Comments on: Breaking the rules of magic

By: Urquhart

Urquhart — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:46:26 +0000

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.

By: Lukahn

Lukahn — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:27:46 +0000

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.

By: Ravyn

Ravyn — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:35:12 +0000

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.