Sometimes the Magic Works Read Free Page B

world and whatever world they are writing about at the same time. They go back and forth between the two at the drop of a hat. What happens in the first suggests what might happen in the second. Daydreaming takes on an entirely new meaning. I am particularly bad about this. I can go away from a conversation in an instant, leaving this world for the one in which I am working, lost in an idea or a plot development. It happens at parties. It happens in the middle of conversations. I don’t have any control over it, and I am not sure I want to. I think it is the source of my creativity, and I don’t want to disrupt the process.
    It may be that writers are actually happier living in their books than they are in the real world. There is evidence of this in the way writers immerse themselves in their fiction. How many times have you heard it said about someone that they are happiest at their work? Writers are like that, whether they admit it or not. But while most jobs fall into the nine-to-five category, fiction writing is a twenty-four-hour-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don’t take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.
    Whatever the behavioral propensities of writers and regardless of the prerequisite of a proper genetic makeup, they still have to find their way to their craft. I suspect that there are as many ways of this happening as there are stories of being published. Since I cannot speak for other writers in this matter, except to the extent that their experiences are the same as mine, I shall stick to what brought me into the fold.
    I submit that it has mostly to do with how I grew up. But you must judge for yourselves.
    I was born in a small midwestern town in the mid-1940s. Sterling, Illinois, had a population of about fifteen thousand and was situated directly across the Rock River from the city of Rock Falls with a population of about ten thousand. They were essentially steel towns settled in the middle of farm country about a hundred miles west of Chicago. My father, back from the war, worked at a small printing company where he was the junior partner. My mother was a housewife. They weren’t Ozzie and Harriet, but they weren’t all that different either.
    Because my growing up took place during the late 1940s and early 1950s, my life was different from that of today’s kids. I know. Duh. But I mean
really
different. Allow me to illustrate. There weren’t any computers or video games. There weren’t any videos. There weren’t tape players or CDs. Television was a luxury. There wasn’t a television in my house until I was six, and even then it didn’t offer much programming for kids; Saturday mornings and after-school serials were about it. There were movie matinees every Saturday afternoon, but nothing midweek or at night. Mostly, there was radio, comics, and books.
    I can see it in your eyes.
How old is he?
    There wasn’t a lot in the way of kids’ toys either, so even if you had the money, which most of us didn’t, there wasn’t much to choose from in any case. There was very little toy merchandising connected with television or movies. No one had tapped into that gold mine yet, and the world probably wasn’t ready for it anyway.
    Mostly, kids were expected to entertain themselves and stay out of their parents’ hair. To that end, you were sent outside to play at the drop of a hat. It wasn’t an option; it was a standing mandate. If there wasn’t a winter blizzard or a spring rainstorm or a summer heat wave, you went outside and stayed outside until the next mealtime came around.
    The neighborhood I grew up in was my designated playground. My boundaries were carefully laid out—west to Avenue J, east to Avenue G, south to 12th Street, and north to the