This week on Writing Break, we’re exploring how to weave the extraordinary into the ordinary without breaking the spell of magical realism. We're also discussing Amazon's increasing censorship of authors and artists.

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Overthinking Couch Topics:

1. How it differs from fantasy and why the magic must stay unexplained
2. Techniques to balance realism and wonder
3. Common pitfalls that break the spell
4. The Latin American roots of magical realism and its global legacy
5. A writing prompt to help you find the extraordinary in the everyday

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If you have plot bunnies coming out of your plot holes, it’s time for a Writing Break.

Hi there. I am speaking to you from a newly re-OSed laptop. My BBL, as in, big beautiful laptop, was lagging just a little bit. And I allowed someone to convince me that the best thing to do was re-OS the whole thing. Which is like saying, I allowed someone to shoot me in the foot and I'm being a pretty good sport about it. Anyway, I hope this makes it to you by Thursday.

This season, we’ve traveled through the lands of mystery, fantasy, horror, romance, and literary fiction. Today, we’re stepping into the realm of magical realism, where events are both real and impossible.

Before we get to that, I want to discuss something that harms authors, and that is . . . censorship.

The Writing Break Café is open, so let's head inside and get started.

A listener and very talented author recently sent me a screenshot of a BlueSky post.

The post shows an author who publishes under his own nonprofit independent publishing house explaining that Amazon’s KDP platform terminated their publishing house's account after they published books about Ghislaine Maxwell's trial and Kevin Spacey’s trial. According to the email this author shared, Amazon deemed the books "offensive content." But then, Amazon didn't just remove those two books. They removed all of the indie publisher's books, which were numerous. Amazon did not mention having a problem with these other books, but they still removed them from sale, revoked access to royalties, and barred the publisher from opening a new KDP account.

Now, I’m not weighing in on the merits of any one title. What matters is that this is a real author who lost distribution, income, and readership with no advance notice and very little public explanation.

Since this author's post back in October, and these so-called offensive books were published years ago, by the way, but since his post back in October, it seems that many of the books are back on Amazon, but not all are available on Kindle. This author, however, is an attorney and investigative journalist. Would such a quick resolution be possibe for an author without such credentials?

This type of censorship is just one reason many authors are moving their books off of KDP.

Over the past year, Amazon has come under increasing scrutiny for how it restricts, alters, and supresses creative work. This is happening to books, films, and art.

Researchers, including those at The Citizen Lab, have documented that Amazon routinely blocks the shipment of thousands of books to certain regions of the world. These books are not banned outright. They still appear listed but are marked unavailable or unshippable, depending on the country.

The categories most affected are books about LGBTQIA+ lives, sexuality, politics, religion, health, and the occult.

For authors, this kind of restriction is especially troubling because there’s no clear or advance notice, and there's no transparent criteria, and often no logical explanation. A book can be available in one region and effectively invisible in another, without the author even being informed.

In some cases, LGBTQIA+ advocacy groups have shown that essential queer resources are hidden behind misleading out of stock messages, even when the books are very much in stock. Did I say "misleading"? I meant to say false. Amazon is just straight up lying to us, and this kind of censorship extends beyond books.

On Amazon Prime Video, for example, promotional artwork for classic James Bond films was altered to remove Bond’s gun. Amazon refused to comment on the 007 matter, despite the public backlash, but they did remove the controversial art and replaced them with stills from each film. None of the stills feature Bond carrying a gun.

The question on my mind is, Who gets to decide when a cultural artifact is too uncomfortable to present as it originally existed?

The 007 films are iconic, and they were books first. Since Amazon is also censoring books about the occult, will Harry Potter soon lose his wand?

Amazon is meant to be just a retailer and a streaming service, but when a platform decides, either deliberately or algorithmically, to make certain ideas harder to find, less visible, or different from what the creator created, it is reshaping stories they didn't write, which then changes the context audiences receive. That's like giving Romeo & Juliet a happy ending.

Books and films don't have to be banned to disappear. And this is where advocacy matters.

You know how much I admire the Authors Guild, so what are they doing about all this? Several things. They’ve called for greater transparency from major retailers about content restrictions, delisting, and account terminations. They’ve pushed for stronger contractual language to protect authors’ rights and clearer standards around distribution and discoverability.

While the Guild cannot force Amazon to change its policies, institutional pressure and speaking up makes a different.

Other groups, including PEN America, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and LGBTQIA+ literary advocacy organizations, have also raised concerns about overbroad filtering systems and the erosion of access to ideas.

So, what can authors actually do?

First: diversify where your work lives. I strongly advise against relying on a single platform for book distribution. Making your book only available on KDP can give you more royalties per sale, but what good is that if Amazon won't sell your book or if they allow the algorithm to swallow you up? Alternatives to consider, and safeguards, really, are indie-friendly retailers, direct sales, and libraries.

Second: build direct relationships with readers. Newsletters, communities, and personal platforms give you a way to reach your audience even if a retailer restricts visibility.

Third: know your rights. Understand what distribution agreements allow, what recourse you have, and when to seek help. The Authors Guild offers resources and guidance here, and a lot of it is available to non-members.

Call me crazy, many people do, but I think the publishing landscape should be shaped, first and foremost, by writers and readers, not by the small-minded, the easily startled, or the remarkably incurious.

For those who are none of these things, there ought to be books, hopefully your books. May the algorithm be always in your favor.

Now, we resume our genre series with magical realism, a genre that has roots deep in Latin American tradition, though its reach now extends across the world.

At its core, magical realism blurs the line between what is real and what is wondrous, without needing extensive worldbuilding or a whole new set of rules.

In magical realism, impossible things happen every day, and no one finds them all that strange. Ghosts might visit their living relatives for dinner. A woman might cry so many tears she floods a town. A man might carry the scent of oranges wherever he goes.

The magic is treated as part of life. Characters accept the supernatural the way we accept rain: sometimes welcome and sometimes inconvenient, but always real.

This acceptance is what sets magical realism apart from fantasy. Fantasy builds entirely new worlds where magic has rules. Magical realism lives in our world, where magic just occurs from time to time, unannounced, unexplained, unfathomable, but not quite unexpected.

Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier coined the phrase lo real maravilloso, meaning “the marvelous real,” to describe the beauty and strangeness of Latin America itself. To Carpentier, magic wasn’t a fantasy. It was simply the truth of the Americas: a place so rich in contradiction that it could only be described through wonder.

Then came Gabriel García Márquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude became the cornerstone of magical realism. His village of Macondo feels both mythic and ordinary, where insomnia plagues and time loops endlessly. The style of magical realism spread quickly. Everywhere it travels, magical realism gives voice to silenced histories and assures us that the irrational can still be true.

Here’s the paradox of magical realism: to write it well, you must treat the impossible like fact.

That means no dramatic reveals, no explanations, no “but how?” kind of thing. The characters never question the magic, so readers don’t either.

The world stays grounded. The magic feels subtle and integrated rather than theatrical. The narration is calm and factual even when describing something impossible.

Let’s look at a few examples.

In Like Water for Chocolate, emotions literally flavor the food. When the protagonist cries into her cooking, everyone who eats it feels her sorrow.

In Beloved, a ghost takes physical form to embody trauma and memory.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, a town forgets the names of things, and residents label their world with signs to remember: “This is a cow.” “This is milk.”

None of these stop to explain why this one magical thing is happening even though the entire world isn't magical. The magic serves to reveal what’s already true about human experience and emotions, especially love, grief, guilt, and memory, in a vivid and unforgettable way.

So when you’re writing magical realism, remember that the magic must express something true about your characters’ inner lives.

Magical realism thrives on tone. The best magical realism stories balance humor and heartbreak, the mundane and the mystical. The prose is often lyrical, sensory, and patient. It lingers.

To capture the right mood, describe the ordinary with reverence and the impossible with restraint. Write as though everything you’re describing is perfectly natural, even a woman turning into a bird.

Magical realism often emerges from places and people whose realities have been denied or erased. To this end, the themes are vast but interconnected. There's colonization and resistance, focusing on reclaiming indigenous myths and identities. There's memory and trauma, which gives us things like ghosts as history that refuses to be buried. There's family and fate. That's where you get generations repeating cycles until someone breaks them. There's love and loss, which gives us the sacred and the sorrowful intertwined.

Globally, magical realism shifts shape. In Japanese writing, it’s introspective and surreal. In African storytelling, it’s communal and spiritual. In Caribbean literature, it dances between colonizer and ancestral worlds. Every culture that embraces magical realism uses it as a mirror to make sense of reality rather than to escape it.

Three pitfalls can break the spell of magical realism. One, over-explaining the magic. If you rationalize it, it becomes fantasy or sci-fi. Which, coincidentally, is an argument I had this morning with an author. Two, using magic for spectacle instead of meaning. The wonder must reveal emotional or cultural truth. Three, forgetting the realism. If everything is magical, nothing feels grounded. Keep one foot in the ordinary world.

Let’s revisit One Hundred Years of Solitude for a moment. The story isn’t really about magic; it’s about memory, time, and loneliness. The magic simply amplifies those truths. When Remedios the Beauty ascends to heaven while folding laundry, the miracle isn’t the ascent but how natural and calm it all is. Refusing to marvel is a hallmark of magical realism.

For this week’s overthinking prompt, think of an ordinary part of your daily life and imagine something magical happening. Maybe it happens during your commute to work or while shopping for groceries. No one questions the magic. No one calls it strange. Let the extraordinary simply exist.

And let me know what you come up with, pretty please.

Now that we've explored magic for grown-ups, next week we're turning to the truest magicians of all: children. Join me for Children’s Literature: From Picture Books to Middle Grade. Even if that topic is of no interest to you, do check in to the first half of the episode where I'll be discussing the latest publishing news and book trends. Until then, thank you so much for listening. And remember, you deserved this break.