Sometimes the Magic Works by Terry Brooks Read Free Book Online Page B

to make sense of the larger world and its complexities.
    So that is what I have decided to attempt here, to think back through the stories I have written and the ideas that prompted them. By examining a few, I hope to give you some insight into how the process works and where those mysterious ideas really come from.
    Let me start with
The Wishsong of Shannara
. This is how that book came to be written. I was musing on the traditional Sirens of Greek mythology who lured unfortunate sailors to their doom. Odysseus only just missed becoming a victim. Such power! I began to wonder what it would do to you if by singing you could destroy things. Or create, perhaps. What if by singing you could change the way things were? What would you do with such power? What would such power do to you?
    I took it a step further. Suppose there were siblings, and each had the power of a Siren. A sister and a brother would do. What if the sister could actually change things, but the brother could give only the appearance of change? But, wait! What if the former fell under the sway of her own magic, a victim of the very power she relied upon, and the latter, the weaker of the two, had to rise above his limitations and find a way to save her?
    That was how Brin and Jair Ohmsford were conceived as the central figures in the book. The wishsong became an inherited trait, but a deadly one that could work both good and evil and was not always controllable by its users. Its magic, like the magic in all of my stories, was a two-edged sword that could cut either way. Brin and Jair would have to find a way to control it in order to save themselves.
    Perhaps you are already seeing a pattern to what I do to come up with ideas. I start asking questions. What if this? What if that? I ask these questions until I come to the central question of the whole exercise, and then either I find my story or I abandon the effort and start all over again. Sooner or later I find a set of questions that suggest a real story, and I am ready to put together a new book.
    All right, let’s try it again. This time let’s delve a little deeper into the process. The book I am going to use is
Running with the Demon
. I began writing this book in 1996, after thinking on and off about the story for the better part of ten years. I hoped to accomplish several things. First, I wanted a dark, contemporary fantasy. Second, I wanted a book in which the story’s magic fitted seamlessly with what we know to be true about the real world. Third, I wanted to write about growing up in a small town in the Midwest, and I particularly wanted to address the way in which children lose their beliefs about what is possible the more exposed they become to the world’s harsh truths.
    I mulled these elements over, searching for a storyline that would incorporate and address all three. Nothing worked. Then one day, while I was driving on the Seattle freeway, another driver cut me off in truly reckless fashion. It wasn’t as if this hadn’t happened before, but for some reason on that particular day it made me think about human behavior in the larger sense. I despaired that we had forsaken so many of the common courtesies. I bemoaned that we had forgotten how to be kind to each other in the way we were when the world was less complicated and hurried. I also worried that I was turning into my father, but I put that thought aside.
    What I ended up wondering was whether we might be a people in the process of destroying ourselves without realizing it. Could our commonplace failures of consideration and caring be the harbinger of a larger social breakdown? Wasn’t that how all civilizations eventually began to destroy themselves? Small cracks lead to large fissures, and the walls come tumbling down?
    This was where the idea for
Running with the Demon
began. The what-if questions continued. What if our self-induced destruction was being aided and abetted by a truly dark force? What if that