When I was very young I
thought that writers were like magicians, saying magic words, reaching out and
pulling strange wonders from out of thin air, as if they had some special
window into things that no one else could ever see.
Now, I still think there's an
element of magic to it, but not on such a dramatic stage.
When I write I feel like I
start with a small piece of something I have seen or read before, or
experienced in real life; a photo, a sentence, or the way someone felt at a
given moment. Or, as the case may be, an entire character or scene I've seen
before.
Sometimes it feels like I'm
copying and pasting; the ears from that, the nose from this, and my great
grandmother's eyes.
Other times it feels a bit
more like mixing. Take this layer of a plot, add rain and laughter, and see how
that changes the layer.
The magic I think is almost
like a click. There's a certain moment where the pieces from any one source are
so very small, like grains of sand, and if each one had a string back to the
source the bundle would be the thickest net you ever saw.
The magic I think is when you
see something, or hear something, and you don't borrow from them, you think
"what if instead 'this' happened", and it feels like water running
down the earth, drawing plant shoots up out of the dry soil like dancers rising
from the floor.
And there are those times
when those many borrowed ideas feel like they are clinging to each other with
such strength that you can't even see the seam where they were once joined.
I think in the process of
learning any craft some of the magic and wonder that drew us in has to go away,
and I often wrestle with whether I really am being creative, or just borrowing
from such obscure sources that no one can recognize how little originality is
really there, but then I'm reminded that Chaucer and Shakespeare, who while not
always popular, are often held up as some of the most well known older
literatures, really just took stories that they themselves heard in their
travels, and polished them.
