The Most Magical Place on Earth

I have just spent a week in sunny Florida, visiting tour parks with my in-laws. That’s an activity that a few years ago I’d have never believed I could enjoy. While I can confirm that some of my skepticism remains, for the most part I am at ease with belonging to a family of Disney addicts, even with my in built disdain for large corporations.

Why?

Because Disney, taken on its own terms, is truly the most magical place on earth.

Everything there is built to create an illusion that fairy tales are real, that animals can talk and toys can live and being good matters and the rest of it. There were times when I’d lag behind the rest of the group, just taking in the atmosphere. 

Now, magic is a difficult thing to define, but if we’re talking about it in some sense of using the mind to create something from nothing in inexplicable ways, Disney qualifies. And its probably the largest scale operation of the stuff going. The mind sometimes boggles at the logistics that must be going on behind it. The sheer scale of the thing only increases the sense of magic to me.

And in walking round there, soaking in the magic, wondering why so many people loved Disney’s particular version of the fantastic so much, I had an epiphany. Disney have an incredibly strong sense of vision and it comes through. Its easy to condemn as trite, formulaic, commercial, but the vision and basic ideas are very attractive and easy to grasp. On top of this, Disney’s dominance is self-perpetuating as it is often the first version of the fantastic many of us encounter. We all know that being the first to introduce an idea to a generation is a huge boon towards selling a story. But its those strong basic ideas that ensures they retain the hearts of those they influence.

This blog frequently talks about the technical aspects of writing, of timing and plausibility and storytelling. That won’t stop because I find those things interesting and do still believe they’re useful. But they’re only useful insofar as they magnify the idea at the heart of your story. A simply told story with a clear and attractive idea will always attract more readers than a beautifully told story about something nuanced or uncaptivating. 

To a certain point that’s a great shame and I’d encourage everyone who wants to ignore that to do so. I think I’ll do so myself. Stories interest me for the sake of stories as much as anything. 

But the power of that central conceit - the importance of it - that’s something I’m going to keep far more in mind. Because that’s where the heart of the magic is.