Writing is Magic: Why We Should All Follow Our Literary Dreams

I was reading one of Jules Verne’s novels when I first experienced the magic of writing. The heroes had just crashed their balloon in the desert. The heat was relentless. They had run out of food days ago and the last drops of water had been gulped down in the morning. My mouth was dry. Suddenly, through the hot, shimmering air, I heard my grandma’s voice calling me to dinner.

Dinner? We have food? There’s water?

It gradually became clear that my late grandfather’s bookshelves held portals. Some of them led to places that were forbidding, almost aggressively inscrutable, while others were easy enough to read but left an eight-year-old feeling that some funny business was going on behind her back. There were Verne’s balloon and submarine expeditions. It was hit and miss, but overall those bookshelves were like the world itself, stretchy enough to accommodate, across decades, both a middle-aged lawyer and his elementary-school granddaughter.

I was about to discover that the magic didn’t end there. Irving Stone’s Michelangelo novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, introduced me to the idea of the artist, the miracle of a person bringing something wholly new and surprising into the world. To a child, this seemed like a conjuring feat. It subverted the way people were defined, how they were spoken of: no, we are not our job, we are not our possessions. We most certainly aren’t our school grades. We are this other magical thing, this creative potential. From coal into diamond, that’s how I perceived it. I remember walking around in a daze after finishing the novel, and feeling exasperated with my grandma for wasting her infinite potential on cooking and washing up.

No, we are not our job, we are not our possessions. We most certainly aren’t our school grades. We are this other magical thing, this creative potential.

My family eventually emigrated to Sweden, and literary success followed. I was eleven years old and bullied at school for having curly hair. The initial remedy of wearing a headband to flatten the curls did little to ease the bullying and much to earn me the nickname “Björn Borg.” But one Friday afternoon, during our weekly recreational class, the teacher asked me to read out the first chapter of the “novel” I had been writing. Suddenly, the same kids who had been teasing me were instead begging for the next chapter. For months on end, the kids in my class chose to spend Friday afternoons listening to a story instead of playing games or watching films. This didn’t help with the already inflated view I had of the business of writing. I felt I had achieved sorcery, that I had tamed wild beasts. Writing was now demonstrably magic. Of course, I owed this success to my old love Jules, and I mean this in the copyright sense: ‘my’ novel featured a journey into a volcano, and an intriguing main character whose passport, had anyone bothered to check, said Captain Nemo.

It was around that time I got so fed up with switching languages from one book to the next that I decided to read only in English. The idea was that wherever in the world we might move, there would always be English books. My problem was that everything up to now had happened in different languages: I was born in Transylvania, a region with a significant Saxon minority, and got sent to German-language kindergarten and primary school. Textbooks were in German, classmates spoke a Saxon dialect, while my grandfather’s novels were in Romanian. My father was Yemeni (we spent the better part of a year in Sana’a) and he kept making doomed attempts at teaching me Arabic. Finally, we emigrated so I could be bullied for my bizarre hair in Swedish. In my mind it was settled: one language good, many languages bad. I would learn one more, the one to safeguard my reading from any future migrations.

The decision to read only English would have been meaningless in most other places, we couldn’t afford to straighten my hair, let alone buy foreign-language books. But in Sweden the public library system is excellent, and there were yards of shelf space of English literature even in our small town. It was also possible to request books from other public libraries. So, throughout my teens, I read books in my adopted language, and it was only natural that at some point during the last year of high-school, I sat my mom and grandma on the sofa and announced that I would go on to study literature. I had no idea what I was doing. Through tears, my mom sobbed that she had left two countries and a hopeless husband so her children wouldn’t starve, and now I had perversely chosen to do just that. Grandma, irrelevantly but convincingly, spoke of wars, blizzards and trekking barefoot to school. They both wondered aloud how they could have failed so miserably. I went into that room an aspiring writer and left it some kind of accountant.

I didn’t enjoy economics. In fact, I thought so little of the profession that for years I imagined it was possible to walk like a duck and quack like a duck, but somehow still be a writer. I thought that if I kept reading and writing in my spare time it would be enough, that I didn’t need like-minded people around me. Even the childhood decision of embracing English to the exclusion of other languages meant that not only was I in the wrong profession now, but also in the wrong language. The turning point came when I made a wistfully lame comment to a friend, something along the lines of “in a different life I would have been a writer,” and got the blunt reply, “Everyone is what they are and nothing else.” It shocked me because it was true: nothing stood between me and being a writer except my choices. It was silly to say that I could have, would have, and so on, since I very obviously could have and didn’t. A duck is a duck.

London, then. That’s where I would find my people. This was such a blindingly obvious answer that I got on a plane there without a job, place to stay, or contacts save for a nice lady I had met a few years earlier on a train. I had enough savings to last me a month in a cheap hotel. But it worked out: my new friend found me an apartment that was let for an almost nominal amount, and that economics degree got me a freelance job that paid the modest bills and left plenty of time to write. For several years I was incredibly lucky to be poor in the big city but not actually live in poverty. There were free creative writing classes at the local library, and eventually I could afford City Lit courses, where I met my writing group friends and finally felt at home among peers. I wrote manically and badly and without any sign of ever getting anywhere. Somehow, this proved to be the exact recipe for happiness.

What I would tell a child stuck with her nose in books is that the creative impulse is not just an activity. That if she persists, writing won’t be a thing she sometimes does, but will become the driver and backdrop to everything else.

If aspiring writers are always a little ridiculous, immigrant aspiring writers are full-fledged comedy acts. One of the side effects of learning a language from books is that your pronunciation is speculative. Spoken English is not kind: “tomb,” it turns out, is not pronounced like “bomb.” My English cultural literacy is not that of a curriculum, or even that of growing up in an educated household, it’s much more scattergun, and people are as surprised by what I have read as by what I haven’t. Astronaut!, which I started writing at the time, is set in an Iron-Curtain world that today feels alien even at the level of daily human interactions. Mercifully, London was full of people who didn’t think any of this disqualifies a person from being a writer in English.

After seven London years I was so confident that my writerness was set in stone that I moved country again, this time to a Greek island. In a moment of cognitive impairment, my sister and I decided to buy an old house with money we didn’t have and turn it into a business we didn’t know anything about. The plan was to have more time to write, but early 2020 found me near the end of a nerve-racking, preposterously difficult restoration, grandchildren-deep in debt, and with a small hotel on an island no one had heard of. My sister kept asking, “Was this a good idea? Did we make a terrible mistake?” and I kept answering: “We just need to finish it. Short of some global disaster thing, we’ll be fine.” A disaster thingy, as you know, did happen, and we were quite spectacularly not fine. For that, too, I blame my grandfather’s books and the childhood insight of humans as essentially bundles of creative potential. It had turned me into some kind of Wile E. Coyote, safe in the Technicolor belief that no boulder, never mind the boulder of bankruptcy, could ever hurt my inner Michelangelo.

In the event, we only survived because an international newspaper ran an article about our Greek island adventure, and the comedy of our cascading failures under the Aegean sun somehow struck a chord. Thanks to words on paper, to a story, we would live to face the next boulder. So, what I would tell a child stuck with her nose in books is that the creative impulse is not just an activity. That if she persists, writing won’t be a thing she sometimes does, but will become the driver and backdrop to everything else, migrations, jobs, friendships. That her mom and grandma are half-right: writing will both doom and save her, and not necessarily in that order. I would warn her that a writer runs the risk of mistaking the world as subordinate to her imagination, and that some of us are prone to very much enjoying the delusion. I would spell out, in more grown-up terms, what the eight-year-old already suspects: writing really is magic.

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Astronaut! by Oana Aristide is available from W.W. Norton & Company.