Do it Again! Taking Readers on a Fantastic Voyage

By Doug Peterson

I will never forget the day my parents took me to the theater to see the movie Fantastic Voyage—a sci-fi thriller in which a crew is inserted into a ship, shrunk to a microscopic size, and then injected inside a human body. I can’t remember their specific mission, only that it had to do with saving the life of the patient.

What I do remember is my sense of wonder.

I’m dating myself by bringing up this movie because Fantastic Voyage came out in 1966—a time when special effects were a far cry from today. But I had never seen anything like it, so when their sub began zipping through the bloodstream, my eyes almost popped from my head. I remember the looks on the faces of the characters as they stared out of the sub’s window in wonderment as blood cells floated all around them like gigantic jellyfish. These people were inside a human body!

Last year, Fantastic Voyage was streaming on Netflix, so I decided to check out the movie, which I hadn’t seen since I was 11 years old. I couldn’t believe that I actually loved this movie. Films back then moved at a much slower pace, but this one moved at a glacier speed. It seemed to take forever for the scientists to finally shrink the ship to microscopic size.

A lot of my disappointment had to do with advances in special effects, obviously. But it was more than that. The wonder of being inside the body was no longer there.

Some of the loss of wonder has to do with age. As we get older, we lose this sense of amazement—but a good story, particularly a good fantasy or science fiction story, recaptures this sense of astonishment. In his essay, On Fairy-Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, calls this “Recovery.” He says that a good fantasy story helps us to recover a sense of wonder.

Tolkien says Recovery is a “regaining of a clear view.” It’s a way of seeing things “as we are meant to see them.” He compares it to cleaning our windows so we can look outside and see things as they are meant to be seen. We are “freed from the drab blur of familiarity.”

For those who have eyeglasses, another analogy is when you pick up your new prescription and suddenly the world look sharper and seemingly more colorful. This is Recovery. This is what every good story should do—help people see the world in a brilliant new way.

Tolkien’s idea of Recovery actually comes from G.K. Chesterton, a writer who inspired both Tolkien and Narnia author C.S. Lewis. In his book, Orthodoxy, Chesterton says that fairy tales tell us “that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

With age comes wisdom—and weariness. We become weary with the world, and we forget to see the wonder.

In one of my favorite passages, Chesterton says that adults have lost the ability to “exult in monotony” because we think we have seen it all. To make his point, he talks about how when children love something, they want it to be repeated over and over and over again. Children do this because they have an excess, not an absence, of life.

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged,” Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy. “They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it against until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”

Chesterton proceeds to point out that God also has an abundance of life, and He too is strong enough to exult in monotony.

“It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger that we.”

So strive for this sense of wonder in your stories, especially if you’re writing the kinds of stories that carry readers into new worlds, which are designed to remind us of how miraculous our own world is.

If you do, then your readers might just exclaim, “Do it again” when they reach the end of your story.

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5 for Writing

1. Get writing. Find the time to write. Then do it.
2. Learn by listening—and doing. Solicit feedback, discern what helps you.
3. Finish your story. Edit and rewrite, but don’t tinker forever. Reach the finish line.
4. Thrive on rejection. Get your story out there. Be fearless. Accept rejection.
5. Become a juggler. After one story is finished, be ready to start another. Consider writing two at once.