What is it that draws us to writing, and especially to writing fiction? While the answer is unique to each writer, for me it is creating that magic that so enthralled me as a reader. Reading allowed me to escape from the dull and sometimes painful experiences of childhood and to enter worlds that were somehow better. Reading was the magic that swept me away and made everything tolerable, and even more, allowed me to find hope and meaning in life. Then came the day when I picked up a pen and put my first tentative words down and started to create my own stories and find my own meaning. I suspect that all fiction writers start as enthralled readers who long to create the magic they once felt. So what then is this mystery, this magic that the fiction writer weaves? Gloria Goldreich explains it in this way…

“The mystery of creative success lies in the writer’s ability to capture and preserve the quality of a given moment in time. The success of a novel or story depends on its intensity, on its ability to re-create an ambience and a sense of emotional contact that make the reader and writer one. Empathy and identification, these qualities that involve the reader with fictional protagonists, rely on the chimeric web of words the writer spins, a web that will, strand by strand, engage the mind and the heart so that pages will be turned and fictional men and women and vanished times will achieve lives of their own. There is no given technique for the creation of mood and emotional identification. Each story rises from its own whirlpool of feeling and memory; it’s the writer’s job to sort the currents and direct them to the steady stream from which each separate story flows.”
~Gloria Goldreich, The Writer, April 1979

And that is why I write, why many of us write, whether published or not. We write to make sense of the world and to create something real and meaningful, whether it is literary fiction, science fiction, mystery, or any other genre. We write to create anew the magic we once felt – and when we do it right and the writing gets across just what we intended, there is no better feeling in the world.

Let go and write.

Originally published on Charge of the Write Brigade, May, 2009