What’s Your Magic?

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Creativity is Something We Have to Cultivate

My fiancé’s dream ever since I met him has been to open a vegan restaurant. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love vegan food and dating someone who’s a good cook is amazing. But having worked in restaurants myself and experienced the hard, often thankless labour involved, I never really understood why he was so driven towards this goal. That was until I heard him talking on the phone to a potential collaborator, and he described the process of turning plants into great dishes as magic. Then it clicked—cooking vegan food for him is like what writing fiction is for me.

And I think I get it now. Turning something that (to a lot of people) looks bland into something that looks enticing and tastes delicious is a kind of alchemy. It’s not so very different from what I try to do every day: arrange little black marks on a page such that they tell a story—and come to life. And though writing feels like very hard work some days, I know that I could never give it up.

Magic is the process of doing something that seems like it should be impossible—of defying the laws of physics. Turning something into something else, for example, or making something appear from apparently nowhere. Ultimately, it requires a feat of imagination: the ability to picture things differently from the way they are now. That’s why many forms of creativity look like magic. They push the boundaries of what we’re used to and turn over mundane things to reveal new and exciting possibilities.

But everything comes from somewhere, of course. While a good writer can make it seem their characters, their world and their story have been conjured whole out of the ether, the germs of all of those ideas were found in this world—the one the rest of us live in too. It’s the way a writer combines them in new ways that generates the illusion of an empire built on thin air.

This is for good reason: the right blend of influences offers limitless opportunity. Even after the millions of books that have been published throughout history, we’re not running out of things to write about. (That’s also true of cooking. When meat eaters complain that a vegan diet is limiting, they’re forgetting how many flavours and textures the world has to offer—spices, herbs, oils, pastes, vinegars and other seasonings, not to mention the innumerable ways of searing, baking, frying or juicing them.)

The point I’m trying to make, however, is that the ingredients for good fiction or good food are available to all of us, and the kind of sorcery required to transform them is something we can learn.

While writing fiction has always seemed obviously magical to me, this is particularly true of writing fantasy. When your characters are actually waving wands and brewing potions, or when you step into the world where you’re as likely to meet a ghost as a gardener, the realms of possibility expand all the more. But one thing that bothers me about some fantasy novels is when magic is reserved for special people, a chosen few—be they witches and wizards, fairies or vampires.

Now I recognise that this type of world-building creates some interesting dynamics that the stories can play on: themes of discrimination in either direction, based on the oppressive regimes of our own history and present culture. I also realise that people aren’t born equally, no matter how much we might wish otherwise. Life is unfair in many ways; sickness, disability and money are dealt out inequitably, for example, and it’s important that we are able to talk about this through fiction. I’m profoundly glad, however, to live in a world where magic—by which I mean creativity, the work of imagination—is the birthright of all of us.

Magic can be a metaphor for many things, but for me, one thing distinguishes it from the kind of differences that represent privilege. It’s an ineffable, untameable and profoundly spiritual thing that doesn’t obey the rules of the mundane world. In the best stories, it doesn’t coincide with other types of power, but represents a universal leveller—a way of speaking back to power, in fact. It’s a way for people with less physical strength to move things with their minds, or for young people to challenge the limitations imposed on them by the adult world. And that’s what’s so great about it.

Even when they’re intended to help us think about discrimination, stories where magic favours some people over others could actually perpetuate the idea that some people just are more special. I’ve noticed that these stories tend to be the same ones that make use of “chosen one” tropes, in which one particular person has more magical power than anyone else.

So while my life changed the day I realised that I was supposed to be a writer, that doesn’t in any way make me special. In an admittedly storybook fashion, I was half a semester deep into a maths and physics degree when I had a dream one night and realised that this dream was supposed to be a novel and that I was supposed to write it. But the resulting novel was not very good. In truth, it was terrible: a clichéd story about a school for teens with special powers including—yes, you guessed it—one with particularly special powers. The point, however, is that during the process of writing that novel, I learned a lot. Because any kind of creative magic is a skill that you have to develop.

So in my current novel, it has been important to me that magic is something anyone can learn with enough time and diligent practice. This is a truth I wanted to communicate about our own world. Not everyone writes fiction, but everyone has the potential to perform magic in some form or another, whether it’s through painting, making music, or turning vegetables into works of art.