THE WRITER, THE READER, AND THE MAGIC THAT COMES BEFORE

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A few days ago I spoke of the magic that stories invoke in readers, and because the post generated a few questions and responses, I thought I would take a moment to clarify my semi-gnostic proclamations with what I hope are slightly less gnostic proclamations.

First and foremost, please understand that a lot of my ideas on these matters derive from the basic fact that unless I’m careful or in an excellent mental state I am highly susceptible to the lures of authorial tyranny — that springs from fear, from insecurity, from a drive for approval, a desire to be a “serious writer”, and which inevitably compels me to arrogate the privileges of reader and writer both — which is not, from my perspective, what a writer should be doing.

A writer that eliminates or colonizes a reader’s play space is a dictator — they want to tell the reader what the story is and how they should read it — harming their talents and their stories in the process.

In order not to be that kind of writer, in order to hold open the play space, I strive to respect the boundaries between the writer and reader in my work. 

I know I’ve said readers collude with writers to read the story — to collude originally means to co-play — but even in the heat of collaborations readers don’t usually confuse themselves for the actual writer of the story.  I am of the belief that writers should return the courtesy, and not confuse themselves for their story’s actual readers, either.

Clearly, a writer needs to write their story as a potential reader, needs to write their story with an eye to how a reader might experience it.  A potential reader, however, is not the same as being an actual reader of a story.  Unlike writers, actual readers come to a story innocent of its wonders and perils (and much more).

For me a story, in this context, functions like a Necker cube. 

A writer holds one perspective (they craft the spell that will make the story’s magic possible).  A reader has the other perspective (they experience the spell that occasionally becomes the magic within).  But neither can hold both perspectives at the same time.  

One is either the writer that crafts the story’s spell, or one is the reader that experiences the story’s spell.

But, in my homebrew, one cannot do or be both.

2

For the sake of one last analogy, let’s imagine the writer as a stage magician, the reader as their audience, and the story is the magic trick.

As some of you may know, stage magic traditionally unfolds in three steps.  Step one is the Pledge, where the magician offers the audience something mundane, a rabbit or a woman on a gurney.  Next step is the Turn, where the magician starts the magic trick by making the rabbit disappear or sawing the woman in half.  Finally, comes the third and final step, the Prestige, where the magician finishes the magic trick by making the rabbit re-appear or the severed woman emerge whole.   

The audience sees only the magic — not the finely crafted labor that goes into its execution.  That labor must, by necessity, be obscured (if the audience can see the strings and mirrors, after all, then it’s not magic).  The magician, on the other hand, is acutely aware of the craft, training, and instincts that create the magic. 

As with magicians, so with writers. 

3

This is not to say writers don’t experience emotion and magic when writing our stories. 

Of course we do. 

Like every writer I’ve known and heard tell of, I am regulary overwhelmed by emotions as I write.  Often find myself crying my eyes out or transported to another time and place, and, in the case of my larger projects, have been transformed by the long labyrinthine labors. But that doesn’t change the fact — no more repetition, I promise — that reading a story and writing one are very different processes.  Or that, unlike the reader, I also experience and hold in my memories all the emotions and magics that I attempted — and that never made it into the story.  Unlike the reader I hold (if only unconsciously) all the frustrations and agonies and gaps that, in the end, produce a seamless experience.   

By the time the story is finished I, the writer, cannot read the finished story as a reader because I know it, and it knows me — too well — and I cannot therefore experience the story’s magic as magic must be experienced: in innocence.  I might find aspects of the story surprising or magical, might find myself pierced with feels or in awe of what I’ve accomplished, but I will never inhabit the story as a reader can or feel its deepest enchantments.

And yet we writers do experience magic.  

A magic born of all the stories that saved us and accompanied us and yes, changed us — utterly.  

A reader’s magic that in time became something more that wouldn’t leave us alone and brought us to the page and encouraged us create stories so that others might experience the very magic that saved us and accompanied us and transformed us — utterly.

I can only speak for myself but there always comes a moment in the hard long lonely process of writing when all the magic I ever experienced from stories returns to me, sometimes a trace, sometimes a song, and sometimes all at once.  I might not experience the magic that I try to cast in my stories, but I experience its well-spring, its origin, its source, and hopefully something of that sublime colloquy flows from me into my stories and, eventually, into the hearts, minds, and bodies of my readers.

Yes, in my homebrew, I believe that the spells a writer casts — and the magic those spells might inspire — belong to the reader alone. That’s the price of storytelling. 

A small price to pay, if you ask me —

— to feel all the regnant magic we’ve gathered from all our reading — which never perishes and is always enough.