Get nine storytelling tips from the father of modern fantasy

George MacDonald is the father of modern fantasy. His support made Lewis Carroll publish Alice In Wonderland. A “master” to CS Lewis, other fans include J.R.R Tolkien, Orwell, and Chesterton. 9 insights from MacDonald on beauty, literature, and more👇

MacDonald wrote fantasies full of mystifying events, and yet knew that stories need internal coherence and consistency. He wrote: “ To be able to live a moment in an imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall out of it.”

A building crashes if it defies the laws of nature - such laws exist for stories too. MacDonald: "The mind of man is the product of live Law; it thinks by by law, it dwells in the midst of law, it gathers from law its growth; with law, therefore, can it alone work to any result."

Many times we physically cannot keep working on our art because it’s based on contradictory ideas: “Inharmonious, unconsorting ideas will come to a man, but if he try to use one of such, his work will grow dull, and he will drop it from mere lack of interest.”

Art must get to the truth, but truth only hangs around beauty, and beauty demands that aesthetic and narrative laws be followed. George MacDonald: "Law is the soil in which alone beauty will grow; beauty is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed."

Must a story always have some meaning? MacDonald: “It cannot help having some meaning; if it has proportion and harmony it has vitality, and vitality is truth.” There’s an interesting idea at play here: anything that vitalizes and energizes you has truth on its side.

Great works of art are, by definition, pregnant with many meanings: “A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.” This is because great art is profoundly real, and reality is a complex lattice composed of delicate dances.

MacDonald on why he never explained the meaning of his stories to anyone: “So long as I think my dog can bark, I will not sit up to bark for him.” He wrote his tales to be self-explanatory, and believed they’d speak to the readers with a depth appropriate to their mind.

When deep insight comes knocking, logic is unwelcoming: "The best way with music is not to bring the forces of our intellect to bear upon it, but to be still and let it work on that part of us for whose sake it exists. We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed."

You can’t label something art and make it art. Beauty is not a linguistic game, it is a sacred reality. George MacDonald: “Obeying law, the maker works like his creator; not obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps a pile of stones and calls it a church.” Follow me for more!