"Adding Magic to Your Writing"

By Sally O’Reilly

Writing about magic means you can access the areas of your mind that you don’t normally use, freeing up imaginative ideas. But it only works if you impose constraints, and you need to decide how these are integrated into your story. 

Magic is multifaceted. In historical terms, high magic was practiced by scholars, and was often based on ancient texts and arcane knowledge. Whereas folk magic – including herbalism and fortune telling - was practised by women.

There are many ways of introducing magic into your story. You might create an entirely invented world, with its own rules, like Middle Earth or Earthsea. This is magic as fantasy. Related to this is the convention of a portal which leads to an invented world from this one.

Or you might make magic integral to the everyday world. For instance Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is set in a world similar to late-twentieth-century America, but which encompasses witchcraft. A similar approach is to use surreal magic in a narrative, in which everything is "off" and weirdness is normal. An example is Leonora Carrington’s "The Debutante," a short story in which a debutante morphs into a hyena.  

Currently, there is a vogue for retelling folk and fairy tales and giving them contemporary resonance. Angela Carter is one of the most influential writers in this field. Dark folk traditions are also inspiring stories in which nature is sentient or sinister, and the past haunts the present through the landscape. 

So what are the tactics that you might use? Spreading your net as wide as possible at the start is essential. It’s important to read /watch / absorb anything that interests you and has magical resonance. For instance, I just saw Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in which a man plays chess with Death, a haunting, unforgettable image.  

You might also visit potentially inspiring places, again, keeping an open mind. Go to old cities, museums, remote places in nature. Writers like Alan Garner and C.S. Lewis were deeply inspired by the natural world. 

Another tactic is to try to rediscover your childish belief in the possibility of magic. Try writing down everything you can remember about a time in your childhood when you were scared, or left alone, or lost. Write down as much as you can about your feelings then, and try to recall as much detail as possible. Magic works best in fiction when it is interwoven with the everyday – think of Harry Potter and the Dursleys. 

Familiarise yourself with folk tales and myths. Grimms’ Fairy Tales is a good place to start, but there are fairy tales and fables from all over the world, varied and colourful, often with similar themes and tropes. Old stories can be repurposed time and time again. 

Using magic in a story means embedding it into the narrative. So the rules that apply to story-telling generally apply here. Traditionally, stories are about characters who want or lack something, who seek a goal, are blocked or challenged in getting to that goal, and who eventually change, and if the story has a happy ending, get what it was they wanted, or something different but slightly better. 

Don’t let the magic in your story solve all the problems your characters face. If you want your story to be engaging, then you need to limit the access your characters have to magical power. Otherwise, everything is too easy, there are no challenges, and therefore no conflict.

Make the rules of your fictional world clear to the reader from the beginning. Be consistent once you have established those rules. If the magic is treated as a skill that must be learned, the stakes are higher. Create barriers and challenges. Impose limitations and rules – for example – a spell can only be cast in specific circumstances. 

Your characters must earn their rewards. Their achievements will only feel satisfying to the reader if the characters had to work for it. 

All writers are dealing with magic to an extent – it’s a proxy for pure imagination. If you can make your readers believe in the magic in your story, you can make them believe that all the events are real. 

About the author
Writer Sally O’Reilly grew up in Stoke-on-Trent and now lives in Sheffield. En route, she’s spent time in Brixton, Brighton, and Barcelona. Her short stories have been published in the UK, Australia, and South Africa, and she has been shortlisted for the Cosmopolitan short story prize and the Ian St James Awards. Her historical novel Dark Aemilia (Myriad Editions/Picador US) was nominated for the Kirkus Prize. She has worked as a senior Creative Writing lecturer at the Open University and her journalism has been published in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and New Scientist. Her latest novel, Hagtale, is a reimagined origin story of Shakespeare's Macbeth and is shortlisted for the World of Books Sustainable Story Award 2026.

About Hagtale
A hagtale, a dark fable, a story told around winter’s fires and known to Shakespeare but never written down. Until now.

In eleventh-century Scotland, feral wolf-child Wulva is brought up by witches and then sent to live at a Scottish castle, where she falls under the spell of cruel, ambitious Lord Macbeth.

Three hundred years later, gentle Brother Rowan goes on a strange and perilous journey to a remote and ancient monastery to write a history of the Scottish king-line.

Misfits in their own time, seekers after truth, Wulva and Rowan are deeply connected despite the centuries that separate them.

Hagtale explores the power of stories lost and found, their transformative potential, and who gets to be the owner of the tale.

You can read more about Hagtale on the publisher's website here. 

Paul Taylor-McCartney, "Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall's Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity"

Congratulations to Paul Taylor-McCartney, UoL PhD Creative Writing graduate, on the publication of his debut non-fiction book, Cornwall Uncharted!

Dr Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, researcher and lecturer whose interests include queer studies, speculative fiction and teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a wide range of print and electronic media. Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall’s Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity, published by The History Press, is his first non-fiction title. You can read more about Cornwall Uncharted below and on the publisher's website here.

About Cornwall Uncharted: Writing Queer Lives Back into the Landscape

By Paul Taylor-McCartney

Cornwall Uncharted began with a walk. I was looking across the water towards Godrevy Lighthouse, thinking about Virginia Woolf and the childhood holidays in St Ives that would later help shape her seminal novel To the Lighthouse (1927). That small connection between a physical place, memory and writing prompted a much larger question: what other queer histories might be held in Cornwall’s landscapes, if we knew how – and where – to look? That question eventually became a journey across the county. The book moves through towns, artistic colonies and coastal retreats, lighthouses and castles, rural hinterlands, private houses, prisons and contemporary Pride routes. Along the way, it encounters writers and artists, performers and campaigners, soldiers and people whose lives survive only fleetingly in institutional records. At its heart are three interconnected themes – concealment, culture and creativity – and the ways in which they have been shaped by Cornwall itself.

One of the challenges of writing queer history is that the archive rarely gives you everything you want. For much of the period covered by Cornwall Uncharted, openness about same-sex desire or gender nonconformity could carry profound personal, social and legal consequences. Letters might be coded. Newspapers relied on euphemism. Court and prison records could reduce complicated human lives to an offence, a sentence and a date. Silence, therefore, becomes part of the evidence. While researching the book, I became interested not simply in what the archive said, but in what might exist around its edges: the gaps between official words, the routes people took, the houses they chose, the rooms in which they met and the landscapes that allowed them to appear or disappear. This is why place became so important to the project. Cornwall is not simply a picturesque backdrop to these histories. Its coves, moors, lanes, harbours, towns and buildings actively shape them. A secluded house can provide refuge. A winding lane can offer privacy. A coastal community can give someone enough distance from the expectations of elsewhere to experiment with how they live, work or love. But the same landscape can also be watched, mapped and policed. That tension runs throughout the book. In Chapter Five, for example, I place the Cornwall of Daphne du Maurier – its creeks, lanes, boathouses, hidden approaches and private houses – alongside the records of Bodmin Gaol. The comparison produced what I came to think of as a kind of double geography: in fiction, a lane or rented room might provide secrecy and refuge; in official records, those same kinds of spaces could become evidence, a "scene" or a "place of offence." Nowhere did the relationship between landscape, concealment and punishment feel sharper to me than at Bodmin Gaol. In this chapter I examine cases including those of Sergeant Ernest Oke and Private William Davey, whose lives entered the historical record through prosecution and punishment. Their story sits alongside du Maurier’s very different experience of secrecy, privacy and controlled visibility. The intention was not to suggest equivalence between those lives, but to ask what different kinds of concealment cost – and what happens when concealment succeeds or fails.

Throughout Cornwall Uncharted, I include short sections called "A Traveller’s Reflections." These were an opportunity to return to the places themselves. I wanted to acknowledge that researching history can also be a physical and emotional experience: walking the same streets, standing beside a harbour, climbing a castle staircase, entering a prison cell or simply feeling the weather change around a landscape you have spent months encountering through documents. At Bodmin Gaol, the historical material suddenly acquired weight. The names in court calendars were no longer simply entries on a page. The building made questions of confinement, visibility and memory difficult to hold at an academic distance. 

The extract below comes from the Traveller’s Reflection that closes that part of Chapter Five.

From Cornwall Uncharted
Here, I reflected on the case of Oke and Davey and tried to set it at a scale I could hold. Two kits packed in haste. Pay stopped. A letter home, delayed or never sent. A newspaper notice that reduced their actions to a phrase like "improper conduct," and two families left to read between the lines. The prison then fixed these lives in record and stone. It named the offence, measured the time, closed the door on both men.

Yet du Maurier’s life sits alongside this image, offering another kind of confinement: one in which she is not locked up, yet her letters and houses show a careful management of movement, disclosure and risk. Menabilly was then, and is to this day, kept closed to visitors and screened from prying eyes. Desire was routed through correspondence, via friendships that must be framed as safe, through journeys that began and ended elsewhere.

During our visit to the gaol, the site choreographed attention differently. Entry to "The Dark Walk" was timed, then we were released into the museum. The past was not softened so much as held at a distance that allowed looking without breaking. For du Maurier, distance likely worked in a similar way. It became a tool for survival, a way to live with what cannot be named openly.

On our way out, I glanced up at the hotel wing: new glass inside old stone, warm light behind a wall once built to contain and punish. Luxury suites where cells had once stood. Soft furnishings where bodies were counted and kept. The conversion was clever, even aesthetically pleasing, but it left a slightly bitter aftertaste. To be clear: I’m glad people come to visit and take the tour – school groups, couples, families and individuals – who wish to engage with local history, even where opulence blurs the edges between past and present. But if there was a promise worth keeping there, it was this: tell the hard parts in daylight, keep the iron in view and do all in my power not to let the triple-glazed frontages ever erase the voices of the past.

Roger Bygott, "Ginsberg & Manchester"

 

Roger Bygott is a writer and researcher living in Manchester. He was an ordained Buddhist for twenty years and lived in a monastery in the Spanish mountains for three years. He studied Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, which led him to co-found and co-direct Manifest Arts, a biennial arts festival in Manchester that highlighted the city's network of arts studios between 2015 and 2019. His essays have been published in Beat Scene and Dark Mountain.

About Ginsberg & Manchester, by Roger Bygott
Allen Ginsberg visited Manchester twice. He barely figures in the city's history, and Manchester barely figures in his. Yet two brief visits — a summer afternoon in 1973, a Library Theatre reading in 1979 — hold richer stories than the bare facts suggest.

Ginsberg & Manchester brings together several figures whose lives were touched by Ginsberg in different ways: Alan Wise, a charismatic music impresario (manager of Nico, John Cooper Clarke and Donovan) from Salford, whose letters to Ginsberg span fourteen years; Steven Taylor, a guitarist born in Gorton who became Ginsberg's closest musical companion for two decades; Jonathan Williams, the American avant-garde publisher (Jargon Press) who first brought Ginsberg into the city centre; and Jampa Thaye, a Manchester grammar school boy who discovered Buddhism through Kerouac, became an influential Buddhist teacher, and who was Ginsberg's host when he came to the Library Theatre. This is a story about how a great American poet left a faint but enduring mark on an English city that never quite noticed he was there.

The book also features rare and unpublished photos of Ginsberg and his associates.

You can read more about Ginsberg & Manchester on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Ginsberg & Manchester
In one of Allen Ginsberg’s date books, there’s a barely intelligible squiggle across the boxes for 4–6 June 1979. On the sixth day, at the end of the squiggle, is an arrow and the question: ‘Manchester?’ 

What was the story behind that asemic flourish? It had been five years since Ginsberg’s fleeting visit to Manchester in August 1973. There weren’t many reasons for him to return; his connection with the north-west of England was primarily with Liverpool, thanks to his fascination with the Beatles and connection with the Merseybeat poets. 

That arrowhead was inviting enquiry. What was he doing? Who was he travelling with this time? The existing biographies were of little help. Ginsberg could pack his days with meetings, readings, socialising and cultural events, so it’s not surprising that his all-too-brief visits to Manchester get short shrift in his letters and the many biographies of him.

Michael Schumacher, in his biography Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, notes that in 1979, ‘Allen’s European reading tour included visits to Paris, Cambridge, London, Newcastle, Rotterdam and Rome – all in a whirlwind schedule that lasted less than a month.’  Manchester has got lost in the whirlwind. Barry Miles’s biography of Ginsberg mentions neither his 1973 nor his 1979 visit to Manchester. I started to wonder if the question mark in Ginsberg’s date diary might indicate a possible visit that never materialised. 

Then I discovered a June 1979 letter to his friend and fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder, sent from the Netherlands on 14 June 1979: 

After triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe – Genoa, Milan, Spoleto, Paris, Manchester, Cambridge, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam – we’re dragging our weary tongues o’er the sea to Newcastle to visit [Basil] Bunting and last reading there … We brought Steven Taylor to guitar and sing and all turned out funny and energetic like a folkie tour. 

Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist and musical director, is an integral part of the story. He was born to a working-class family in east Manchester, who emigrated to the USA in 1965 when he was ten years old. 

On 5 June, Taylor joined [Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Anne Waldman] on the 12.55 p.m. train from Euston, heading north for a reading at the Manchester Library Theatre ...

LJ Ireton, "Unclaimed"

LJ Ireton is a poet and a bookseller from London. She has a 1st Class B.A. Honours in English Language and Literature. Her poems have been published by over forty journals both in print and online, including: Green Ink Poetry, The Madrigal, Humana Obscura, Spellbinder Literary Magazine, Drawn to the Light, Acropolis Journal, Amphibian Literary Journal, Tiny Seed Journal, Black Bough, Spelt and Wild Greens Magazine. Her poetry features in the printed anthologies Spectrum (Renard Press, 2022), York Literary Review 2023 (Valley Press), Building Bridges (Renard Press, 2024), You’re Never Too Much (Macmillan, 2025) and on the BBC World Service Bookclub. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons from the Sky, was published by Ellipsis Imprints in February 2024, followed by Interlude in February 2025 by Haywood Books.

About Unclaimed, by LJ Ireton

These are lyrical, first person poems, which give voices to the bold and spirited Tudor and Stuart queens judged and condemned by history: Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Mary, Queen of Scots.

You can read more about Unclaimed on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From Unclaimed

Scotland 

          Mary, Queen of Scots

It was there. Hidden,
sleeping in my young soul
while I was scorning rocks
on curated tile.

I am awake now, and turning;
wild heather scales my bones, 
shedding my skin –
I was schooled in everything but
how earth-gold would respond
to my step 
returning,
humming at my feet —

my mourning veil
curls in the wildflowers;
they are reclaiming it
with teeth,
thistle purple sharp ghosts
arise,
my lungs smoke mist
moors and heights —

Scots King am I;
brocade and pearl
re-learning the beauty of thorns.

Bert Flitcroft, "From Standing Stones to the Stars"

Bert Flitcroft was born and brought up in Lancashire but now lives in the Midlands. He now has four collections of poetry published: Singing Puccini at the Kitchen Sink, Thought-Apples, Just Asking, and Seeing the Light. Recently he has made available a fifth, a "new and selected" entitled From Standing Stones to the Stars: History and Science: 30 Poems.

He is an Arts Council prize-winning poet, was Poet in Residence at the Southwell Poetry Festival and has performed at a number of leading national festivals including The Edinburgh International Book Festival. He was Staffordshire Poet Laureate 2015–17 and curated the on-line Staffordshire Poetry Collection. 

He has worked as resident poet with one of our "National Treasures," The Wedgwood Collection at the V&A; as resident poet with the prestigious R.I.B.A. exhibition "The Road Less Travelled"; and recently as part of the University of Keele project "Labelling the Museum."

Bert offers a professional mentoring service and has a long and successful history of running workshops and giving readings, not just to local poetry groups but in libraries, arts centres, gardens, galleries, museums. His website is here. 

About From Standing Stones to the Stars, by Bert Flitcroft

This collection  includes a few new poems alongside poems published in Bert’s first four collections. Glancing through these he realised how many of them reflect his long-standing interest in History and Science, and the variety in form and structure this has involved. This collection is designed to appeal to a wider-than-usual audience as well as the general poetry reader. Many readers will find this collection both a pleasure and a rewarding, if occasionally challenging, experience.

From From Standing Stones to the Stars

Re-reading Jane Austen

in the age of quantum entanglement

It is a truth universally acknowledged

that a single heavenly body, in possession

of space, must be in want of a soul mate. 

Between such bodies there is always gravity. 

And who is to say this isn't a form of love?

Whole galaxies may be holding hands, 

finding themselves entangled

at a subatomic level, sharing words of love. 

And, for all we know, causing each other 

both joy and heartache.

Let us imagine two heavenly bodies

and name them Elizabeth and Darcy,

separate them by unacknowledged forces

a physicist might label Pride and Prejudice.

Two planets, mere particles, seemingly 

destined to circle around each other forever.

There is much that is mysterious about love,

but two particles can exist in many places

at the same time yet be connected, 

and, though separate, can influence and refine 

each other's behaviour.

So who is to deny that our two particles,

one in a high-waisted white gown

and one in a tailcoat with white cravat,

could be entangled at this subatomic level,

discovering that they share an affinity

created by a chance encounter at a ball

or an innocent visit with an aunt.

In the light of quantum entanglement

Jane Austen was much wiser than we think.

With such knowledge would the tale

of Romeo and his Juliet, two universal 

star-crossed lovers, have to end as it did?

Or Abelard and Heloise suffer such a fate?

Intensive care

Back from theatre, again, the room quiet 

but for your breathing and the syllables 

of monitors and voices in the corridor,

your eyes closed in opiate delirium 

you whispered, "I’m being chased 

around the room by a mashed potato."

And, after a silence, "Is that you, dad?"

and you squeezed my hand.

To see your pale flesh turn red and swell,

a doctor's pen daily marking out the fronts,

was to witness Life reduced 

to mortal combat between microbes.

If only Love could be a friendly bacteria

we could drip-feed into veins.

But for now at least, thank God for surgeons 

and men of science, and Fleming.

And yes, thank God for love.

Had you gone before your time, the natural 

order disturbed, I would have needed 

your absence, the silences, made bearable; 

convinced myself you were still somewhere:

in the low clouds, your voice in the wind,

your hands part of the warm rain.

Heaven would be good. That’s what it’s for.

Kate Loveman, "The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary"

Congratulations to Prof Kate Loveman, whose book The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary has just been published!

Kate Loveman is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Leicester. She researches the literature and history of the seventeenth century, notably things to do with Samuel Pepys (who rarely met a thing he did not want to have to do with). She is the author of Reading Fictions 1660-1740 (2008) and Samuel Pepys and his Books (2015), and has edited Pepys’s diary for Everyman (2018).

About The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary, by Kate Loveman
During the 1660s, Samuel Pepys kept a secret diary, full of intimate details and political scandal. First published two hundred years ago, it is now the most famous diary in the English language. The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary explores why Pepys’s diary was written, how this secret diary came to be published, and the many remarkable roles it has played in British culture since then. Pepys’s journal has prompted creative responses ranging from Victorian fanfiction to World War II propaganda and COVID parodies. For two centuries, it has also encouraged debates about what counts as ‘history’ and about whose stories are worth telling.

You can read more about The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book. 

From The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary
Pepys’s journal vividly describes momentous events, such as the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London, alongside small moments – quarrels with his wife or jokes with servants. Since it was first published in 1825, it has variously been called an ‘incomparable masterpiece,’ ‘an historical and literary work of an outstanding character,’ ‘trifling,’ ‘tedious,’ ‘very amusing,’ ‘too gross to print,’ and ‘obscene.’ Those divided judgements come just from the people (the editors, the publishers, and the lawyers) who were tasked with getting this extremely bizarre, frequently filthy text into print. For most of the last two hundred years, significant sections of the diary were deemed unpublishable, thanks to Pepys’s habits of describing court scandals, his sex life, and his bowel movements. Since nothing could be more intriguing than a secret diary too shocking to print, this censorship only increased the public’s fascination. 

Robert Selby, "The Kentish Rebellion"

 

Robert Selby, photograph by Paul Ligas

Robert Selby edits the literary journal Wild Court and reviews for various publications. His debut poetry collection, The Coming-Down Time, was published by Shoestring Press in 2020. A book-length sequence, The Kentish Rebellion, is out from Shoestring on 7th July 2022. 

About The Kentish Rebellion, by Robert Selby 

It feels fitting to be able to introduce The Kentish Rebellion here as the book owes a debt to The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640-1660 by the late Alan Everitt, who held the post of Hatton Professor of English Local History at the University of Leicester between 1968 and 1982. In his forensically-researched, fascinating study published by Leicester University Press in 1966, Everitt examined his native county’s restiveness through the Civil War period as part of his wider argument that "the England of 1640 resembled a union of partially independent county-states or communities, each with its own distinct ethos and loyalty." It is instructive, he wrote, that the people of the day referred to their county as their "country."

I first read Everitt’s book when I was nearing the end of my PhD on the poet Mick Imlah, whose final collection, The Lost Leader, contributed to the assertion of Scottish cultural difference within Britain. Reading The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion helped inspire me to explore if I could do something similarly assertive for Kent, my native county just as it was Everitt’s. Kent, of course, is not Scotland - a "Home County" after all, with the associations of conformity that go with that status, and last an independent kingdom in the eighth century. But studying Kent in the Civil War period, when it was still far from homogeneous with the seat of power – the 1648 rebellion being just the latest in a long line of Kentish uprisings against London down the ages – allowed me to explore the idea of a distinct Kentish identity and imaginatively throw it forward to our own turbulent time.  

Below, you can read a poem from the sequence. 

From The Kentish Rebellion