Magic Words
- Maggie Shayne
- 7 minutes ago
- 6 min read
With special guests Eileen Dreyer, Brenda Stanley, and Kari Lee Townsend
VIDEO EDITION
(Text edition below. Book & Author links in are there.)
TEXT EDITION
Get some coffee or tea, and a lovely snack and settle in for a chat with the ladies. Authors Brenda Stanley, Kari Lee Townsend, and Eileen Dreyer stopped by to offer their input on the topic of the day, magic and ritual ways we approach our writing.
Storytellers are magical people, I think. We make marks upon pages that cause other people to feel whatever we want them to feel. We can make them feel happy, or sad, or frightened, or aroused, all by the way we arrange letters on a page.
So it's not surprising to learn that some storytellers also use magical rituals, habits, or charms in their work. Doing the same thing the same way, every time, is a ritual, and over time, rituals gain power just by our repetition of them. It's kind of a mutual charging exchange, I guess.
I have this set of eighteen old, old keys. They belonged to my husband's grandfather, and I have no idea why he gave them to me, but he did. He had them all on a string, but I found a big round key ring, like the kind that held the jail cell key in all the old westerns and put them on that.
I keep these keys near me all the time. They hang on a chain in the window nearest me when I'm writing, or sometimes I clip the ring to a belt loop in my jeans and wear them around the house. I hold the keys, and fondle them like fidget spinners when I pause in my writing. It's like I'm rubbing the ideas out of them. Sometimes I sleep with them under my pillow.
Each key unlocks a thousand stories, maybe more. They're filled with stories. People held these keys in their hands, carried them around through their lives. They unlocked doors or strongboxes or cabinets or desks or secret rooms. For me, they unlock stories.
I'm so into my keys that I decided to ask some of my storytelling pals what magical, woo-woo sorts of writing habits and rituals they have around their writing.
My first reply came from NY Times bestseller Eileen Dreyer, author of JUST ONE KISS releasing in two weeks on February 24th. She said...
________
My magic is the fact that it took me years to trust my subconscious. I call it the ooze. A character will walk onto the page and I finally know to leave her there until she explains herself. If I have a problem, I shove it into the ooze and let it marinate and then suddenly days later the answer pops back up.
It's like my current release, Just One Kiss. My heroine shows up at the hero's house to ask him to release a friend from their engagement and suddenly there are two little girls, one of which she has to save from falling from some shelves she's climbed. Had no idea who they were. Set it aside for a few days. Came back to realize that they were the daughters of the hero's cousin, who he inherited along with his new title.
From that moment, they blossomed into two of my favorite characters, and he gained unexpected depth in his dealings with them.
Trust the ooze. It never fails.
I also LOVE when a new character shows up and I have to wait to figure out who they are, Eileen. That's how it was with the guy in the sombrero who kept showing up in The Texas Brand: Generations series. He turned out to be an important character.
This is one of the things that make me feel as if story flows through me, rather than from me. But that's probably a whole other type of post.
Also, I love that you call your stuff the ooze! I call mine the stuff.
Next I heard from National Bestselling Author Kari Lee Townsend of THE WELL-LAID TRAP, in which Lyra Wells must untangle a slow-burn mystery of loyalty, magic, and desire—before she becomes the final piece in someone else’s design.
Kari sent us a video included in the video edition of this post above.
Here's a transcript:
Hi, guys. My name is Kari Lee Townsend.
The series I've been working on is my Wishville cozy mystery series. And my friend Magige Shayne asked, are there any rituals or things that we do as authors when it comes comes writing and it made me remember that sometimes when I get stuck, I read the last chapter that I've written, and I put a notebook right next to my bed. I end up having the craziest dreams and I usually wake up with something really cool to add to the story!
There are probably other things that I do, but for now, that comes to the top of my head.
What do you do?
THE WELL-LAID TRAP and its prequel, THE WELL-KEPT SECRET are on sale now!
I love your process, Kari, and now I'm going to try it. I almost always start my writing day by re-reading what I wrote the day before, but now, I'll do that before bed, to prompt my subsconscious crew to send up some juicy stuff!
I next reached out to Brenda Stanley, author of IT HAPPENED IN THE HOLLOW, an evocative, atmospheric YA paranormal mystery about two boys, one living, one dead, who must solve the mystery of what happened to one, before it happens to the other. (Shivers!)
I nutshelled that from the blurb. I'm sold.
Brends sent a video, too. It's included in the video version of this post, above.
Here's a transcript:
Hi, I'm Brenda Stanley. Some of the things I do to get ready to write are simple but they seem to work for me and they're things that I've done for years.
First, I light a candle. It just seems to set the mood.
Second, I always have a cup of tea.
And third is that I turn off my cell phone and literally set it outside the room so I won't have the temptation to just pick it up.
Those are just some of the things I do to set the mood. Good luck with your writing!
It Happened in the Hollow is available now!
You have the willpower to set the phone in another room, Brenda? OMG, that's amazing. How zen would that feel? I need to start doing this, or at least silencing it and turning off vibrate, because that shit's not silent.
I'm not surprised so many of us have rituals, or even just repetitive ways of doing things before we begin our daily pages.
I like a nice hot cup of coffee, freshly poured. I have to drink decaf, but I drink it like a caffeine addict. I like some background noise that won't distract me, nothing important because I won't hear most of it. Once I sink into the story, my external senses shut down, and my internal eyes and ears and nose and mouth and hands activate instead. I think these are the same senses we we use during dreams. You know how we see and hear and so on in our dreams, but not with our physical eyes or ears. It's like that, I think.
I like to be warm and comfortable. And I like to have at least an hour of uninterrupted time stretching out ahead of me.
And I like to have my keys nearby. When I pause to think, my fingers move through them, and their soft jingle shakes loose sparks in my mind.
And if I'm working on a vampire novel, Rhiannon is always at my side, in her physical form (a doll) which to me is kind of like Nadja's "Dolly" in What We Do in the Shadows. (If you have not seen What We Do in the Shadows, drop everything and look it up immediately.)
Sometimes I burn a little incense and invite my muse in. Sometimes I have a statue of Ganesha on my desk, watching over me as I write. I also have the collected, translated works of the first author ever to put her name on her work. Yes, her. She was the Sumerian priestess of Inanna called En Heduanna.
I don't think there's anything more magical than storytelling. Creating a universe and filling it with characters and places and events is magical. If I cry when I write it and then later, maybe years later, somewhere far away, a reader cries as they read those very words I wept upon writing––how is that anything but magic? I have transmitted my emotions to her across time and space, by way of lines on a page or screen.
What could be more magical than that?
I hope you enjoyed this post. I love having other authors in to visit, don't you?
See you next time!
Next Week:
We'll talk about the greatest villain I ever created, Mordecai Young, from the romantic thriller series, DANGER AFTER DAWN.