Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.

I usually feel something before I know it.

Bruce Lee, before he fought, he would try to visualize how the fight would go, because he was visualizing a victorious path out of the combat.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.

There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.

I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.