Storytellersunplugged

Writing is hard enough, it seems, when you’re doing it in a story set in the “real” world, the world of our everyday experience, the world which you-the-reader could step outside your front door at any moment and more or less experience (no, fairly obviously you cannot find yourself being a brain surgeon or a jockey, but both are occupations which you know about in terms of your own quotidian reality and you can fill in the blanks in the worlds surrounding those two characters fairly easily). When it comes to writing fantasy, the writer is faced with a whole other can of worms. The reader cannot assume anything about the world in which a particular story is set – anything at all beyond the things that the author tells them about it. Worldbuilding from scratch is a pretty intensive process – but things get nuttier faster when there’s magic in the mix.

You know, magic. The point-your-want, wave-your-arms, perhaps spout-faux-Latin kind of, well, MAGIC. Stuff that makes interesting things happen.

Turns out there’s quite a discussion going on about that very subject in a newsgroup which I frequent. Without naming names, a few things that have come up include:

- a [moderately solid] idea of what magic can and cannot do is important in generating plot twists. If magic can do “anything the plot requires” it doesn’t generate any plot. If magic can do anything for anyone, it’s mere handwavium. Anything that works just as the character needs it just when the character needs it (and that doesn’t work equally well for the villain) is not [an enjoyable] story.

(This is partly what is involved in what is otherwise known as the deus-ex-machina plot – things get sticky, and presto, someone somewhere manages to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and you know, nobody seems the slightest bit perturbed about it. I remember coming across it in a book which was part of a fantasy series, by a writer far too well known for me to mention his name here – let us just say that there has been a particularly nasty and evil war going on for, oh, some 300 pages of the book, a war in which most of our characters – including a high-falutin’ mage – have lost people they loved. And lo, after these 300 pages of war and angst and suffering, the high-falutin’ mage floats out above a bloody battlefield and raises his arms and says, “This stops now”. And you know what? It does. More or less instantly. My aggrieved demand in the aftermath of this was simply that if the mage in question had been able to do this all along then why hadn’t he done it before all those people (including the ones he loved) had to die – and if this was absolutely essential at THIS plot point, why wasn’t it at least hinted at that he could do it at all? Magic works in certain worlds in certain ways – except that this felt rather the author had painted himself into a corner and had used allashazam to blast his way out. And I, as a reader, resented that.)

- [the author] needs more knowledge of magic to write a good story that doesn’t read as if things ‘just happen by magic’…[need to know]whether there’s a price for using (or misusing) magic, who can use magic and how powerful they are.

(Utterly important point – everything has a price, and magic perhaps more so than most. The author HAS to remain aware of this fact if the story is to have any credibility.)

A good friend of mine from that group explains it in these terms:

“There’s a world of difference between magic that works every time -

switch on a current, and your light bulb glows - and magic that works

only some of the time (turn the key in your old banger. Mostly it

starts. If it’s been dry. Sometimes it doesn’t start, and there could be

five or six reasons why not. And sometimes, if you go away and try again

ten minutes later, _exactly the same action_, it works.)

Knowing which of these your magic falls into *will* have an effect on

the story. Your guy can light a fire that’s been laid. Can he set fire

to a tree with the same ease? A house?”

…and I think she is completely right about this. Magic may be wild but it has its rules, and how it functions in a given context is utterly essential to telling a coherent fantasy story involving fantasy.

- the “need to know” principle. This reared up in quite a few discussions where two writers who work in very different ways are arguing whether knowing far more about the magic in your story than ever actually makes it into the story as any kind of exposition or elucidation is a prerequisite for writing that story, or whether knowing what happens in the story is moot until you hit the point of the story at which it happens. An important idea is that it is (at least sometimes) impossible to know if a certain kind of (magic-drive) event occurs in the story or not, unless the author starts out with a minimum amount of knowledge in advance. Without that, the rules are not set up, cannot be broken consistently and believably or with any kind of acceptable motivation by the characters, and the resulting story has been described as “thin” by people taking part in this discussion.

Speaking of motivation – it came up in the discussion. People were arguing about whether it is enough for a reader to know that a character, for instance, carries a gun (or can do magic, insert motivational basis of your choice…) or not – or even if the reader actually needs to know that the gun is being carried at all. A lot of interesting discussion was born out of this, because several people argued that they may not NEED to know about the gun, but they might WANT to know, because the carrying of said gun might influence all sort of a character’s reactions and attitudes which will, in their turn, drive the plot of the story. People wanted to know what KIND of gun it was (colt? Flintlock? Derringer?) and the reasons behind the character’s having it (business? Self-protection?) as well as the character’s level of skill with said weapon, which I could quite easily see as having a profound effect on a character’s demeanour – heck, if I was out in the street and I knew I had a gun in my purse and an I knew that my chances of actually hitting a specific target with it – with any kind of accuracy that would make that matter – was at best 50-50, well, I would be looking and acting rather differently than if I was Jane A. Bond who was a cool and trained shot and who could whip out a gun, aim, fire, and drop a man at a hundred paces.

Magic works in much the same way. A particular person in the discussion spoke of how he might draw conclusions from a character’s actions and demeanour which would throw light on the attitudes and the expectations of that character’s society where magic is involved. He said that if a character appears hesitant while casting a spell and that character’s behaviour appears to suggest that (s)he is aware that there is going to be a price if (s)he screws up the spell-casting attempt, then the writer in question didn’t feel as though he needed to know exactly what would happen when a spell is improperly cast until it was actually cast and he could see the consequences of that action for himself. Conversely, the same writer said, if a character was acting confident and self-assured just before casting a spell, if there is no, uh, apprehension visible – then this author draws the conclusion that HE KNOWS that any negative consequences of failure aren’t going to be a “big deal”. He goes on to say, “I didn’t need to work that out in advance; the character

explains via his actions and attitudes what I need to know.”

And here is what I said on the matter in reply:

No. A character acting nervous might simply mean “YIKE! I’ve never

done this before”; “Oh my God, the Magister is watching ME, and not

anyone else at all, I’d better not screw up” (it is my experience that

the thought “I’d better not screw up” usually triggers such screw-up

more or less instantly). Conversely, not acting nervous might denote

bravado, arrogance, smugness, pride-cometh-before-a-fall - it doesn’t

always mean that the character knows there won’t be consequences. In

fact in good writing there almost always are - just not the ones the

character expected. You can rely on your character’s outward demeanour

only so far when it comes to judging motivations - and if YOU, as the

writer/creator/God of that Universe, don’t know what at the very least

MIGHT happen next you’re drifting.

I felt that assuming that the only reason that a character might act scared or not scared at the point of casting a spell might revolve on whether or not that character feared imminent punishment afterwards was far too simplistic. And from where I stand… I would need to know, myself, as an author of this story, how the spell casting works and what would happen if rules were broken. If the characters then go ahead and break the rules, that’s fine, that’s what a good story should do – it should take the reader for a wild ride, that’s its purpose. But to quote another participant in this particular debate,

“I need to have the feeling that the _author_ knows.

And often, this is most easily achieved when the author does know.”

So, then, how does magic work in a fantasy? Do we as the writers need to explain it? Do the readers absolutely need to know?

The answer is that thankfully there are as many kinds of readers as there are writers out there and no doubt the proper connections (through a simple process of elimination where the readers gravitates to the kind of thing that they would wish to read) will eventually be made. But from my own point of view, this is what you will find in my own books.

Magic, if it exists, exists in a set of rules that circumscribe it. It is not and cannot be all-powerful because there is nothing which an all-powerful force can be fought with (at least in order to reach any kind of satisfying conclusion) – if the attempt is made it is merely a rush to suicide by a writer’s characters and it is hard to imagine why any reader would wish to identify with characters so clearly doomed from the outset. There have to be limits. Limits may be breachable by virtue of heroic effort and/or virtuous sacrifice – but it has to be understood that there WILL be a price for achieving any kind of victory. Characters who don’t have a weakness at all, or who are simply not willing to pay such a price in the context of the story, are extremely difficult to make sympathetic to the reader – and if the reader doesn’t care what happens to your protagonist that reader won’t care about finishing the story you are telling.

The reader does NOT need to know precisely what the source of all magic is. It is sufficient to know how it functions in a given world, what makes it stronger, what limits it. And THAT, the author has to have an inkling about before the characters are flung willy nilly into the fray. A good magic-invested story does not mean planting a surreptitious top hat for your character to pull a rabbit out of at the eleventh hour. Sometimes, the character might have to BE the rabbit, to be sure… but the point is that it has to come from somewhere consistent, believable, unshakeable, or else the world you have built has been built on sand and the foundations will not stand.

The first rule of breaking rules is to know what they actually are. The second rule is that a character should have a reasonably decent reason to contemplate breaking those rules in the first place, because more often than not they are there for a damned good reason. The third rule is… that none of this, of course, is gospel.

I’m just telling you this – if you want the magic to be real, to play any kind of role in motivating your characters’ attitudes of motivations, you have to make it real. YOU have to make it real. You, the author.

Before you can ask anyone else to do it, you yourself must believe.