Beyond the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez - lessons in writing
Storycraft: Mini-Series - Lessons From Great Writing
If you’re new here, every week I share tips, insights and actionable ideas on writing, travel writing and mindful travel through the lens of a novelist and travel writer (Lonely Planet, DK Travel, etc.) in three newsletters: Storycraft, Write Your Way Around the World and The Green Travel Guide.
Welcome, thanks for coming on the journey!
Mini-Series: Lessons from Great Writing
There are many writers that have shaped me both as a reader and writer. In this mini-series I’m sharing a few of my favourites and the lessons I’ve learned from their writing. Alongside each week’s essay there’s a free mini-resource included on the themes covered to help you hone your writing craft, and at the end of the series there’ll be a complete Writers’ Reading Kit for subscribers (resources, tools and reading lists). Onwards…
2. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Wonder, Simplicity & Purpose
3. Seamus Heaney: Writing as Excavation
4. Gabriel García Márquez: Beyond Magic Realism
Beyond Magic Realism: Lessons in Writing from Gabriel García Márquez
I have always been a collector of languages. At school we were taught Latin, Irish, French, Spanish, even Japanese in evening classes. Since then, I’ve added Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, and some Swedish, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Hindi to the growing list, along with smatterings of words and phrases in dozens more. I say this simply as an admission of a life-long obsession with languages and cultures. So it was no surprise that at university I chose to study Modern & Medieval Literature (mainly in French and Spanish). And it was here that I discovered the writing of Gabriel García Márquez.
Best known now as a Nobel Prize laureate for Literature for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (written feverishly over 18 months sparked by a flash of inspiration), ‘Gabo’ was both journalist and writer, immersed in the political life of Colombia and Latin America. Writers like Virgina Woolf and William Faulkner influenced his own writing style and preoccupations, as did the Greek Tragedies, and closer to home, the support of the Barranquilla Group - a group of writers and journalists with whom he spent much time in the early writing years.
In a way, I credit his writing with really teaching me Spanish. I would sit with a notepad and an enormous dictionary on the desk beside me, and jot down every phrase or word that I hadn’t encountered before. Like all writers García Márquez has obsessions of his own, and motifs he returns to over and over in the writing. These were the ones I observed surfacing time and time again:
Soledad (solitude) – The defining motif of Cien años de soledad, symbolising both the isolation of individuals and the fate of entire families/communities.
Amor (love) – Often obsessive, enduring, or impossible, love is written in grand, unrestrained terms (El amor en los tiempos del cólera).
Muerte (death) – Death is omnipresent: foretold, remembered, revisited. Not always tragic—sometimes inevitable, sometimes absurd.
Sueño / Soñar (dream / to dream) – Dreams bleed into waking life; characters act as if the dream and the real are equally valid.
Fantasma / Aparición (ghost / apparition) – Spirits return to visit, embodying the porous boundary between past and present.
Lluvia (rain) – Rain that lasts for years, rain that erases, rain that renews—weather as history and fate.
Mariposas (butterflies) – Yellow butterflies, especially tied to Mauricio Babilonia, symbolising love and destiny.
Tiempo (time) – Cyclical, repetitive, nonlinear; generations repeat mistakes, histories echo.
Silencio (silence) – Silence as oppression, as waiting, as dignity. Often paired with political repression or family secrets.
Pueblo / Aldea / Macondo (village / town) – The invented town as microcosm of Latin America, a character in itself.
Olor (smell) – The sensory detail of odours: flowers, death, rot, sweat, gunpowder—his prose is intensely olfactory.
Realidad (reality) – Always unstable, always shifting, always infused with the marvellous.
Destino (destiny) – The sense of inevitability, of being bound to a family’s or a people’s fate.
Patterns in His Language
As writers we all have themes, ideas, obsessions, questions we return to over and over. His writing thought me to think about that in relation to my own writing.
García Márquez stylistically is drawn to:
Exaggeration: He amplifies ordinary details—an insomnia plague that lasts months, a rain that lasts four years.
Repetition: Words like soledad, muerte, tiempo recur as refrains, building a sense of myth and inevitability.
Sensory weight: His vocabulary often leans on colour (amarillo, verde, rojo), smell, and touch, grounding the fantastic in the physical.
Sacred tone: Words with biblical weight—milagro (miracle), profecía (prophecy), eterno (eternal)—infuse the prose with a mythic atmosphere.
Again, I learnt the value of sewing fine threads through my writing to connect ideas through structure and motifs.
When people talk of Gabriel García Márquez’s writing, there’s often the throw-away tag of ‘magic realism’ and while it’s true that his writing embodies this, it’s important to understand that behind those two words lies something which isn’t surface at all, but a deep examination of wonder and extraordinary in the face of darkness and a loss of hope. By writing as if telling a fable or myth, he was engaging with story through the ages and far beyond the present moment. It’s an awareness of deep time, of our humanity and of the power of story.
“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
- Gabriel García Márquez
But there were many other lessons I took from his writing. A few favourites are:
I learned about the world of story truth - that fiction is essentially a series of imagined events but told to reach a greater truth, and that what you write must ring true - not in the external world per se, but within the world of the book.
I learned how to play with structure when writing. Much like French film-maker Jean-Luc Godard’s famous quote: ‘A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order,’ so too did García Márquez play with structure, often diving right in at ‘the end’. We start with a death or a loss, and work backwards from there.
I learned how to be playful as a writer and that it was possible to break the rules if you did it with intentionality. How many times do we hear: ‘don’t give characters similar sounding names, you’ll confuse the reader’. Márquez would give different characters the same names intentionally - the generational looming large in his storytelling. Sometimes you just have to trust the reader to make the jump.
I learned that you can demand the reader’s attention through density (counter-intuitively making it more demanding to read) and through what is held back - the gaps in storytelling.
In all that he writes, his voice jumps off the page. It is distinctively his, and how he sees the world. That’s a lesson to all writers. It’s also the difference between story and storytelling. With Márquez you feel like you’re sitting next to someone by a fire, and he’s telling you the story late into the night. That intimacy builds trust with the reader, engages them, draws them into your story world.
I learned that place is character. This theme is a touchstone for me in my own writing, and in Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, place is at the heart of everything.
I learned how memory is story - whether personal, or community-based, or historical - and how to examine that it writing and let it resonate.
I also learned how to tackle writing about politics (or the socio-political) without hitting the reader over the head dogmatically - that showing how the political affects the personal in writing is always more powerful and relatable.
My favourite lesson, is that sense of wonder and curiosity and playfulness that is imbued throughout his writing - that search for the extraordinary and transcendent in the ordinary.
“There is always something left to love.” - Gabriel García Márquez
Reading List
If you want to study Márquez’s craft, here are some starting points:
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) – The cornerstone of magical realism, weaving family saga, history, and myth.
Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) – A study of time, longing, and the endurance of passion.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) – A masterclass in structure and inevitability, where the ending is known from the start yet suspense is sustained.
No One Writes to the Colonel (1961) – A slim, poignant novella about dignity, waiting, and quiet resistance.
Strange Pilgrims (1992) – Short stories that bring the uncanny into everyday life.
Writing Exercises in the Spirit of Gabriel García Márquez
Make the Ordinary Miraculous
Write a scene of domestic life - a meal, a family gathering, a quiet morning. Now reframe it so that something extraordinary happens, but the characters treat it as natural.
History in the Room
Take a small, personal story (a breakup, a childhood memory, a reunion). Write it as though an entire nation’s history is pressing against it - what echoes seep into the moment?
Memory as Narrative
Write a piece where the timeline isn’t linear but flows like memory - looping back, skipping ahead, repeating itself with slight variation.
The Inevitability Experiment
Draft a story where you reveal the ending in the first paragraph. The challenge: sustain tension and interest through how you unfold the journey.
The Place as Character
Márquez’s Macondo is as alive as any person. Try to write a story where the setting has moods, desires, or even a destiny of its own.
Serendipity and Imagination
🦋 💛 Yesterday when I was working on this article (and writing about yellow butterflies as symbolism in García Márquez’s writing) I saw this yellow butterfly just afterwards in the garden - amazing how the universe guides us.
These tiny moments of serendipity signal the magic of creativity.
What are some of your favourite books, the ones that gave you the encouragement to write, that inspired your creativity? Why?
If you’ve found this helpful and want to follow along with this series, sign up here for weekly insights into storytelling.
Write With Purpose - Course now LIVE
For writers interested in learning how to better Write With Purpose, I’m excited to share that the course is now live. This is a topic I’m passionate about and I hope you’ll find it transformative for your writing.
So if you are ready to develop your writing voice, discover the greater ‘why’ behind your writing, and align your writing practice to write in a more compelling, powerful and authentic way, then Write With Purpose is for you. It’s self-led, allows for quick engagement (taking 1-2 weeks+ to complete), and includes 17 audio lessons, a 54 page workbook full of actionable exercises, prompts, and recommended reading. It’s suitable for both travel and fiction writers. Any queries, drop me a DM.
What Others Say ❤️
“…there’s so much I can take from it in order to grow my writing style.”
“Just what I needed to haul me out of a creative slump!”
“Thanks for the encouragement - your words remind me that our stories belong here.”
“While going through the lessons I already found out five experiences that I am longing to speak about. Your work will encourage me to start it right now. Thank you again.”
“This is brilliant, Laura. Just discovered you. Very glad to have found you.”
And if you’re interested in different storytelling models that go beyond the hero’s journey — a previous post Do We Still Need Heroes? breaks down global storytelling models and how to apply them in your writing.
To discover more on place as character, read here.
Also this week:
In The Green Travel Guide - travelling to music legend Freddie Mercury’s childhood home in Zanzibar and hiking the longest trail in the Caribbean in Waitukubuli, along with a free mini-guide to 7 Green Adventures To Do This Year
In Write Your Way Around The World - looking at the writer’s mindset and essential skills to become a truly unstoppable writer
Over on Notes, running a 5-Day Travel Journal Challenge with daily prompts to help you develop your travel journaling.
If you enjoyed this content, a ❤️ share, restack or recommend is greatly appreciated!
Until next week,
Laura
Laura McVeigh
Author | Travel Writer | Storyteller
lauramcveigh.com | lauramcveightravel.com | travel-writing.com | greentravelguides.world
Laura McVeigh is a Northern Irish novelist and travel writer. Her internationally bestselling writing has been widely translated. Her latest novel Lenny (described as a ‘remarkable novel’ (BBC) and ‘an essential read’ (Irish Independent)) travels between Libya and Louisiana. She has authored books for Lonely Planet, DK Travel, bylines in Irish Times, Irish Independent and her writing has been featured in BBC, Newsweek, New Internationalist and many more. Former CEO of a global writers’ organisation working with writers from 145 countries, Laura is founder of Travel-Writing.Com and Green Travel Guides. She works with writers, founders, and sustainable brands on storytelling. Laura also writes weekly on writing, travel writing and green travel on Substack.
P.S. Learn more about how to Write With Purpose here
Place is always character. When it's not, a story isn't alive enough.
I'm just curious though, how well do you speak all these languages?