Paying Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain, or Ruining the Magic Trick for All the Right Reasons

My wife, Lisa, and I recently caught up on the final season of Lucifer (one of our favorite shows to stream) and when we got to the episode about the murder in the magic club, I felt personally called out. Called out, not because I'm a magician or even that I know any magic tricks save for one bad card trick and a few child-level "magic" gadgets for hiding coins in tiny plastic boxes. 

No, I felt called out because I have a tendency, nay, a calling to do exactly what Lucifer hated during the episode. Every time Chloe or any detective or magician's assistant started to explain the trick in order to provide clues for the detective and forensic teams, he would poke his fingers into his ears and la-la-la-la so he wouldn't discover the secret behind the trick. Ultimately, he desperately wanted to not lose the wonder of the magic. 

But that's exactly what I do here at this blog in regard to the magic of writing and reading. I've been told that all this talk about how writing works and the nuts and bolts of the mechanics of the art can destroy the sense of wonder when the art works like it's supposed to. 

Instead of letting the mystery of how Authors (with a capital A) create those wonderful worlds and characters and adventures settle and shakes its fairy dust all over the crowd, I actively dig in to see the clues behind the mysteries and the wires holding the fairies in the air and the hidden pocket all that fairy dust is coming from. Because, unlike stage magic, where few members of the audience have aspirations to be the magician, a relatively high percentage of readers do seek to become writers, and that percentage gets higher depending on the genre in question. Take comics for instance. Or Urban Fantasy. Or High Fantasy. Tucked away under readers' stacks of books and graphic novels, you're sure to find some scribbled (or even typed) pages of works in progress. It's the nature of the beast. 

I want to actively demystify the Author and help the "rest of us" become better writers. I want all the capital "A"s in all those bios all over the web to just disappear as if Thanos snapped his fingers and dusted all Authors into just plain writers. That's my goal. 

You see, I tend to observe it all through a different vantage point. I approach it in a far more Wizard of Oz way than a stage magician way. While the big scary head is shouting "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!", I'm desperately trying to sneak back there, like a deranged Toto, to see how it all works, to expose the secrets and make them my own.

However, I'm like that because I'm here for the writers. 

When I work on stories or general essays or what-have-you, my audience is the reader, and for those cases, my job is different. That's when I need to shake my fairy dust and inject magic and mystery into my work. I want above all for readers to feel the joy of finding "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" or to wonder if my vampire detective will find the killer before he stakes his sire. In those cases, I'm the man manipulating them from behind the curtain. 

But when I'm working on becoming a better writer, I need to know how the trick works, just how that woman gets rolled up into a poster, shot out of a cannon, and ultimately transformed into a tiger before being restored to sashay off stage with the magic gadget that did all that to her. (You think I'm exaggerating, but I saw that trick on TV as a kid and it really stuck with me.)

And I hope that you do too. As writers, we don't allow ourselves to see the magic fully anymore. Sure, we can observe, but much like a musician/songwriter at a rock and roll show, we start to break the songs down into verses and bridges and choruses, into octaves and chords and melodies. We can't help it. 

When we read, we take in details, sometimes without even realizing it. We pay attention to word choices, to characters, to symbols, to metaphors, to techniques. 

One the questions I always ask in my "Getting To Know You" interviews with other writers is this one -- "Where would you rank writing on the "Is it an art or it is a science continuum?" Why?"

To me, that's one of the most important questions I can ask a writer if I truly want to understand how they approach the craft (or the art, depending on their answer). One thing we all tend to agree on based on the responses I've received is that it's not really an either/or issue. Writing is something of a spectrum sliding between art and craft (and often back again). 

I've always felt that writing is a calling first. Something inside you gets the idea that yes, you can do that too. And you start putting words on paper. 

Then it becomes a craft. Practice and reading and hard work improve all those words you're writing. Your characters get deeper. Your settings become more real. Your dialog begins to fake a natural tone that fools your readers. Your writing becomes leaner and more direct. 

Then it becomes an art. All that stuff you learned about the craft seeps in through your skin into your soul and becomes second nature. You start to look into your work and find elements you perhaps weren't even aware of before. You find themes common to your stories. You find types who occupy your work and you learn what you as a person (not just a writer) think about them and why they follow you from story to story. 

Then you learn to actively work those "art things" into your work and "Bam!" -- suddenly you're thinking about it as a craft again. It's like leveling up in a legacy board game. You've got a bunch of new abilities/cards to work with and you have to practice them to get the hang of them. 

Eventually, even that art transforms into something called a "style." 

And style... well, that stuff is the real magic. But magic rarely just happens. It's a carefully orchestrated combination of skills and practice and learning and doing it all over again and again. So, to get there, you have to keep riding that sliding spectrum. 

A caveat -- to be fair, there are those rare creatures who emerge from the womb with a sense of style that transcends where they are in the craft. But to fair to your abilities and your writing career, assume that's not you. Because even they have to practice, and even they only discover later they were born savants in the art of writing. Not even they realize it at first. 

That's why it's so important to learn the nuts and bolts of the craft. Without the craft, you'll never realize the art. You'll never paint mysteries that help readers escape reality. As writers, we have an obligation to keep taking a peek behind the curtain and making sure we know that little man back there isn't fooling anyone with his delusions of wizardry. We're in on the joke with him, no matter how big and scary he makes that fiery head. 

And that's why I feel compelled to ruin the trick. I want to find where every hidden panel is. I want to know which way all the mirrors face and which are double-sided. I want to find the twin assistant already in the other cabinet ready to miraculously appear. Once I know those things well enough, I too can do the trick. And, more importantly, I can also take all those skills to create my own tricks. 

And that's when I can really, finally, genuinely share the magic with others who are looking for the wonder. 

If readers want to treat writers like Authors (again, that capital A), that's fine. But as writers, we can't fall into that trap or escape the truth we're still just that little man pulling levels and bellowing like a big deal wizard. And it is perfectly okay when others find that out. That means we can invite them into the club too.