I knew as a little girl that there were really two kinds of readers: those who liked Little Women and those who preferred The Phantom Tollbooth, but it wasn't until I was much older and learned to think like a critic that I understood exactly where the difference lies: Little Women is a novel; The Phantom Tollbooth is a romance. Little House on the Prairie is a novel; The Wizard of Oz is a romance. Magic is, without a doubt, a fictional device you almost never see outside of romance, but not all romances are magical.

The iconography of medieval romance is woven into our world and our language. The knight in shining armor, the damsel in distress - these are half-mocking labels we use to tease people for acting out roles from an idealistic, outdated notion of chivalry. The Holy Grail or the dragon that requires slaying are metaphors invoked in newspaper or magazine articles to indicate that a particular goal or challenge has some extraordinary significance. Four hundred years ago, Cervantes mercilessly parodied the clichés of the romance in Don Quixote, but his mockery didn't slow it down; romance mutated and evolved, manifesting in dozens of new forms: the gothic tale, magic realism, the road novel. It lives on in comic books, science fiction, movies and television series, even video games. Once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere, especially in narratives (whatever the medium) that speak to the young.

Life, unlike stories, has no theme, no formal unity, and (to unbelievers, at least) no readily apparent meaning. That's why we want stories. No art form can hope to exactly reproduce the sensations that make up being alive, but that's OK: life after all, is what we already have. From art, we want something different, something with a shape and a purpose. Any departure a story might make from real-world laws against talking animals and flying carpets seems relatively inconsequential compared to this first, great leap away from reality. Perhaps that's why humanity's oldest stories are full of outlandish events and supernatural beings; the idea that a story must somehow mimic actual everyday experience would probably have seemed daft to the first tellers. Why even bother to tell a story about something so commonplace?

If you read enough [...] you come to see that every great story contains elements - talking beasts and brave orphans, lonely girls and dying gods, trackless forests and perilous cities - that can and have been used and reused over and over again, without becoming exhausted. If anything, they grow denser, richer, more potent with each new telling. Every great storyteller contributes a little to this patina, but storytellers are human, and inevitably those contributions have flaws. Myths and stories are repositories of human desires and fears, which means that they contain our sexual anxieties, our preoccupation with status, and our xenophobia as well as our heroism, our generosity, and our curiosity. A perfect story is no more interesting or possible than a perfect human being.