Babel Clash

How does magic work in my books?

Short answer:  However I want it to.

Long answer:  Depends on the book.

I don’t believe in magic, but I don’t believe in vampires or raccoon gods and that doesn’t stop me from writing about them.  Nonetheless, magic is one of those fantasy bugaboos, those dangerous elements that, done improperly, can lead the reader to ask all sorts of difficult questions.  Readers don’t like magic.  They think, justifiably, that ill-defined magic powers can be an excuse for the writer to just pull something out of the air (often literally) to save the day.

Not every story I write has magic in it, but when magic shows up, I worry about this.  I’m a fantasy / sci fi writer.  That’s my job.

Most magic is simple.  Superman has magical powers.  He can fly.  He has heat vision.  He’s invulnerable.  While the backstory might be sci-fi, it’s basically magic.  And it’s easy magic to understand.  It’s rigid.  It’s direct.  Consider Superman 2, where Superman develops a dozen spontaneous new powers that pop up and disappear without explanation.  Remember when he pulls the S off of his chest and throws it at a bad guy?  What the heck was that all about?

Batman has magical powers too.  Most people think his magical power is his great wealth, but they’re wrong.  Batman’s greatest magic is that he can do anything.  World-class athlete?  Check.  Fantastic detective?  Check.  Super scientist?  Check.  Master of disquise?  Y’betcha.  Escape artist?  Of course.  So basically, if someone can do it, Batman can do it just a little bit better.  And while he might not punch through walls or shoot lasers out of his eyes, this is still a pretty darn nifty power to have.

But what about more nebulous, less rigid forms of magic?  What about the wizards and witches?

Some folks, though less and less, go with the Dungeons and Dragons approach.  The wizard knows a very specific form of magic that works by very specific rules and does very specific things.  It works, but it’s pretty damn boring, if you ask me.  And it makes magic somehow less magical.

I know it’s not necessarily a popular opinion, but I think magic should be vague, ill-defined.  I don’t want to hear a thousand rules about how it works, and I don’t want to have a degree in thaumaturgy to understand it.  Most importantly, I want to be surprised by magic.  I never want it to seem as mundane or predictable as Batman’s amazing skills or Superman’s X-ray vision.

When incorporating magic into my stories, I tend not to think in terms of functionality and more in terms of personality.  Because none of my novels are set in the same universe, I can experiment quite a bit, and it would be a shame not to use that freedom to play around with the many possibilities of magic.

In my first novel, Gil’s All Fright Diner, magic is real.  It’s highly ritualized though.  You need to have the right supplies, know the right chants, and have to put in the time.  The villain of the story knows a few small tricks, here and there, that she can pull out in a pinch, but if she wants to do anything big, it’s going to take a lot of work.

In A Nameless Witch, our heroine is . . . well . . . a witch.  I very deliberately modeled her after a mythic version of such.  She has the ability to talk to animals and objects.  She can manipulate nature.  She knows things.  Magic for her is an art, not a science, and as such, I avoid quantifying it as much as possible.  Whether it works or not depends on who you ask, I suppose.  But I like it and feel like it fits in with the universe created.

Monster, on the other hand, is a contemporary fantasy tale, and I decided to go the opposite.  Magic is a science in this world.  Just a science nobody really understands.  They only know that if you write the correct rune or recite the right chant that magic happens.  Magic in this world is not a supernatural talent, but a practical skill, not much different than operating a computer.  It just takes education and practice.  The problem is that most people don’t remember it exists, and those that do aren’t very good at it.  Monster, our hero, has to carry a pocket rune dictionary around with him.  Even then, he’s not very capable because rune magic is like trying to write a sentence in a language you don’t really know.

When creating a world of magic, I find it’s less important to define what magic does than what it doesn’t do.  Just as Superman really shouldn’t have Rebuild-The-Great-Wall-Of-China-Vision, Monster shouldn’t be able to scribble a rune that defeats the bad guy without a lot of effort and even more luck.

I don’t think most people care that much about the rules of magic.  They just don’t want it to rob the conflict from the story.  They don’t want a character to use a magical cheapshot to solve a big problem, and they don’t want a character to forget a convenient ability when it could fix everything.  But spending too much time learning the rules of magic is like getting a degree in the history of Middle Earth.  It might be a fun hobby, but I’d rather apply my time to more practical pursuits: like learning VCR repair or teleportation.

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