I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change peoples consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman.
There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic.
To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.
The one thing with writing stories about the rise of fascism is that if you wait long enough, you'll almost certainly be proved right. Fascism is like a hydra - you can cut off its head in the Germany of the '30s and '40s, but it'll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise.
Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do.
Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate.
You've got to be able to pay your bills, otherwise you're not going to sleep at night. But beyond that, the world inside my head has always been a far richer place than the world outside it. I suppose that a lot of my art and writing are meant to bring the two together.
In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.
If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.
There is no substitute for practical experience, and if you want to write about people you ought to put down that comic book and go out and meet some of them rather than studying the way that Stan Lee or Chris Claremont depict people.
I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.
I don't think there's really any difference between art - or writing, or music - and magic. And I particularly draw the link between magic and writing. I think that they are profoundly connected.
I don't really have any great interest in writing for movies. Comics, to me, is a much more promising field. There's still a lot of ground to be broken in comics, whereas movies, to a degree... I don't know. They're a wonderful art form, but they're not my favorite art form. They might not even be in the top five of my favorite art forms.
Way back in the day, when I first started and had delusions of adequacy as a cartoonist, I would listen to music. When I switched to a career as a writer, I would try to listen to music, but if the songs had lyrics they would get in the way of the words I was trying to write. So I switched to listening to purely instrumental pieces.
On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.
