That Old Creative Magic's Got Me Again by Martha Reed

In July, I celebrated the fifth anniversary of my retirement from a forty-year career in the corporate world. When they hear that, people ask me what I do now, or how do I fill my time? Do I play pickleball? No to that, but I can happily and honestly say that I’ve never been busier. The silver lining is that now I’m busy writing full-time, which was my lifetime end goal and the occupation I feel most fulfilled doing. Writing daily adds genuine joy to my day-to-day life.

When I retired, I made a deal with the universe. I promised that I would devote half of each day doing writerly things if the universe kept giving me amazing story ideas. As a side note, ‘writerly things’ includes marketing and promotion efforts, designing bookmarks, writing blog posts, updating my website https://www.reedmenow.com/, editing anthologies, judging contests, mentoring newbie authors, and attending workshops and conferences.

So far, this deal has worked out to the point that I know what my next two writing projects are. Right now they’re on a back burner bubbling away in my imagination while I put the final polish on The Seven Gates of Guinee, my NOLA Mystery No. 3, due to be released shortly. That timing is also a great thing about being indie/self-published. I don’t stress out over trying to meet a hard publishing deadline. This way, I feel like I have the time I need to make the new story the best it can be.

Having the luxury of this extra time also gives me the freedom to do deep research dives which uncover real-life details that I might otherwise have missed. While I do discover some story details through nothing less than hardcore research detective work, I’ve also experienced surprising reveals through what I can only call creative magic.

Here’s an example: My process, when I construct a new mystery, is to start by building a timeline. I’m sure this comes from my old corporate Project Manager days. Give me a legal pad and a calendar and I’ll start framing up my project or my next plot. (See how this fits?) Setting out my new dates, I started filling in the story suggestions and ideas. About three quarters of the way through the first draft of The Seven Gates of Guinee, I decided that I needed a tropical storm or even better, a threatening hurricane to stress out my characters and heighten the tension. Googling the real-time dates to see what had blown through the Gulf Coast in 2017, I discovered that Tropical Storm Cindy had come ashore and nailed New Orleans on the very date I had already set.

I swear I didn’t know that detail before I started writing about it. It’s magic.

I’ll admit that when the magical and creative connection happens I’ll sit hunched in my correctly ergonomic chair and giggle like a mad little gargoyle. I’ve come to believe that when the magic happens the universe is telling me to carry on writing in faith because my story – although raw, uncertain, and unfinished is on the right track and that more magic will be revealed.

In case this sounds too far-fetched, I brought creative magic up as a topic at the Bouchercon 2025 convention this month, handily enough being held in New Orleans. Surprisingly, two different author friends mentioned experiencing the same serendipity. Firstly, we confessed we were glad to hear it happened to other people, and that we weren’t insane. What a relief! And then they both mentioned reading Big Magic, a book on creative writing and creative living written by Elizabeth Gilbert. She’s the author of the Eat, Pray, Love bestseller. In Big Magic, she offers ‘potent insights into the mysterious nature of inspiration,’ and ‘discusses the attitudes, approaches, and habits we need in order to live our most creative lives.’

While I don’t agree with everything she covers, there’s enough parallel thought in her book and in the way I live to give me pause. I’m mentoring a newbie writer as part of a Sisters in Crime Mentoring Program. I would never mention this level of creative trust to her yet. I think it takes a seasoned and veteran writer to confess having this much trust in the creative process. But when I do run into one of these dearly grizzled friends, we can share our hidden secret that this magic sometimes does happen; that we feel creative joy when it does; and we don’t question the ‘How’ or the ‘Why.’ We just let it be.

In his excellent book On Writing, Stephen King writes (and I’m paraphrasing) that stories already exist in the universal unconscious like fossils, and that we writers only excavate them.

The more stories I write, and the deeper I explore the writing craft, the more I agree with him.

Have you encountered magical thinking with your writing efforts? How do you structure your writing life to support your creativity?