Nobody writes about dragons. Dragons are a mythological concept, probably derived from our ancestors finding dinosaur bones and inventing explanations. There is no actual quantifiable definition of a dragon. It is fiction. So no one who writes about them is writing about dragons. They’re just like the rest of us. We’re all writing about ourselves. Greed. Selfishness. The amassing of great hoards of equity, virgins and gold, that we can never access. The value of both can only be measured in the instant either one is handed over. Gone. Changed forever.

Nobody writes about witches and wizards and jumbled Latin roots and millennial blurred line friendship turned love stories. They’re writing confessionals. Just like me. Just like the greats, who filled the canon with black ink powder and wounded us for generations into the future. Injuries for which there is no suture. We pray for clean burns and exit wounds. We are writing about the nature of art, the nature of nature, putting down our part. A wand is a stick. But a pen, now that is a funnel for power. Killing spells, renewal curses, habitual rituals like brushing our teeth or setting up the coffee. There is no such thing as magic. The greatest witches and wizards of our time will tell you. There are human beings behind all of this holding strings. Hiding the miracle of reality behind a barrage of earthly, domestic expectations.

Goblins, and elves, and demons and sorcerers. We suffer under such a deficit of imagination in our time. No one alive invented these things. These ideas. Creative, moldy leftover remains of our giant, untraceable, easily arguable collective unconscious. Our universe’s big memory. Like an ocean. Comprised of all these droplets of our individual memories. If you could journey back thousands of years, the people who first wrote about them were not inventing, or being creative, or imaginative. These writers would tell you they were translators. Observers. Watchers. The fiction was so good, because no where in their minds was it fiction.

Nobody is living anymore. Nobody imagines if there were no word for tree. How many sounds would you throw to the ground to see which one sticks to rocks. We are so wrapped up inside of our own culture, it’s stagnate. The most imaginative, our very most creative, are interpreting nothing. They’re regurgitating primeval themes and re-branding the myths and fantasies of medieval minds.

One should not trust the metric of consumption as reflective of success. I’ve seen people, and animals, eat some terrible things with smiles on their faces because there was only ever a menu of terrible things. Sometimes you don’t even see how clouded the glass is, until there is clean water on the table. A powerful, moving, world changing novel, that isn’t based on a children’s fable. But reality. Capital T Truth.

I like it when heroes have to wash their hands. Or sit with a child, trying to keep it from crying. Or sewing holes in crotch of their long underwear. For me, magic cheapens, tarnishes, makes a farce of all these actions. The presence of one real, undeniable, wand waving miracle in this world darkens and dampens and disrespects every experience untouched by such formal grace. My answered prayer shines a burning spotlight onto the unanswered prayers of thousands of others who honest to goodness probably need it more than me. Magical abilities would produce more overweight wizards than it ever would heroes.

Not even if we believe, if we’re even just mildly curious if this world is the creation of some untouchable, unknowable intention, if it is all on purpose, then why are we trying to escape it so desperately?

Why can’t wizards be true, and goblins for next door neighbors. The school you go to, teaching physics, literature, expression, the mathematics of how all existence comes together and falls apart, an ancient purveyor of our most modest witchcraft. Ingenuity. Invention. Imagination.

We are translators, first and foremost.
All great writers read.
Just not always books exclusively.

Nobody is inventing worlds so that we can get out of having to live in this one.
In my experience, it has been the exact opposite. They’re not telling us how it is,
but how it feels. They’re giving their confession. I can’t speak for all writers.

But most often, I write for the simple sake of it helps me to feel less alone,
whenever I help someone else feel less alone. That is my magic. A sort of miracle.

I found it at the heart of every piece of fiction I’ve ever read. No matter how extravagant. How imaginative. How other-worldly. Like all good writing. All good confessions.

I found myself looking into a mirror.

In the middle of a five army battlefield or banquet dinner or an old growth forest walking in circles. I did not feel transported. But rooted. A mouse with a sword and a shield taking on a world of sea rats and foxes triple my size and carving out a good name for myself.

Overcoming limitations. We even fantasize about our limitations. We don’t enjoy the strength without the struggle. And magic and miracles are always demonstrated with elements of suffering, humility and base need. Same as reality. There is no escaping it.

But you can always wake up in it.
There is no franchise that holds the patent on magic.

All good fiction is a pursuit of truth.

And I’m saying, I’m telling you, if you can stop glossing over it, reality is full of magic and miracles. It is the source and inspiration for literally anything and everything you have ever read.