Writing is magick

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Tech tipsComputer Tricks
@N00/112597076">LIGNTNING OVER LADY LIBERTY
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I was watching TV tonight and around 9.35pm the ending of the novel I’m writing for NaNoWriMo came to me. Bam. Just like that, a lightning bolt straight into my conscious mind. I wasn’t thinking about the novel. I was just doing nothing, and maybe that’s why I got the idea when I did—I was free, for a time, from the internal knots and tensions that every writer is familiar with, and has to wrestle to the ground constantly and never-endingly if he or she is to win through and get the work done.

To say I was excited was an understatement given that the now-known final chapter will turn the entire story round, flip everything on its head, confound and surprise and terrify the reader who, I hope, will already have enjoyed plenty of mystery and surprises from the very first page. It feels weird saying that when I’m only writing chapter four today and am planning a total of thirty—one for each day of the competition. It’s also, remember, only the first draft I’m pumping out right now. There could be one, two, three or more before everything’s ready for take-off.

I’ve never before planned a novel and had in my head this eerily coherent totality of plot, not so early in the story’s development, hell,  not ever. Most of my stories I wing ‘em, see where they take me. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. This one, it’s the other way round—it’s riding me, I’m now a slave to the telling, and I find that at least as strange as the story itself which, I kid you not, is so out there I think and hope I’m feeling the same emotions as I type that the eventual reader will feel. They do say, if the writer is bored when writing then nobody else will be interested, either. So if the writer is fired up in an almost actor-like way while hitting the keyboard (or using the pen), and feeling all the emotions of the story—fear, loneliness, anger, lust, horror, attraction, curiosity—for however long it takes to get those feelings onto the page, and then they’re gone and it’s time for the next emotional hit to be typed, then it’s got to hold out some hope for me that I really am onto something. Hasn’t it?

I tell you, I’ve been Pagan for a long time, and I’ve practiced magick and ritual and not once before today did a simple truth make itself known to me: writing is magick.

Thanks to those of you who are following my (as it turns out, spiritual, psychological and even physical as well as creative) journey this month, and have already left positive comments here and DMs or @ messages on Twitter. I really, really appreciate the goodwill—and that’s a powerful form of magick too, you know. I’ve heard of sympathetic magick. Maybe I’m talking here about empathic or compassionate magick. Whatever it is, it sure isn’t something science can ever pin down.

The greatest power of all isn’t to be found in the body or the business or the politics. It’s in the mind. And your faith, it doesn’t matter—what you do with it, that’s what counts. Even if you put your faith in people and never in gods, you’ve found what is clumsily referred to by us humans as divinity—or, if you prefer, the most potent magickal force there is in the whole universe.

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categories: broomstick stuff, creative, strange universe
  • Go Andy, Go Andy, Go Andy :o)
  • Thank you cheerleader, for that insightful analysis of everything I wrote above... Honestly! Put down the pom-poms and walk away slowly... Don't look back at them, even if they are fluffy and pink... Enough with the cheerleading! Trust me, it's not necessary.
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