Know Jack #495 Legerdemain

A display of skill or adroitness, sleight of hand, that’s what Mr. Webster says the word means. In magic, it is the art or skill of performing tricks or illusions for entertainment. So, being a fiction writer means you have to be somewhat of a magician.

Many magicians prefer the term illusionist and that may be a better term for a writer. The job of a fiction writer is to create an illusionary world that engages the senses of the reader without overexplaining. He then fills that world with believable characters. But beware, the illusionist only lets the audience see what he wants them to see. There’s a lot more going on out of sight.

Multiple rewrites, edits, and revisions are the writer’s practices that make the illusion come off as it should. There are characters waking the writer up at all hours and telling him how the story is supposed to go. St. Peter once healed a crippled man with the words “such as I have, give I thee”. The writer can’t give readers what they don’t have. All that research and reworking give the writer the experience of living in his world, and that's what makes it “real”.

Convince the reader that what you’re showing him is real. Make it a world with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures the reader knows. Then, out of his sight, add a dash of fiction. It’s a bit of sleight of hand, slipping a needle of fantasy among a haystack of truth.

However, the believable sensory world a writer creates is only smoke and mirrors that he uses to take the reader where the real story lies. Legerdemain entertains, and that’s where the similarity ends. The true goal of writing fiction is to write a story that touches the soul of the reader.