Magic

I am not a Harry Potter fan. I tried—I read the first book, I’ve seen many of the movies. I gave it every chance I could. It’s not even that I dislike it, really. It was just...never my thing. And when I announced such a confession on Kilimanjaro Safaris in Animal Kingdom, the woman in front of me whipped around so fast that I thought she was going to throw me straight into the lion pit. Forgive me, book community, for I have sinned.

But despite what any Buzzfeed article may lead you to believe, not every avid reader was born a Potterhead. While Harry Potter may have been the gateway to the Magical World of Reading™ for many people, for me, that gateway was the Baby-sitters Little Sister series by Ann M. Martin. I’m not sure why. All I know is my mom gave little seven-year-old me secondhand books from a garage sale, and next thing I knew, I was getting my first library card and powering through six books a week like I was getting paid.

Reading is more than a source of distraction; it’s experience-sharing, an “act of empathy,” as John Green puts it: “an imagining of what it’s like to be someone else.” I read for the opportunity to discover new places and new people, to see new worlds through new perspectives. As I started venturing into telling my own stories, I became fascinated by the mechanics of it all—the narrative, the structure, the very words themselves. For me, it was never just about reading at all, but about the magic of storytelling itself.

I wholeheartedly believe that books are magic—or at least, the closest to thing we have. Let's break it down. All books are a collection of lines marked on slices of dead tree, bound together with glue. They’re all made the same, they all look the same. But those lines form letters, and words, and sentences, and paragraphs, all arranged in such a way that anyone who understands the language can share an understanding of the text.

Intertextuality is the relationship between texts, the way the content of one book interacts with the content of another. Language forms the basis of intertextuality, a common thread of what would otherwise be an unfamiliar collection of symbols. When the alphabet is rearranged in a careful, deliberate way, it can transport a reader somewhere beyond reality. That’s beyond just art or linguistics. That is straight up magic.

Go to your nearest bookshelf and grab two books. Read or unread, long or short, it doesn’t matter. Open one to any page and start reading. Now open the other and do the same. You can jump between them, one page at a time, and travel across continents and universes to find yourself surrounded by completely new people, without ever leaving your couch. It’s like a movie in your head. If that ain’t magic, I don’t know what is.

Books contain whole other worlds. By learning the art of writing, I was learning to transport people beyond the ink printed on the page to a place that is as real as it is fictional. The point of fiction is to make things up, yes, but to do so in a way that speaks to readers on a deeper level, in a special way.  Anyone who has ever gotten lost in a good book knows how magical stories can be. By learning the art of writing, I was learning how to make magic. 

There will never be anything more thrilling to me than flipping through an old journal. Looking at pages and pages filled with my thoughts and my words and my ideas fills me with a sense of unending pride and glee. Even if it’s all awful, every word, they are entirely mine, made by me alone. And isn’t that magical—the fact that I took a blank page and made it mean something, if only for a little while?

Some people needed that belief that a letter would arrive on their doorstep, or that a magic wand would select them out of so many others as worthy of its companionship. But I never needed a boy wizard to show me that magic exists. I suspect I never needed a Baby-sitters Little Sister, either. Discovering the magic of words and falling in love with it was inevitable. 

And now, I can make all the magic I could ever need.

Until later,

- Justyne