LEVERAGING THE POWER OF WHAT IF? IN SPECULATIVE STORIES

Five techniques for convincing readers your fiction just might be real after all.

- BY JEFF SOMERS

When I was a kid and just beginning my descent into book nerdery, I ran into a problem familiar to book nerds everywhere: Not enough books. When you're reading all day and well into the night, you burn through books at an incredible pace, and finding more in the right genre and style soon becomes an obsession. I bought books recklessly, often based on the cover art and little else—or the sheer length of a series. Five books? That was, like, three days of reading. Ten books? Now we're talking. Fifteen books? Now I had weekend plans.2

So, when I discovered that the movie The Wizard of Oz was based on a book series, and that the book series had more than 40 entries (the first 14 written by L. Frank Baum, the rest by a variety of authors after his death), I was all in.3 I tore through the first 12 and really fell for Baum’s warm, jocular voice and the way he pretended to be a kind of historian writing down the absolutely real adventures of various folks in the magical Land of Oz. I knew he was just telling stories, but the tone and approach were very effective.

And then I got to book 13, The Magic of Oz, and my book nerdery went to a whole new level. And it was all due to one word: Pyrzqxgl.

In the book, pyrzqxgl is a magic word that allows anyone who pronounces it correctly to transform themselves or others into an animal of their choosing. Baum (who often interjected the authorial voice in his stories) explained in the book that he felt safe printing this powerful word because no one would ever figure out how to pronounce it properly.

I was hooked—the idea that this was an authentic magic word made the whole Oz universe suddenly feel very, very real. The suggestion that I had