MADDIE DAWSON: I’ve always secretly liked the idea of magic. It’s because of my mother, who fancied herself something of a practitioner. She knew how to wish warts away, how to manifest parking spots merely by calling for them, how to find multiple four leaf clovers in any lawn within five minutes, and how to reason with inanimate objects like sewing machines. But perhaps her best magical skill of all was how to marry men with money. (Three of them, to be exact.)
I had none of those skills, particularly the one about marrying men with money. And when I had been married to my first husband for nearly ten years, I discovered that I wasn’t good at marrying men who wanted to be faithful either. My husband had fallen in love with someone else, a woman who declared that she was a witch.
I told my mother.
“WHAT?” she said. “Do not take this lying down. You have to fight witchcraft with magic!”
Magic, huh? So I went to the library and found a book called Positive Magic by Marion Weinstein. I learned about the Law of Attraction and the Law of Allowing, and pretty soon I was able to change stoplights to green, get perfect parking spaces—and after a while, in what was the biggest magic of all, I realized I didn’t want my husband back after all.
Six years later, a psychic told me that my life was just about to undergo a magical transformation—and on the same day, I had my first date with the man who became my second husband. We raised three kids, bought a house, took vacations in France. I started writing novels in earnest—which was what I’d always wanted to do.
And then, six novels in, years after my mother had passed away, I decided I wanted to write a novel that had some magic to it. This felt a little crazy, and I was embarrassed to tell my friends what I was working on. What if it was…stupid? Or what if I couldn’t tell it right? Who was I to write about magic when all I’d ever done was manifest a new husband I adored as well as some pretty good parking spots and green lights?
But if there is one thing I’ve learned over the years about writing novels, it’s this: when you put the intention out there in the world to write a certain novel, characters show up and start telling you the story. And if you’re smart, you don’t dare turn them away.
And sure enough, somebody named Blix came thundering into my inner life, a fictional eighty-five year old spitfire who lived in a Brooklyn brownstone and was full of kindness and love (as well as vim and vinegar) and who just happened to be dying of a cancerous tumor she had named Cassandra. She also had a book of spells and a lover named Houndy, and she loved nothing more than matchmaking and seeing where everybody needed to be in order to be happy. She wasn’t scared of dying, but she knew that her time was running out—so she wanted to find a successor to continue her work, and she just happened to have somebody in mind for the job, her grandnephew’s ex-wife.
I’d like to report that Blix made writing Matchmaking for Beginners a breeze, and that I did nothing but laugh and smile as she narrated her story and I typed it up. That would have been magic indeed. But nope. She was impossible most of the time. She fought me throughout the whole process, withholding information during the day and then waking me at 2 in the morning to insist I get right up and go type. (I did it, too.)
But then—well, after a few months, I felt something shift in me. Blix was bold, and I decided to be bold, too. I started expecting the story to unfold before me instead of worrying that it wouldn’t. I threw out the outline I had made, and I started to trust the process to lead the way. It was scary. So scary! I had a deadline, after all. And I didn’t know where I was going.
One of the magic principles my mother used to talk about the most was the Law of Relinquishment. She said that sometimes when you give up on something—really, really give up on it, no faking—it starts to work out. And Blix seemed to be telling me that that might be the best way to write this book, too.
As a piece of writing advice, it might seem a bit insane—but I really think it’s the best thing you can do with some books (and maybe some life situations, too): GIVE UP. Relinquish the need to control the outcome. Throw out your plan, and see what comes from the unseen world. Let the character tell YOU the story.And above all, if your character wakes you up in the middle of the night and wants to tell you about the guy who lives in her basement, get up and write it down. This, I learned, is where the story magic happens—when you’re willing to listen hard and feel your way to telling it the right way.
Oh, and when you make it all the way to writing those really magic words—THE END—characters love it when you say “thank you.”
Maddie Dawson is the author of seven novels, including her latest, Matchmaking for Beginners, which is a Washington Post and Amazon bestseller. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut, where she teaches writing workshops and writes novels on her screened porch next to a nest of robins whom she has been known to talk to. She probably needs to get out more.
