take me on a neighbourhood tour of the cliffside, where lobsters crawled, delicate corals rippled, and tropical fish darted back and forth in unison. Larger, more curious fish followed us.
This sense of weightlessness and the thrill of flying were the impetus to my urban fantasy series, The Gift Legacy. I wanted to capture in words that magical feeling of flying. The first scene I wrote had the protagonist, Emelynn Taylor, leaping off a seaside deck and flying down the coast, riding the wind.
But as magical as that scene turned out, it wasn’t enough for the pragmatist in me who wanted to know how that situation came to be. The scene posed the question, how did Emelynn know she could fly? No one jumps off a deck that’s twenty feet in the air without knowing whether they’re headed skyward or plummeting to the ground. That question posed another, how did she come to have this ability to fly? Were there others like her? How did she learn the mechanics of flying?
To craft a satisfying story, those questions needed answers, or at least plausible explanations. That first scene I wrote with Emelynn leaping off the deck didn’t make it into the finished novel, but the answers to those questions became the bones of Secret Sky, the first book in The Gift Legacy series.
All fiction is fabricated—it’s a collection of lies with plausible explanations—and some of the most colourful lies are found in genres that have a supernatural or magical element. What writers of these genres are asking readers to do is suspend their disbelief.
I’m a huge fan of these genres. I read supernatural thrillers, ghost stories, horrors, high-fantasy, low-fantasy, epic fantasy, dystopian novels, and the paranormal. As such, I’m eager to suspend my disbelief. All a writer has to do is distract me, nudge me in the right direction, and I’m happy to believe in their magic.
But how does a writer do that? How do they make a reader buy into the possibility that people really can fly?
I find the best lies are the ones that have a grain of truth to them, and by “best” I mean the lies that are most believable. It makes sense then that if you want to get your readers to suspend their disbelief, you should keep your lies as close to the truth as possible. The quickest way to do that is by dropping the reader into a familiar setting with recognizable characters. This familiarity grounds them.
This grounding is the grain of truth in the lie. It’s why I set The Gift Legacy in current times. I love the idea of a secret society of people with supernatural abilities living amongst us.
It’s why I made the characters your neighbours. They are teachers, nurses, auto mechanics, and salespeople. You know them. They attend your church and sit one table over in the restaurant where you’re celebrating your anniversary.
To give the story heart, I layered in a father figure and a few true friends. A lover provided the distraction. The supernatural elements sparked to life with a little nudging at some real-life scientific oddities like the placebo effect and the Bermuda Triangle. And then I turned up the heat with unexplained disappearances, mid-air fight scenes, and looming danger.
With the web glued in place by plausible explanations, the lies morph into something on the edge of believability, and before you know it, you’re convinced that people really can fly. Naturally.
