Advice from a comic book writer & my grandparents
Sometimes to create all you need is a magic wand.
Famous for his stamp on the comic book landscape, writer Alan Moore teaches on the BBC Maestro online class series that the writer is like the magician. The writer, like the magician, must deploy the use of four weapons: coins, the sword, the cup, and the wand.
The Coins = Pay attention to the physical world. See how people work, how situations work, how the landscape works. Represent the physical world through your creative abilities.
The Sword = The intellect. Research, science, data, historical context, and raw info that can help strengthen the creation.
The Cup = Exercise human emotion and compassion. Imagine being another person, and don’t forget to lend compassion out, even in the most villainous of characters. In the world of fiction writing, giving compassion will help you make characters more human.
The Wand = This is the human spirit and human will to create something. In Alan’s eyes, the most important.
I am going to hone in on The Wand. Alan writes that the human will “is the single most important element because, without it, you will not finish the shortest of stories. You can very easily end up with nothing but a stack of unfinished manuscripts.”
That’s what most of my books have been. A digital stack of unfinished work. Alan describes being in his mid-twenties and deciding to dedicate himself to being a writer. He told himself he would take a year, living off the UK’s unemployment system, and write all the stories in his head.
He didn’t write. He started huge sagas and never finished. Alan realized that if he never finished anything, that meant it would never be judged. He didn’t want to be judged. He knew he needed to take responsibility for his actions if he ever hoped to get published, or to put himself out there.
So, he took action: “I sent some comic strip samples in and received a telegram reply saying they’d like to start running the strip. This was my first professional work and enabled me to build the rest of my career upon it.”
Human will isn’t just for writing a knock-out story, or composing a magnetizing piece of music. In my mind it’s to create anything. Perhaps because I have spent the last week at their house, I also realized my grandparents are a good example of people who use The Wand to create.
Papa, my grandpa, came across an old toy pedal tractor in his basement. One axel was in the dirt. The chain was broke, the bearings were shot, the tires had lost tread, and the sea foam paint was faded. Over 40 years ago his own children rode it, especially my aunt Karin. “She probably put 50 miles on it in our driveway,” Papa told me.
Papa looked at the tractor fondly. He imagined fixing it and having his great-grand kids playing on it, and future generations after that. “I didn’t plan on rebuilding it,” he said. “And then I thought the kids would want to play with it. And I think they will.”
The idea could have stayed an idea. A mention, a conversation, forgotten in the basement among the dirt. But Papa wanted to push the idea into reality.
Papa is an 80-something retired wood shop teacher. He wears the same outfit everyday: jeans and a t-shirt or sweatshirt. He sports a mustache, and is missing parts of his fingers from an experimental rocket fuel accident. \He’s a hard worker, a craftsman, drafting extraordinaire, and loves to say a phrase from his family: “Everybody has their own way of kissing the cow.”
His shop is under his A-frame home, down in the same basement where the tractor had existed for decades. It’s dark and full of tools down there, brick floor. Damp and cool. There are long table tops, saws, jars of nails, screw drivers, a swivel vise. Famously in our family, the original hammer that built the A-frame in 1967 hangs on the wall among the other tools. It was here, like so many past projects, where Papa would restore and rebuild the tractor.
He made some phone calls, found some parts, looked at models online. “It’s a 450 Farmall. I even found the original decals.” It’s modeled after a real tractor. A long nose and thin tractor. Papa disassembled the whole thing and replaced bolts, installed axels. Boiled the tires so they loosened enough to go over the rims. He ordered new pedals, a new chain, primer and paint. Wand of the will, the thing snaps back together into a newer, restored model.
Soon, after a month and half of going down to the basement, he had a newly restored fire-engine red toy pedal tractor. It’s short and squat, and enticing to any person under five. It stood there aglow under the shop light. “It’ll last another 30, 50 years, hopefully.”
Nana, my grandma, uses her own wand and will everyday in the kitchen. She is also in her eighties, a retired teacher. She’s a grandmother who scans social media, reads books, knits scarves and hats, performs yoga, and can do the splits. She has a comforting voice and marks the end of her sentences with “hun” and nods her head.
She bakes homemade pies, apple, mixed berry. She rolls gnocchi, crafts lasagna, spins up garden-packed salads, mashes her own basil-grown pesto. No meal goes without her grandmother magic. Give her some time in a kitchen and out comes a stunning meal. She never half-bakes anything. Below is a photo of her and my wife Megan making gnocchi:
Bottom Line: You need The Wand, the spirit to create something. You need the space and time, and circumstance, to make possessing The Wand possible, yes, but once you have that — even just a little bit — you’re able.
As I go into in new writing adventures, it’s always a good reminder that I must pick up The Wand and will creations into existence.
Shoutouts & Blurbs
If SVB news is on your mind, Activision Blizzard’s CCO Lulu Meserveywas had the best set of thoughts, in my mind. In short, bad communication was the biggest breakdown (there should probably be some work around bank regulation, too).
Have you thought about phosphorous lately? It once saved humanity’s way of life, now it might destroy it. Elizabeth Kolbert doing her thing in the New Yorker.
Cool newsletter called Perfectly Imperfect. It’s a mini Q&A profile that “shares a taste of cool people’s tastes.”
For giggles, here’s my grandparent’s A-frame originally built in 1967. After a fresh March snow.
Open heart, open mind,
Tucker Legerski
ENDIT.
Love this Tuck!
This is wonderfully written and I have the honour of being able to say I met your grandparents on numerous occasions between 2020-2022 - they are simply inspirational !