sarah eve kelly

On magic:

(I’m writing this across the table from my marvellously autistic brother who looks exactly like me and who I love more than anyone in the world. John is working on a 500-piece puzzle, and every time he puts two pieces together, he claps and says ‘Good job, John!’ He also says ‘ICE LINEUP!’ and ‘PURPLE VACUUM CLEANER!’ and ‘ORANGE VACUUM CLEANER!’ - and, just now, ‘You’ve just had LOTS of oats.’ He will keep saying each thing until it’s said back to him. Look up ‘echolalia’ in the dictionary. So if this seems a bit disjointed, that’s why.)

Yes, I was one of those kids who waited until Mom had tucked me in and left the room before pulling out a flashlight and a coffee-table-sized edition of STORIES FROM THE BALLET. I thought I was supersly, but Mom was just winking at it: she loved that she had a kid who did this.

(She did, obliquely, warn me that my vision would eventually fail. To this day I have perfect vision, but I’m sure she’s right anyway.)

I believed in stories. I didn’t like that Sara in A LITTLE PRINCESS had a tiger-skin rug, because come on, poor tiger, right? (This was Little Sarah being present-centred, I suppose.) But I read my favourite stories again and again, loved them more each time. I don’t think I knew, then, about the magic of storytelling – but I think that itself is part of the magic, that you don’t know it’s there.

I didn’t discover magic until I started writing – really writing – myself. I was replete with arrogance, but I thought I was full of magic. My characters were Velveteen Rabbits, waiting to become real, and I – unlike the Velveteen Rabbit – was sure that they would become real.

When I began making a daily discipline of writing, I became a reactionary about magic. Stories, I’ve said any number of times on this site alone, are the result of sweated labour. It isn’t just love that makes the Velveteen Rabbit real, and certainly not magic: it’s his willingness to lay stifled under the blanket of a sick child, to become threadbare, to become ugly. Stories are work.

Now, today, I’m not so sure. I think magic might lurk after all.

This is what happens when you escape the vacuum in writing. You can either take what people have to say and incorporate it or not, or you can turn your story into a book-by-committee and stand paralysed before turning every corner, worried that there isn’t enough suspense, worried that no one will care, worried that the names aren’t right – and finally, worried that you don’t care.

This is what happens when you believe in the magic again, but are sure that you don’t have it.

(That author you think is a hack, though – she has it. The authors you admire – well, of course they have it. But you don’t, and you should stick to the typing pool.)

Most writing manuals written by earnest writers you admire tell you that most of writing feels like banging your head against a wall. It feels very much like despair, very much like pain. But then you have those days when you feel like you can fly. All of this is very true. When you try and nothing comes – or when only offal comes – it’s painful.

But I know what it is to fly, too, and I’ve come to distrust those days. That is often where my worst writing comes from, though I don’t know it at the time. Those days make me arrogant; they make me feel like my best work isn’t work at all.

So between high-flying arrogance and total paralysis, where do we find ourselves? What state of mind can we adopt so that we can work?

I don’t have answers today. I’m only asking questions. Because there’s a sense of having lost the joy of the thing, of having let the magic slip out of my fingers (not through: out of), if it was ever there. (Maybe the magic is just arrogance – maybe you need arrogance to keep going.)

(To this, my brother John says ‘SWIMMING!’ I say it back. ‘MUSHROOM SOUP!’ he bellows. I bellow it back.)

From listening to other writers, I learn one thing: I have to bend my mind so that I can be proud of all of my writing, of everything I commit to paper. X number of words make a draft. You have to have a draft. To paraphrase Anne Lamott very badly, I can’t let perfectionism stand between me and a shitty draft. I can’t let the memory of days when I could fly stand between me and a shitty draft. The minute you clap THE END onto something, you have something to work with. The last ten thousand words of my novel have been absolutely uninspiring, but it could be that they all had to be committed to paper for me to write one perfect paragraph. Who knows. The lesson is a daunting one. This isn’t the time to stop and think: this is the time to keep going.

(John puts two more pieces together and claps. Good job, John! And then: ‘STOVE!’ ‘FIRE ALARM!’ The puzzle looks like a mess right now, but it’ll make sense eventually.)

Till next time, &c. &c.

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