On Writing Magic

Whenever you're writing a story you're going to have some fantastic elements in it. A novel of cops and robbers, for example, will include a mafia with its own customs and hierarchy. You, as an author, will have to introduce your reader to this world, even if your reader is a schoolteacher from Kansas. There's nothing magical about a mob (or at least most mobs), but it will operate according to rules that need explaining. I'm referring to all that as magic. A wizard's fireball? Magic. A lightsaber? Magic. James Bond's car ejection seat? Magic—even though the Mythbusters built a working model. Got it? Let's dig in.

Characterizing a Magic System

Using my loose definition, almost every story has a magic system. This system consists of the rules your characters follow when determining what they can and can't do with magic. (And yes, there are things magic can't do. Plenty about that as we go.)

• A magic system gives your hero (or villain) certain capabilities. Liam Neeson has "a certain set of skills" that help him recover kidnapped loved ones. The same story told about a nobody from nowhere, he won't have access to that same magic.
• A magic system has to be explained to the audience. At the start of most Bond movies, Q gives him a briefing about his gadgets. When his pen explodes later we'll want to know why. The explanation needn't be long; the word "starship" or "werewolf" or "tequila" can convey most of the exposition by itself.
• There are problems the magic system can't solve, or can't solve immediately. If Sherlock Holmes can deduce the answer to every case just by reading the newspaper story about a crime, then you won't be telling very interesting stories.
• Applications of the magic system will sometimes work and sometimes fail. A cop may use his badge to convince some witnesses to talk to him, but not every witness will be so obliging. Some may react poorly to the badge.

These properties needn't all be present. I'm not describing a universal pattern inherent in storytelling here, merely providing a model which might help your thinking.

The Disenchanted Reader

There are two basic problems with writing about magic. The first is that half of your potential readers have put down your book as soon as they've seen a dragon on the cover. They've been burned before by fantasy. However interested you are in the rules of magic, they don't care. The second problem is the readers who are way too interested in magic. Sure, they'll buy your book on the strength of the cover spaceship, but they'll also buy from every other hack writer out there. That floods the market with pulp imitations; the kind of stuff that has driven away the first class of readers. (These effects are multiplicative, by the way. For every kid who goes bug-eyed to find a story about dragons fighting starships, you'll have a jaded reader deciding that book burnings have something to be said for them after all.)

Tastes vary. In principle, boy meets girl is a universal theme. As Dooley Wilson sings, "It's just the same old story". You ought to be able to write that story in a dragon-blasted countryside or on the moons of Jupiter. We all have our limits though. I'll give you an example. One Day on Mars, by Travis S. Taylor. It's a story about a war between the planets, with mechs and spaceships exploding and AI-to-brain interface links. I almost put the book down. Not because of that, but because I was worried he'd make the spunky girl reporter asking tough questions of the government the heroine. Some things I can allow for the sake of the story. Other things are just too dang implausible.

These aren't problems that admit of a solution. Your story will be caught between the Scylla of driving away one class of readers and the Charybdis of disappointing the other. The only thing you can do is make your writing as good as you can, which you ought to be doing anyway.

Soft and Hard Magic

Any magic system includes things that are possible and things that aren't possible. Gandalf is a wizard but he can't just magic the One Ring out of existence. If he could, then we wouldn't have a story; at least no story worth telling. The question here is how thoroughly you're going to explain your magic system to the reader. A soft magic system leaves more options open, whereas a hard magic system allows your reader to work out possibilities and ideas for themselves. More commonly you'll hear of hard and soft science fiction. That's the special case where the magic system involved is the laws of physics as we know them.

Let me stress right away that this isn't a question with a right answer; there are absolutely times when a soft magic system is superior, and vice versa.

Gandalf is probably the best example of a soft magic system. What exactly can that wizard do? He's good with fire, we've got several examples of that. He knows other spells too; he tried opening charms on the doors of Moria without success, and later cast a spell to close a door, which might have even worked if he hadn't been facing a balrog. We know there are limitations on Gandalf, but we the readers never get a measure of them.

On the hard magic side, consider the powers of the One Ring. You wear it, it makes you invisible. You're still detectable by other senses, you'll still bump into things, and you'll cast a shadow in sunlight. That's a very hard magic system right there. When the dwarves are trapped in the Elf King's halls Bilbo can use the ring to get himself out, but we as readers know that he'll have to find an escape route for his friends. When the story moves from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings the magic gets a little softer (we don't know what precisely would happen were Gandalf or Galadriel or Sauron or even Boromir to take up the Ring, but we know it would be bad), but for the most part, the rules relating to the ring remain predictable.

Got that? Let's look at this concept as it applies to things that aren't fantasy. The McGuffin in a movie is absolutely a soft magic system. Alfred Hitchcock describes his character as an exporter and importer of government secrets. Which secrets? What happens if they get out? We don't know, but we don't want it to happen. That's enough to drive the plot. On the other hand, real-world rules act as a hard magic system. Imagine a sports movie where the hero team almost loses but at the last second, the ref awards them ten extra points. The story isn't satisfying because the authors arbitrarily broke the rules of a system that we all know. (But what about sci-fi? Shouldn't soft science fiction be a contradiction in terms because physics is physics? Yes, but fiction is still fiction. Every time a starship jumps to hyperspace it breaks the rules. We don't know of any hyperspace for it to jump to, or how it would do it, or what that would mean for the folks on board. But you've got to tell a story.)

Let's dig a little deeper into what the idea of a soft or hard magic system can do for your writing.

Sanderson's Laws

I admit it, I'm a Brandon Sanderson fanboy. He developed these laws when he was thinking through his writing technique and for his own use. I find them to be good ways of understanding magic systems; what you can get away with and what you can't. Per my definition above they apply to far more than the epic fantasy genre and the literal magic that he likes. Oh, and like all artistic rules, they come with the unstated caveat "... unless you can make it work." (I'm putting my own paraphrase on his laws here.)

Sanderson's First Law: Your character's ability to solve problems with magic directly relates to how well the audience understands that magic.

People hate magic stories — the sort of people who hate magic in stories, that is — because they're always expecting the storyteller to cheat. A deus-ex machina comes down to solve the problem with magic, and everything's better. Imagine Wolverine from the X-Men. Magneto has him trapped, wrapped up in metal such that he can't move his arms. He could cut through his bonds with his claws except that he can't position those claws. But what's this? He wildly mutates, gaining the powers of the Incredible Hulk. He turns large and green, bursting out of his confines. Even better, his Hulk flesh shields his adamantium bones from Magneto's influence, so he quickly pummels the shocked villain into submission. Best superhero story ever, amirite?

No, because I just cheated twice to get Wolverine out of his predicament. First by spontaneously granting him new powers, and second by arbitrarily weakening the villain. It ensures the story ends well for the good guys, but does so at the expense of cheapening every other story I might tell with those characters. If you find yourself beset by authors who are cheating for you, know that it's possible to love a story again, but you'll need to get out of that toxic relationship first.

Now take that same scene again. Instead of Wolverine mutating his way out, what if Cyclops, trusting in Wolverine's healing factor to keep him alive, hits him with his laser eye beams and blasts his bonds? It's just as much superhero nonsense to solve the problem, but it's a more satisfying solution because it relies on things we already know are possible (in this universe). It doesn't cheapen any other stories; it even adds the potential for more drama in the Cyclops-Wolverine relationship. That's something you'll frequently find. The more attention you pay to keeping your magic system in line the more opportunities you'll stumble on for good storytelling.

Sanderson's Second Law: Limitations are more interesting than powers.

There's a truism in the writing advice world that considers Superman a bad character. You put a gangster with a gun up against Batman; the gangster has a chance because the gun poses a threat to Batman. Superman doesn't have that. Shooting his eyeball might make him blink, but that Tommy gun ain't doing anything else for ya. The writers get around this by pointing the gun at Lois Lane, or pulling in Kryptonite, or by using Lex Luthor to confound the Man of Steel rather than punch him directly. "Here's a bad guy! Superman punches him. Here's another bad guy! Superman punches him too!" Might work for kids, but not for very long.

That said, I disagree with the received wisdom. Superman has been an enduring figure for years because sometimes you just want to see him punching bad guys. If in the last section you were thinking, "I'd like to see that Wolver-Hulk scene play out," this one's for you. We go to the theater to see James Bond win. He might theoretically be more interesting with a deeply flawed character, but the audience would walk out. More than most laws, this one is overruled by cool. If it's cool enough, the audience will be there for you regardless.

Heroes have to struggle against something. A limited magic system is more interesting because it provides more chances for the hero to struggle. Every werewolf has strength, speed, teeth and claws, and incidentally, wolf form makes a pretty convincing disguise. His story is mostly about other things. The uncontrollable rage. The involuntary transformation at the full moon. The terror about what he might do when he's lost control. A werewolf who's a villain becomes more terrifying because of these traits. A werewolf hero will spend most of his story in dread of what havoc he might unintentionally wreak. A werewolf who suffers none of these limitations is a superhero by another name.

(A quick note on werewolves. Magic systems require extra exposition. Saying "werewolf" covers a great deal of explaining in one word, but that comes with costs in turn. Everyone's already familiar with the dramatic arc of the werewolf. If they're the monsters, the audience at home knows how to fight them already. If you take an off-the-shelf Dracula for a villain, then expect garlic mentioned in the kitchen to be about as subtle as a fire alarm.)

Sanderson's Third Law: Do more with what you have.

There's always a temptation to add something new to your magic system. Resist that temptation. Take the original Star Trek as an example. Once you've introduced the transporter (for entirely understandable budgetary reasons), you'll be amazed at how many stories can be resolved by the clever use of teleportation. Or time travel. Or mind reading, or shapeshifting, or any number of types of magic that get out of hand fast. These are all magic systems that are, if you'll allow the phrase, self-hardening. Once you've taught the audience that time machines exist you find them asking, "But why don't you go back and solve things before the problem started?" There are a couple of answers to that question, but none are very satisfying.

Instead, spend more time with rules your audience already knows. If your hero can solve problems in ways that they could have figured out they will think your hero clever rather than your story contrived. Take the Bridge of Death from Monty Python's Holy Grail. The rules are established and we see the implications played out and the clever way the situation is resolved. The only thing that's not clever about it is how often you've heard the exact words repeated over and over by nerds. (I apologize to everyone I knew in Junior High.)

Suppose you wanted to write a robot apocalypse war. The Terminator but without time travel. You've got scrappy underdog humans fighting mass-produced mayhem machines. That's enough for a fine action movie; enjoy the popcorn, go home and never think of it again. Take it one step further. Instead of Kirking the robots with a paradox or spin-moving their mothership, what if you treated them like actual robots? Spend some hours on Grok or what have you talking to an AI, get a real good feel for what kinds of questions it can answer and what it cannot. Then write your movie with the robots facing those same limitations. Your underdog resistance will have the chance to adapt and attack the robots from unusual angles. You'll have a compelling, consistent story about how the underdog can actually beat an overwhelming foe. Your readers will be engaged because they can understand the tactics your heroes are using. And don't neglect the lasers and sweet explosions; those are important too.

Sanderson's Zeroeth law: Remember why you started.

It's possible to overdo a magic system on all these fronts. If you're too thorough in explaining your magic to the readers, they'll get bored and wander off before you get to the point where you can solve problems with it. You can write a hero who's so limited by his crippling emotional problems that he's no fun to read about. And if you constrain yourself too much by what your magic system is capable of, you cut yourself off from many potential storylines. (Good luck building a galaxy-spanning empire without hyperspace.)

If your magic system never makes the audience say "interesting" or (heaven forfend) let off a juvenile, two-syllable "Coooool!" then you're doing something wrong. If you give your hero magic powers that are too limited to actually accomplish anything useful, then why even bother? On the other end of believability, imagine a legal thriller where no one ever does anything illegal. That book is describing — at best — a chess game, which will be interesting to other aficionados of the sport but not to the general public. If a kid picks up a book with an exploding spaceship on the cover he's going to want to read about exploding spaceships, not an explanation of why, actually, individual space fighter craft don't make economic sense.

Remember why you started. Write a book that someone will love, even if it means you have to break the rules.