You don't need to. It happens naturally, if you're a good enough magician and you believe your own bullshit.
So the way magical training is set up, you memorize and memorize and rote learn and practice, and then when you're in fourth year, out of five, you go for a special semester in Antartica. They take your voice. You wear white, you live in a cell, you fucking cast until your mind breaks. At the end of it, they strip you naked and you go out onto the ice and walk to the pole, where a gate brings you back to New York.
It's a kind of- [struggling for words, he picks Mayakovsky's] -Rubicon you either cross or don't. Your mind intuits the shape of magic, you begin to be able to feel your way through spells instead of memorizing circumstances and formulas.
It's also incredibly fucking dangerous, because doing magic isn't always conscious. When you feel something, thereafter, that same intuition about the shape of magic can mean you pull the thing you're wanting towards reality. This is especially true of frantic self-delusion.
no subject
So the way magical training is set up, you memorize and memorize and rote learn and practice, and then when you're in fourth year, out of five, you go for a special semester in Antartica. They take your voice. You wear white, you live in a cell, you fucking cast until your mind breaks. At the end of it, they strip you naked and you go out onto the ice and walk to the pole, where a gate brings you back to New York.
It's a kind of- [struggling for words, he picks Mayakovsky's] -Rubicon you either cross or don't. Your mind intuits the shape of magic, you begin to be able to feel your way through spells instead of memorizing circumstances and formulas.
It's also incredibly fucking dangerous, because doing magic isn't always conscious. When you feel something, thereafter, that same intuition about the shape of magic can mean you pull the thing you're wanting towards reality. This is especially true of frantic self-delusion.