Babel Clash

Time flies.  It seems like only yesterday that we embarked on this journey together, you and I.  One novelologist, one magic internet machine, and millions of adoring fans hanging on my every word.  It’s been fun.  More importantly, it’s been educational.  So what have we learned?

We’ve learned that Batman is magic.

We’ve learned that when giant robots fight, we all win.

We’ve learned that pulp fiction is awesome.

We’ve learned that the gods of old are a bunch of losers, just like the rest of us.

Most importantly, we’ve learned that in any fight, always bet on Tarzan.  (Wait.  Maybe I didn’t cover that.  In which case, I apologize, but my time is up and such wisdom is for a later date.)

Seriously, it was a great ride.  At least for me.  I can’t really speak for anyone else, but any chance to share my opinions with the greater public is always fun.  Hope you enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.  That’s probably unrealistic though, so let’s hope you enjoyed reading them half as much as I enjoyed writing them.

It’s been an honor, folks.  Thanks for having me.  Thanks for reading.  And thanks for buying my books.  Divine Misfortune is on sale now.  (One last plug before I go isn’t so wrong, is it?)

I’m out.

Laterz (with a Z because I’m cool like that).

Your friend and fellow Terran,

Lee

People don’t like cliches.

People LOVE cliches.

And there’s really no reason they shouldn’t.  Cliches are everywhere, all the time, in every story.  Even the most popular story is built upon a house of cliches.  Let’s take a look, shall we?

Harry Potter is a reluctant everyman chosen by destiny to defeat an evil tyrant.  Hermoine Granger is an overeager, booksmart student who is never quite as smart as she thinks she is.  Ron Weasley is a well-intentioned, clumsy underachiever.  Dumbledore is a wise mentor.  Snape is a red herring.  And Voldemort is an evil madman who wants to rule the world.

There is nothing original about any of those characterizations.  Nothing to make them jump off the shelf at the reader.  Yet Harry Potter is outrageously popular (just in case you didn’t know this already).  I’m not attacking the books.  I’m merely pointing out the obvious.  For all it’s praise, Harry Potter is not original.  This is hardly surprising.  Originality is an overrated virtue.  The audience doesn’t care if your characters are original.  They just want characters they can care about.

While it might be heresy to some, let’s compare another phenomenally YA series:  Twilight.  Bela is the typical unnoticed (yet somehow beautiful) and unpopular outsider.  Edward is the eternal youth who discovers dangerous passion via th discovery of his “true love”.  And Jacob…well…Native American werewolves really are a dime-a-dozen at this point.

I’ll leave history to determine which series is the better, but both are riddled with cliches.  Neither suffers for them.  Cliches are nebulous things.  They’re almost impossible to pin down and even harder to avoid.  For example:  Johnny is an outsider, a rebel, who discovers, through the attention of a dedicated teacher (yet another cliche), that he has a future.  OR Johnny is an outsider, a rebel, who is swallowed up by the hopeless indifference of the streets, turning to a life of crime.  Johnny #1 goes to college, uses his education to rise from his circumstances, and becomes a useful member of society.  Johnny #2 joins a gang where he applies his utter ruthlessness to become kingpin of the neighborhood.  Either way you slice it, Johnny is a cliche.

You can even cut it thinner.  Johnny #2A becomes an untouchable crimelord.  Johnny #2B is betrayed by his own cutthroat henchmen, learning too late that crime is a harsh mistress.

But wait, let’s go for one more while we’re at it.  Johnny #2B1 is brutally murdered, his life and death amounting to nothing but a harsh morality play on the dangers of a violent world.  Johnny #2B2 barely survives his betrayal.  He recovers from his injuries with the help of a hooker with a heart of gold (why the heck not?) and enacts his own bloody revenge on those who betrayed him.

And so it goes.  Every path, every turn, is just another story that’s been told before being played out by characters that have existed, in some permutation or another, since the dawn of storytelling.  (For the record, I love the word permutation and will use it every chance I get.)  So let’s just admit this.  Cliches are everywhere, and the only way to avoid them is to write something bizarre that, even if it does make sense, is probably not very satisfying.

And really, let’s get down to it.  People like cliches.  They just don’t like all of them.  The problem is that nobody quite agrees on which cliches are good and which are bad.

I’m a fantasy guy.  Not just fantasy, but crazy, outrageous fantasy.  I like giant robots, evil geniuses, raging werewolves, and mole people.  Oh, how I love mole people and giant robots.  Some consider these things silly.  For the record, they are wrong, but the object of this article is not to correct these fallacies.

I’m not a big fan of low fantasy.  Or English period costume dramas.  Or any movie where someone dies tragically so that a writer can impress us with how deep he / she is.  Yet there is nothing intrinsically wrong with these types of stories.  They just aren’t my cup of tea.

People use the term cliched when they don’t like something, and they overlook cliches when they do.  That’s just the way it works.  The term cliched itself has never meant much to me.  It’s a convenient catch-all, and while it rarely means what people think it means, it always reflects a story falling short for someone.  So let’s give cliches a break.  They’re out there, everyday, working hard, building our favorite stories.

Good night, little cliches.  And good luck.

I’m not going to lie to you.  I like it when giant robots fight.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I write fantasy and sci fi because I enjoy the chance to explore characters and ideas unfettered by pesky reality.  I want to write about Quetzalcoatl, about country-fried vamps, and drunken ogres because somebody has to, and it might as well be me.  I love exploring how these types of characters are different than we mere humans, and I love exploring how they’re the same.  Believe it or not, I do try to have some depth in my stories.  I’m not suggesting that you’ll discover some profound insight in my novels, though I won’t mind if you do.  Just tell me what it is so that I can act like I did it on purpose.  But, still, I try to do more than just write weird stories.

But, let’s be perfectly clear, I love writing weird stuff.  If I can write a novel where an eyeball monster threatens to destroy the universe, I will.  If I think of a great scene of characterization that just happens to invovle two down-on-their-luck gods sitting on the couch, watching TV, talking about women troubles, it will be written.  And if I can think of a place to insert a naked man fighting a hellhound, then it’s going to happen.

Yes, I want to have my cake and eat it too.

I want to go wild, and I want to be taken seriously.  I want to make you smile, and I want to have you think (or give you the opportunity at the very least).  I don’t want to just have giant robots smash each other to bits.  I want to make you care about the giant robots smashing each other to bits.  Because, really, aren’t giant robots people too?

Robots are awesome.  If they had been more robots and less people, Transformers 2 might have been worth seeing.  Superman Returns wasn’t very good precisely because it was too busy apologizing for being about a superhero who can bench press a yacht.  And Avatar was only really tolerable because at one point, a battledroid was crushed beneath the hooves of a space rhino.

On the other hand, Kung Fu Panda had great characters and a nuanced plot.  It also had an amazing martial arts battle on a crumbling bridge.  Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs took a ridiculous premise and ran with it.  The result was a surprisingly touching and fun film.  Heck, would The Lord of the Rings movies be as popular if not for the epic battle scenes?

We like the fantastic for being fantastic, and there’s no reason to deny that.  Some of us never grow out of liking robots and dinosaurs (or, even better, robotic dinosaurs).  It doesn’t mean we can’t apply a little grown up sophistication to the topic while still admitting that a cosmic monster battle for the fate of the universe is just plain neat.

I miss pulp.

This doesn’t make much sense.  I am too young to have experienced the age of pulp.  I have a few Tarzan books from the age, but that’s about it.

This isn’t truly fair to the current world of publishing.  It’s easy to look back at a bygone era and pine for the good ol’ days.  But those days weren’t as good as you remember or imagine.  The trick of memory and imagination is that it allows us to envision the past the way we want to, for good or ill.  The pulp era I miss most probably never existed.  It doesn’t stop me from missing them.

So what do I miss?

I miss when books were cheap, when they were less of a specialty product.  I do have some experience with this as a long time comic book fan.  If I may lapse into my whizzened old man voice for a moment:

In my day, comics cost seventy-five cents!  And you didn’t need to go to some out of the way comic book store to get ‘em neither!  All you had to do was walk down to the local convenience store and check out the spinnin’ rack.  Sure, the comics were printed on cheap paper and full of advertisements, but at least ya could afford to buy ‘em and actually find ‘em without making a day trip outta it!

Resuming normal voice:  Yes, it’s true.  In many ways, it was a wonderful time to be a comic fan.  Especially a young one.  When I first collected comics, I did so because it was cheap.  This is no longer true.  The comic book market continues to shrink, and I believe it’s because the cost has put it out of the reach of the younger fans.

And isn’t it the same with the publishing industry?  Aren’t novels getting awfully expensive?  I love that I’m doing well enough and my publisher has enough faith in me to print my books in hardcover.  Divine Misfortune is a low, low twenty bucks (subtle self-promotion at work), but that’s still not cheap.  Certainly not pulp cheap.

In the (most probably imaginary) pulp era I envision in my dreams, books were cheap and plentiful.  They had typos.  Many of them were dreadful.  But they were accessible.  They were something anyone could buy without having to consider them “a hobby”.  Reading was just something people did because it was easy and fun to do.

It’s easy to be critical.  Especially when comparing the real world to some beautiful Utopia that only exists as a dream, a perfect world that never was.  The publishing world has been very generous to me, and it’d be foolish of me to be ungrateful or excessively critical.  My experience with publishers, editors, agents, and fans have all been uniformly wonderful, and in no way do I want to imply that dissatisfaction with my career is the the root of this yearning.  I’ve done better than I have any right to expect.

But sometimes, just sometimes, when I close my eyes and allow myself the luxury, I miss pulp.

Time for a bit of crass commercialization.  Sort of.

I’d like to talk about DIVINE MISFORTUNE, my new book.  It just dropped in stores a couple of weeks ago, and yes, I used the word “dropped” for my books because I figure if it’s good enough for hip hop, it’s good enough for me.

Divine Misfortune is about gods.  Gods that are a lot like people if you put aside the immortality and wrath.  I tend to write about monsters and weird characters, robots and vampires, etc., but rather than finding it becomes an obstacle toward writing about people, I find it frees me up to really explore what being human is all about.

The gods in Divine Misfortune are mythological in form and function.  They’re very human.  They’re also extremely powerful and completely immortal.  They can be hurt, sure, but nothing can kill them.  And they might like human followers for the prestige, but they don’t technically need humans.  Yet, in their perceptions and attitudes, these gods are human.  And so you take a human, make that human immortal, give that human great power, and then sit back and see what happens.

Personally, I don’t think limitations make us human.  Although these gods do have limits.  Still, compared to your ordinary, everyday human, they live by a different set of circumstances.  And what they do, how they live, is something I strive to make relatable.  Not just relatable, but even thoughtful.  If you think about it, we might not have the ability to smite our enemies, but we certainly have the ability to do great harm.  And great good.  Perhaps the biggest difference between the gods and humans is that gods don’t have the luxury of dodging the responsibilty.  Although they do.  Quite often.

The gods might be the most powerful of the strange characters I’ve explored, but they aren’t the most inhuman.  Not by a longshot.  Right now, I’d have to say that honor goes to Mack Megaton, the indestructible crushing machine protagonist of The Automatic Detective.

Mack is a robot, and I’ve always wondered just what that would be like.  If you think about it, most everything we do as a human would be pointless for a robot.  So many motivations are moot when you’re a robot.  Perhaps this is why so many robots in fiction want to be human.  It’s not because there’s anything great about being human.  It’s because a robot has to do something, and what are you going to do with him if he doesn’t want to be human.  Have him destroy humanity, of course.

It was very important to me that Mack be of neither philosophy.  I didn’t want him to envy humans, and I didn’t want to have him despise us.  Either motivation seems too one-dimensional, even for a robot.  Instead, I wanted to write a story where a robot wrestles with his purpose, his instincts, and his fellow citizens like we all do.  Mack is just a guy trying to find is way in the city, and while you’d think being nearly indestructible would make that easy, you might be surprised.

Also, I wanted to write a story where someone punches a giant, melting mutant in the face.  But that was just icing on the cake.

If there’s a central theme to what I try to do (and, yes, I am pretentious enough to suggest that there just might be), it’s that being human ain’t easy.  Even if you are a vampire, witch, or god.

And if I may be so bold as to suggest a secondary theme to my work, it’s that everyone likes watching giant, melting mutants getting punched in the face.

I don’t write sequels.  I don’t like sequels.  Sequels make sense commercially.  They make sense to authors, who get to explore tried and true characters.  They make sense to publishers, who are always eager to entice readers back.  And the make sense to readers, who, if they’re going to spend hard-earned money on a book, want at least some assurance that they’ll be getting something they like.

Sequels just make sense.

But I don’t write them.  I’m not suggesting that I never will, but at this stage, not yet.  I don’t fault writers for writing them, publishers for publishing them, or readers for reading them.  I see where they’re all coming from, and there are plenty of great series novels out there.  They just don’t appeal to me.

As a writer, I find writing new ideas, new worlds tremendously appealing.  It stimulates my creativity in a way that I don’t believe a continuing series could.  I’ll admit it’s not always easy.  Sometimes, coming up with a new story can be a real pain.  Especially since I strive to do something a bit different every time.  Of course, if it’s too different then any potential fans might not be very happy.  Although I’m lucky enough to have a strong base of fans who love my willingness to experiment.  So the question I must always face when starting a new project is how can I make this different, but not too different?  How can I explore a new universe with its own unique rules and themes without alienating my fan base?

It’s then that I can see the appeal of sequels and series.  Writing a book is tough.  It’s a lot of work.  You might read a book over the weekend that took me eight months to write.  And we won’t even get into the extensive editing process that comes into play once the publisher gets involved.  Many people have put hundreds of hours of work into my books.  And there’s no guarantee that just because someone liked my book about Mack Megaton, robot detective, that they’ll dig the adventures of Lucky, the raccoon god of prosperity.  With a sequel, most readers will give you the benefit of the doubt.

It can be scary, but as an artist, it’s also satisfying, a chance to flex my creative muscles and explore worlds, characters, and themes I couldn’t address in my previous stories.  Series have their advantages, and I love recurring characters and settings as much as the next guy.  I just love surprising myself and the reader more.  I love that when you open an A. Lee Martinez novel, you aren’t really sure what you’re going to get.  That’s what fantasy should be all about.

Sure, that means taking a risk, but it’s a risk well worth taking.  Both as a writer and as a reader.

Ah, the debate continues.  Clearly, this is bigger than Batman.  This is about perception itself.  This is about fantasy versus reality, magic versus science.

Really, this is all about semantics.

So let’s walk away from the specific example of Batman for a moment and speak about fantasy and sci fi in general.  It should hardly come as a surprise that as a writer of fantasy that I like fantasy and sci fi.  I like robots and spaceships, vampires and otherdimensional moon monsters.  I enjoy a story all the more if it has a raccoon god or a telepathic alien thrown in the mix.  But I enjoy fantasy in all its forms.

I enjoy martial arts movies where people do amazing stunts.  From a realistic perspective, what they’re doing is real.  It is possible for Jackie Chan to jump through the rungs of a ladder, land in a shopping cart, and slide out, delivering a kick to the bad guy.  I’ve seen him do it.  But possibility is not probability.  Or even feasibility.  Every stunt is a highly rehearsed moment that often doesn’t go right the first time.  (Witness Chan’s outtakes at the end of virtually every one of his films.)  The action sequence we end up getting is the best of all possible worlds, a highly polished dance staged to appear spontaneous, surprising, and thrilling.  It is a fantasy though because while it is possible through the magic of movies, it is just about impossible in real life.

Fantasy is a wider genre than just superheroes and dragons.  And magic is more than just fireballs and teleportation spells.  Such distinctions might be important for the universe the story takes place in, but they are usually artificial.  They are limitations placed on the reality so that everything doesn’t turn into chaos.  Now, in the interest of not repeating myself, I won’t suggest that superheroes, who live in a universe of infinite possibilities, are the ultimate fantasy characters.  That they are, to a one, magical beings even if many of them aren’t technically magical.

Honestly, I’ve always felt the definition between fantasy and sci fi, between realism and fantasy, to be a thin one.  It’s always struck me as odd that people want to read about a character like Batman, a character who is as mythic and supernatural as Ulysses or Beowulf, and decide that he isn’t.  But his accomplishments, his skills, his equipment, all this is the stuff of legend.  Individually, you could argue that any of them are possible.  But are they probable.  Could anyone do what Batman does?  Clearly, the answer is no because we have never had a Batman in real life.

Too often in fantasy I feel that we confuse the trappings of the world with magic.  To say that Green Lantern isn’t magic, but his ring is is technically correct.  But would you be interested in reading a story about Green Lantern without his ring?  Would you like to read a story about the ring itself?  No, Hal Jordan and his ring are one character, bound together in a fantastic bargain.  Just as you could take away the ring and still have Hal Jordan, you’d destroy both elements.  Nobody wants to read about Hal Jordan, test pilot.  So the ring might be the source of his power, but it’s also the source of his popularity.  It makes him magic, and without it, he’s not that interesting.

Same with Batman.  You could have the exact same character, but take away his utility belt, his cool car, his amazing skills, and set them at a reasonable level, then no one would give a darn about Bruce Wayne.  No one wants to read the story of a boy who loses his parents and then grows up to be a business tycoon.  No, what makes Batman worth reading about is everything magical about him.

I like magical characters.  I like it when they do magical things.  And if you’d rather not label him as such to enjoy his adventures, well, it’s all just semantics in the end.  But as a fantasy writer, I have no problem enjoying fantasy because it is fantastic.  And I find labels to be an obstacle toward embracing the joy that comes from enjoying a good fantasy, rather than allowing me to appreciate them.

Clearly though, this debate will not be settled here.  I’ve had it many times before, and rarely, if ever, make any traction.  Ultimately, we enjoy what we enjoy.  Whatever labels we’re comfortable using are just there for our own convenience.  So you can call Batman a fantastic character, or a realistic character, or an awesome character.  You can call him whatever you like.

But for me, Batman IS magic.  And he always will be.

Batman IS magic.

I suppose it’s a controversial observation, but indisputable.

This should be fairly obvious, but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway.  Superheroes are magic.  There is nothing truly realistic about them.  From their flimsy disguises to their amazing abilities to their absurd adventures, there’s no way around it.  Superheroes are fantasy, pure and simple.  And since Batman is a superhero he is, by default, a fantasy character too.

This truth is so self-evident that I sometimes have trouble debating it.  Because it’s just so glaringly obvious.  Is it really controversial to suggest that the rich guy who dresses up in a funny costume, drives around the city in a modified crimefighting hot rod, and beats up bad guys dressed like clowns and penguins is perhaps not a glowing example of realism in fiction?  Batman is part of the Justice League, for cryin’ out loud!  He goes to meetings on a space station.  Among his closest friends are an alien, an Amazon princess, and a space cop with a magic ring.  Yet somehow, we’re supposed to NOT believe Batman is magic?

That’s like arguing that Little Red Riding is not a fairy tale character.  Sure, she lives in a fairy tale world.  Yes, she takes part in a fairy tale adventure.  But she’s just a little girl in a red hood with nothing truly fantastic about her.  Therefore, she is not a fairy tale character.

Except, of course, that Batman is fantastic.  He can do anything, and he can do it better than most anyone else.  He wears a magic belt that is full of amazing gadgets.  He throws special weapons shaped like bats.  And he has a cape.  A cape!  What non-fantasy, non-magic character wears a cape?  Also, one of his Rogues Gallery is a scientist who used a special formula to transform himself into a bat monster.

For the love of Pete, the man has a Rogues Gallery!  No one in real life has ever had a Rogues Gallery!

There.  Case closed.  Let’s move on, shall we?

What’s interesting to me about The Batman Fallacy is that the mistake seems to come from a comparison of our ordinary universe to a fantastic one.  And the world of superheroes, despite its familiar, contemporary setting is not our world, but a fantastic version.  And if you don’t understand the differences between our world and superhero universe, you will naturally be confused.

In a superhero universe, it’s not uncommon for people to run around in funny costumes with absurd code names.  In real life, this would be bizarre.

In a superhero universe, people with amazing powers and abilities are not so unusual.  To see a man in blue and red fly through the sky is hardly surprising.

In superhero universes, criminals (even the more ordinary ones) tend to have colorful personalities and gimmicks.  And even if their skin is bleached white and they wear purple tuxedos, they somehow manage to tool around without immediately be caught by the police.

In a superhero universe, if you put on a domino mask, glasses, or even a cowl that covers half your face, it’s enough to disguise you.  Even if you hang out with the greatest detective in the world.

All fantasy is like this.  It has its own rules and as long as it plays by them, everything’s cool.  But when it breaks those rules . . . well . . . things can be confusing, even self-defeating.  Alan Moore’s Watchmen is an interesting deconstruction of the superhero genre, but at the same time, it really isn’t.  Because, aside from Dr. Manhattan, the superheroes of this universe are all just exceptional people.  They’re also exceptionally flawed, which in itself is a bit of a contradiction of the original superhero universe.  Moore’s Watchmen explores a different model of superheroes in a different universe.  While it’s an interesting story, it isn’t really a deconstruction of superheroes because most superheroes don’t live in that universe.  Or at least, they didn’t until fairly recently when a generation of writers decided that this was the way superheroes were supposed to be.

Moore’s work is, at least, thoughtful and consistent.  Whereas Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass is a convoluted, confusing mess of an idea.  It is both a deconstruction of superheroes and an homage to them.  Considering that half the time it says being a superhero is stupid and dangerous and the other half it’s suggesting that a small girl can dodge bullets and slice off limbs with a single swipe of a sword, I find it hard to say anything positive about the story.  Maybe it’s just the writer in me, but I can’t get around the contradictory nature of the tale.  I can’t both laugh at the absurdity of superheroes and then be expected to play along with it in the same moment.

So what’s my point?

Well, first up, let’s not confuse fantasy with reality.  To try and make Batman realistic, to interpret him in too realistic a manner, is to destroy the character and miss the point.

Secondly, I like that Batman is magic.  And most fans of Batman do too.

Even if they never realize it.

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.