Writing and Magic: the ritual of National Novel Writing Month
I’ve written before about magic systems in stories, particularly in my most recent novel, Union Station. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how writing is as close as I come to magic in reality. I’m certain Grant Morrison has written about this subject more extensively, but here is my take.
I believe that writing, really any act of creation, is its own form of magic. It takes a force of will to create something out of nothing, especially for anything as large as a novel. In order to create one must believe that one can do it. And much like the idea of magic in Union Station, the point of many of the rituals involved is to help persuade the caster to believe that they can do it. For instance, chanting an incantation in Latin probably isn’t any different than chanting it in English, except that it feels more ritualized, the esoteric feel of the dead language gives it weight to make it feel more like a magic spell with inherent power and in the world of Union Station, this shared belief grants it that power.
There are many similar tricks with writing that I can attest have worked for me. Routine provides its own sense of ritual. I do most of my writing in my office, it is where the magic happens, my brain has associated it with being a place of creation and therefore it has become such a location. Whenever I start a project I research it at length, this along with many books about writing make it feel like my office is a wizard’s laboratory with many arcane tomes lining the shelves. Generally I write at the same time of day in order to train my brain that these are these times that this spell is best cast, something like the witching hour. Toys and posters from stories that inspire me are all around my office like totems to be called upon.
Two rituals I’ve discovered over the years are National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and Writing Sprints.
National Novel Writing Month is what it sounds like: it is an attempt to write a novel in a month. Now for most of us that means a first draft of a novel, or even a very rough draft approaching a first draft of a novel, but some sort of draft. I’ve found that this can be a good means of creating a framework with which to fill in the details later. The ritual of writing an average of 1,500 words a day is helpful to work towards that goal. Having the support of other writers conducting the same ritual feels like the shared will of many casters working to the same end. The ritual has worked well for me in the past. All four of my published novels (The Whisperer in Dissonance, End Times at Ridgemont High, Four Corners, and Union Station) all had their early drafts forged in the National Novel Writing Month fires.
National Novel Writing Month is in November. I usually spend some or all of October doing preproduction for it. I gather my resources, research, and surround myself with the things that will inspire me specifically to work on that project. For every larger project I work on, I create a playlist of music that I think will help keep me focussed both tonally and also have enough up tempo songs to keep me from losing energy: creating something into existence with one’s will takes energy. Mostly I use October to make sure I will be ready for NaNoWriMo the start of November: I outline, I sketch out all the characters, and I make sure I know enough about my setting to be comfortable in it.
Writing Sprints are short bursts of activity, usually 30 minutes to an hour. I’d first started doing these from following Jane Espenson on the twitters. If you don’t follow her, and would like to write, I recommend following her and whenever possible joining in the sprints. It’s amazing how much one can accomplish in a focussed 30 minutes, sometimes as much as one manages in a less focussed eight hour day, and most people don’t have eight hours a day to work on stories. I think the magic of it is similar to NaNoWrMo in that there’s the sense of shared purpose: I don’t want to stop writing because I don’t want to let the team down and also there’s the feeling that were all focussing our wills at once to inspire creation.
These rituals and others are a useful tool to help confront the demon of doubt, that gnawing feeling that one can’t finish the story. There’s more to writing than belief of course, but particularly when approaching the early drafts, self doubt can be a killer, so I’m all for any means of conquering that doubt and producing a draft to work with.
