Sunday, December 28, 2014

Creative Magic

(An article from the recent Night Clinic blog tour)          

God carried out the act of creation by his spoken word. The heavens and Earth and everything else came into being by the power of his voice. Humans are far more limited in their acts of creation. From the depths of the brain ideas emerge, grow into a concept and then pass to our hands to be shaped into the objects we take for granted every day. Each new thing is an act of creation. The pinnacle of human creation is art. G. K. Chesterton said it was art which separates humanity from all the other beasts of the world.
The act of writing is one of the artistic forms of creation. A germ of an idea in the depths of the mind sprouts and, magically, grows to be nurtured and polished into a story.
Thus, this magic of creation which began within the depths of my imagination became “Night Clinic,” a collection of short stories unlike any others. There is a genre called medical fiction, usually a story set in a hospital with doctors and nurses as the protagonists or apocalyptic stories where humanity is nearly destroyed by some sort of dread disease, but there has never been a collection of stories like “Night Clinic,” a totally original set of stories where the medical intersects with the magical, mystical and supernatural.
A morbidly obese man is imbued with all the resilience of the common cockroach and becomes Roachman. The venerable space epics Star Trek and Star Wars clash pitting Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock against Darth Vader. A child is granted her wish to be with her mother who has succumbed to the ravages of cancer, but in a way that leaves the reader both happy and sad. It is at the “Night Clinic” where such a diverse cast of characters converge.
Stories filled with mystical and magical creations abound with only one commonality. All of these unusual characters need medical care and, for better or worse, they are drawn to this clinic.
Where is the magic? Every story has its own touch of magic, a creative force which sets it apart. The writer looks at the words on the page until that moment when “Aha, that would be funny, or clever, or inspirational, or sad or so many other things” pops into his head and the words find their way to the printed page.
Is it magic, this act of creation? That is a decision I leave to the reader.