Breaking the rules of magic
Filed under Trends & Tropes on November 11, 2008
Tagged: fantasy fiction, magic
Top ten lists provide good fodder for blog posts. I came across a “top ten” rules of using magic in fantasy fiction article last week. While I’m all for magic-related rules that fantasy fiction writers should follow, a good writer learns how and when it’s appropriate to break the rules. I’ve broken several of the rules the author of the article listed, and disagree with a few others.
Whatever the good guys have, the bad guys still have a chance to beat them
A good conflict in fantasy fiction will create tension by making the reader believe there is always a chance the protagonist can fail. That doesn’t require both sides having access to magic, however. What if the antagonist is zealously anti-magic and the central conflict is their crusade to rid the world of all magic? I dealt with that issue somewhat in Maiden of Pain, though the Karanok family had access to divine magic, as opposed to arcane magic, which are considered two different systems in the Forgotten Realms.
The Children of Light from the Wheel of Time are perhaps a better example. Though they are not the central agents of conflict, and they suffer greatly when they make frontal assaults against opponents with magic, the Children do find success without the use of magic. So, it’s okay not to give magic to both sides, just be sure the other team still has a way to overcome that particular obstacle.
Magic can be good or evil
Magic is commonly depicted as a tool in fantasy fiction. It’s morally neutral, with no inherent nature of its own. Instead, it’s the characters’ use of it that is good or evil. In some cases, there might even be good magic and bad magic, but it’s pretty rare to find magic depicted as purely good or evil.
That’s a shame. You’re pushing yourself into a corner with a lot of other fantasy fiction if you fail to consider the potential of magic morality. I’ve chosen to make magic inherently evil in the Chronicles of Jord. It stems from a malevolent source, it corrupts those who use it, and it has been outlawed by the benevolent god and creator of the world. While it may appear to produce good in the short term, magic ultimately harms more than it helps.
Magic makes the story
Which brings me to my final point: magic, its use and the consequences of, can certainly be a central theme and plot path of your story. I read fantasy fiction for the magic. I expect it to be an integral part of the characters and/or their world. If I can yank the plot out and slap it into any other genre, sans magic, then the writer is treating it like an afterthought.
Shattered Amulet would not be a tale of Logan Shadowhand if it didn’t include his relationship with magic. Magic forces Logan to grow, provides motivation for key decisions within the story, and is the greatest source of internal conflict. It is so intricately woven into the setting and plot that removing it would unravel the whole.
What rules do you follow when writing about magic in fantasy fiction? What rules do you break?
November 12th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
My main rule of magic: it must be internally consistent. If someone declares a hard and fast limit to it, no just being able to sidestep that limit without any explanation or foreshadowing. (If, however, it’s already been implied that that rule can be broken, and it’s clear why whoever’s breaking the rule is doing so, I’ll give it a pass. Particularly if it’s a plot point in and of itself.)
I think that the writer was attempting to address a different issue in her Point #1 about magic and its role in the story: that of the general carelessness our genre seems to have drawn. My senior year in college, I took two semesters of creative writing. I spent the first semester in a subtle little battle with the professor, who forbade us from writing speculative fiction, or anything that could be described as “genre” really, until the advanced class (I dealt with it by fuzzing the line between genres, which I think was really good for my writing as a whole): at one point during the second semester, after someone had defined “literary fiction” as “not-genre”, I finally snapped and confronted her on why. It turned out that she’d had a number of students who seemed to think that writing speculative fiction gave them an excuse to not live up to the class’s standards, and she’d gotten sick of arguing with them. I wrote a riff on the subject here; dealing with the reputation of the genre is one of the reasons why I blog, and I feel rather strongly about this particular issue.
Though honestly, I agree with you–if it turns out the story is a typical [insert common plot here], only With Magic, I’m going to find something else to read. The story shouldn’t be the same. The magic should have shaped the world in such a way that the plot would be fundamentally altered by its absence.
November 13th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Good points, both Kameron and Ravyn.
Since the first time I posted my post got eaten by the ether monsters in the tubes, and I forgot to save it to my clipboard first, I’ll sum up:
I disagreed with most of the rules, finding some of them easily broken and a few flat out flawed, #1 being the worst of them. Tolkien’s LotR trilogy is a prime example of destroying the entire story by taking magic out of it. There WOULD be no story if the One Ring wasn’t magical and ultimately the reason for the entire journey.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:46 am
While I do agree with parts of what are being said here and on the page the “rules” came from, I must say: Tolkien’s LotR and other similiar stories would *still* be stories without magic. Just because there is magic doesn’t actually remove the idea that the stories are about joining forces with others, even those that are not the same as you, to battle against injustice or evil.
That is what the rule maker was trying to convey. The story must still exist. Magic is not the entire plot, it is merely a plot device to alter the story, or advance it in a way that previously tellings of similiar stories have not.