Citing Queen and the wonderful Freddy Mercury is always a good idea, though their song “A Kind of Magic” does not really refer to what I have in mind. Written by drummer Roger Taylor for the film Highlander in 1986, this song speaks of transcending time as the immortals in the movie’s fable do. However, the lines “The bell that rings inside your mind / Is challenging the doors of time / (It’s a kind of magic)” might be helpful for my purpose. This is exploring (again) the reluctance of fiction authors to discuss imagination, or what I prefer to call fabulation: the ability to think of a basic plot line and develop it by following trains of thought and ideation that are so far unknown by any of the current sciences.

I’m back in touch with the first-rank author who very kindly told me that “I don’t get it” nor do my academic peers (see my post of 1 December), now facing the challenge of approaching another of his novels (his own choice) from a less reductive ideological perspective. This novel has a group of character reincarnate in different periods of human history following Buddhist tenets of great importance for the author, of which I have been warned. He insisted to me once again that while literary work may express the political unconscious as Fredric Jameson famously argued, this is not what writing feels like for writers. I do know that but, as I have explained here, the problem is that no author wants to discuss what it feels like to write fiction, or not in much depth.

This week I’ve seen another example of the same reluctance. Glaswegian writer and musician Neil Williamson (‪@neilwilliamson.bsky.social‬) posted on Bluesky “There’s a thing with breaking ground on a new novel. You can only plan (or not) so much. You’ve got an idea of what it’s going to be like, but you never really know until the world and characters come alive when you write that first chapter.” Ready to be refuted again, I replied: “As a teacher/researcher of Literature I remain mystified by how little we know about the process of writing fiction. Most writers report similar experiences of going along with characters’ demands and changing the plot if required, but no literary scholar has truly explained how this works, have we?” To which Williamson most politely counter-replied “We have not, and (I realise this is no help to educators, sorry!) I kinda love that. It feels like magic when you do it, and I’m a fan of not trying to explain magic. Can we settle on ‘just vibe it’? :D.” I gave his post a like and moved on (I mean, I still follow Williamson, of course, but will not pester him like this again).

I don’t write fiction but I do write books, and I have some experience of magic. In the case of scholarly work of the kind I write, magic happens when all the pieces fit together and for some miraculous reason all the quotations I have painfully selected work well. I assume that every literary scholar has gone through the process of planning a paper, article, chapter or book, writing an abstract and then deviating from said abstract in the process of writing, sometimes significantly. You may begin with an idea but, then, as you test it, this idea might not work, or lead you in an opposite direction. There have been many moments when I have written something (also in this blog!) and I had no clue where the idea came from. In fact, what I most enjoy about writing is that process of surprising myself and visiting corners of my brain I didn’t know had something to express. Magic!

The question is that I have never ever in my life spoken to any of my scholarly peers about how we write, where ideas come from, how we know that the structure of our works is right and so on. This is quite peculiar considering that we are constantly subjected to peer reviewing, often by persons who seem to know better than us how we should have written our work and implicitly hint they would have done a better job of it. I myself make a living off teaching students how to write academic prose without fully understanding how they learn. I was marking today reviews written by my fourth-year students, the first ones they ever write, and reading some of the best I wondered how they had managed to acquire the necessary skills so well. It’s not my merit but something in their brains that has clicked and now allows them to produce reviews. Magic!

Because this is what my brain and the brains of my students do, I think that putting ideas together in essays makes perfect rational sense. As I age, however, I’m getting a bit paranoid about the claims that fiction writers constantly make about how they put stories together. In one of his letters J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that his legendarium had been on his mind long before he had started writing the stories; when he did, he explained in one of his letters, “always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’.” We tend to overlook that kind of declaration as a flight of fancy, with writers typically being irrational about their task, invoking ‘magic.’ I am reminded of those posts in which parents report spooky domestic scenes when their children speak to imaginary friends or claim to see what can only be ghosts or spirits. Apparently the children grow out of that phase soon, but the reports are so many and so consistent that perhaps we should look into them. Likewise with authors.

In the case of fiction writers, we take their many declarations that characters have a personality of their own, or that plots take unexpected twists without their control, as a sort of natural eccentricity that goes with the craft. I must be perhaps a little crazy myself but I don’t think that’s quite normal. Hearing voices, the British Mental Health Foundation informs, “can be a symptom of some mental health problems” though “not everyone who hears voices has a mental illness. Hearing voices is actually quite a common experience: around one in ten of us will experience it at some point in our lives.” Fair enough. I’ve never heard voices, but I sure talk to myself a lot. It turns out, and this is another surprising finding, that people with a constant internal monologue might be a minority of 30-50% according to some reports, which, incidentally, makes the classic Modernist novel based on stream of consciousness a very odd exercise. My point is that whereas fiction writers do hear voices (those of their characters) and can even invent internal monologue for imaginary people, we take that for granted. Am I saying their literary creativity is some form of mental disorder? Noooo!!!! What I am saying is that it is a mental singularity (a form of neurodiversity?) and, as such, worth exploring.

I am not asking for neurologists to read writers’ brainwaves instead of their books, which sounds nightmarish in an Elon Musk kind of way, but speculating on what could be found if authors were open to exploring ‘the magic’. It is obvious that they don’t want to take that road for fear that the possible findings might spoil their mysterious abilities, and this is something to be respected. I just suppose that if we asked engineers to explore what happens in their brain when they have a new idea, most would go along in the hopes of further stimulating their neurones. Writers interfere indeed with their brains using coffee, alcohol and a variety of drugs (remember Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception?), but one thing is testing substances and another becoming the subject of lab tests. Of course!

In my wildest moments, I strongly suspect that fiction comes from the multiverse. If you Google “characters and multiverse” you will get all kinds of information about “shared universes”, whether they appear in the works of one or more authors. Just to give an example, other novelists apart from Ian Fleming have written about James Bond. You will also get tons of comments on the multiverse now overwhelmingly present in superhero stories, from comics to movies. And, of course, you get Jungian disquisitions on how the sum total of all the fictions ever written constitutes a universe different from mundane reality. But, no, that’s not what I mean. Imagine for a second that actually when writers fabulate characters and plots they are tapping into another universe, with each writer owning a strand. Or perhaps each writer owns an imaginative universe, which is part of the multiverse (in another universe our mundane reality is fictional). I’ve possibly got this mad idea directly from Jung, though I seem to recall Grant Morrison commenting on something similar.

No, I have not lost my sanity (yet!) and I’m not trying to establish the multiverse as the real source of fiction. There is no way I could manage this within a rational framework, though some literary theories feel to me whackier (to name one, the application of Lacanian psychoanalysis…). Being a fan of science fiction rather than fantasy, I’m asking whether ‘magic’ can be approached from a more scientific angle. If the question is what are we to gain, and whether we have all to lose, I have no clear reply. Would the mystery of how Emily Brontë could write Wuthering Heights diminish if we discover her brain was wired differently? Would we still feel her magic? I’m watching a football match on TV as I write (Barça against Madrid) and it occurs to me we don’t know either why some bodies perform so well at sports and do ‘magic’. But it’s only human nature to be curious.

More… as soon as I can.