When Magic Happens with author Barbara Bickmore

Something magical that happened to me.  It was the winter of 1990 and a friend, Hazel, and I were spending 3 months in Mexico.  I was writing an outline for my book about China, "Distant Star." I'd had writer's block for a few days.  We'd been out to dinner with new friends and there was music at this lovely hotel where we dined, and we met another couple there and had a perfectly lovely evening.

My friend,Hazel, and I had returned to our rental apartment about 10:30 or 11:00, filled with warmth and pleasure at being in a foreign country and meeting pleasant people and drinking margaritas!

I was sleeping in the living room on the couch because Hazel snored terribly. I lay there  sort of drowsy, hearing Mexican music from down the street (there is always noise in Mexico, I mean always) and suddenly images started coming to me. My characters jumped into life and began to do things...I was startled yet didn't dare move or stop it because I was aware something magical was happening. This went on, a story unfolding, conversation and what clothes they wore and new characters I'd never dreamed up. This went on for hours. I thought maybe I was dreaming but I knew I wasn't because I could hear a cat meowing out in the courtyard. Though I didn't want to open my eyes, through slit in my eyes  I could see slants of light from the streetlight outside the window, sifting across the room. The air was warm (February in Mexico!) and soft and my characters acted as though they were in a movie. The second half of my book wrote itself that night. This went on for about 3 hours. I thought I ought to get up and write it down before I forgot but I was, by then, too sleepy to do that. I did get up and go to the bathroom and got back on the couch and slept until 8:30.

I awoke, filled with energy and excitement. I fixed some coffee, got out my laptop and started to write down what I had experienced. It took me all morning. When I finished I saw that the outline for over 2/3 of the book lay in front of me, complete with a heroic man I'd never even dreamed of before.

I've had this happen again, only once, when I was driving along in the back seat of a car in Australia and, pretending to be asleep as I let characters ingratiate themselves into my life so that I spent the next two days writing down the gift I'd been given. That was half of "Deep in the Heart," about Texas, though at the time I was in the midst of writing about Australia's flying doctors.

I don't know how to explain either of these mystical experiences except to say something magical happened. Books wrote themselves. I have felt guilty about these two because I don't think I really wrote the stories. They were given to me and I just wrote them down. I didn't think them up.

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