Some stories never need a spellbook. They cast their enchantment slowly—like the hush after a storm or the way grief makes time behave strangely. They work not through potions or portals, but through atmosphere, memory, and the kind of wonder that lingers long after the page is turned.
This is the kind of magic I write.
It’s not that I don’t love dragons or wizards or galaxies far, far away. I do. But I’m drawn to something quieter. Something that feels as though it could be real—if only you were looking at the world a little sideways.
In my current novel, set in hurricane-season Florida, there are no incantations. No chosen ones. But there is a whisper of the mythic. An arrowhead that seems to shimmer with old stories. A tide that takes more than it gives. A sense that something ancient is watching, just beneath the surface of the bay.
This is the realm of quiet magic.
What Is Quiet Magic?
It’s the uncanny familiarity of a place that shouldn’t feel familiar.
It’s the belief that memory lives in objects.
It’s the goosebumps when a red-shouldered hawk calls just as a long-lost name is spoken aloud.
It’s the moment when silence becomes a character.
Quiet magic doesn’t seek to dazzle. It seeks to haunt. It lingers in ordinary moments charged with extraordinary weight. It trusts the reader to feel wonder without being shown it with fireworks.
Why It Matters
For many young readers—and adult readers of children’s literature—quiet magic feels truer. It reflects the way we actually experience the world: full of signs and symbols, hopes that hinge on talismans, the hush of belief that never fully leaves us even as we grow older.
It gives space to the internal: to grief, to resilience, to change.
Quiet magic doesn’t offer easy answers. But it does offer possibility.
And sometimes, that’s the most magical thing of all.
Writing Wonder Without Wand Waving
To write this kind of magic is to trust the natural world. To let setting breathe. To plant a seed and let readers feel its roots before it blooms into anything remotely mysterious.
It means knowing the difference between coincidence and connection—and leaning into the latter.
It means that an arrowhead found in the sand isn’t just archaeology. It’s ancestry. It’s mystery. It’s the silent thread that ties a hurting girl to a history she never knew she needed.
I believe quiet magic is worth defending—not because it’s louder than fantasy, but because it hums in a different key.
One that sounds, to me, a lot like truth.