For the next two weeks, and another week later on, I’m going
to poke and prod at the most common element of all fantasy novels: magic.
It’s the defining trait of fantasy, more than dragons and
more than knights and more than princesses. Magic comes in a dozen forms, with
a dozen ways to write it, describe it, show it, and mess it up completely.
I love fantasy. It’s my favorite genre, the genre I hope most
to be published in. One of my favorite parts of fantasy is the magic, and the
amount of diversity that comes with it.
So let’s jump right in.
What is Magic?
Next week, I’ll talk about Structured vs. Free-form, but this
week I wanted to take the time to really get into “what is magic”. And then in
a few weeks I’ll talk about actually writing
the magic into your story.
So what is magic? You can pull a handful of books of the
shelf that supposedly have magic in them, but there’s no real clear component that
says “magic” that runs through all of them. It’s not like dragons, where
something specific can be identified as “a dragon”, even if it looks a little
different every time.
Magic, in
essence, is something you cannot experience on our world because of the laws of
nature. Whether it defies the conservation of matter, ignores the
proportionality of density and weight, screws with entropy, or summersaults
around gravity, it could not take place in this world because this world does
not work that way.
For instance, an elemental form of magic in which the user
can summon a fireball from nothing breaks the laws of nature. It creates
energy, heat, and light with no discernable source. Even if the author attempts
to explain it, there’s not physical way for them to completely do so.
Telekinesis, telepathy, spells cast from wands, muttering
incantations to open doors that are invisible when closed and shine in the
moonlight, walking on top of snow even though you’re Orlando Bloom,
clairvoyance, elemental magic, and even “potions” are forms of magic because
they’re not possible in this world.
(I realize some might dispute a few of those more “mental”
forms of magic as being un-real, but this isn’t really the place for that. If
you really want to debate me on it, you can find my email on the “Contact”
page, and I’ll talk with you there. Yay.)
An author by the name of Daniel Schwabauer terms the magic of
fantasy as “Otherness”, and I think it’s a fantastic way to sort of describe
what magic is. It’s something Other. It’s foreign, unknown to us. Different.
Out there.
Other.
There’s literally no other limit you have in creating your
specific brand of magic. It’s just something that’s not possible in our world.
The Big Four
While magic is generally very diverse and unique to each case
(unless it’s a case of one case stealing from another case), there are a few
basic structures that magic follows:
-Incantational magic
requires spoken words. This is much like the spells in Harry Potter and much of the magic in Lord of the Rings. The person with the magical abilities says a specific
word or words to achieve some action or result. When you use this type of
magic, the possibilities are endless: all you have to do is come up with a
phrase and assign it to something you want your character to do. Summon a lightning
bolt in the middle of a blizzard to bury your foes in an avalanche? Saruman
knows the right words. Make an unconscious person float? It’s wingardium
leviOsa, not levioSA.
-Extrasensory
Perception is the most common magic in Urban Fantasy, but can also be found
elsewhere. It’s the kind of magic that is closest to our own world, because you’ll
find fringe science out there that delves into the possibility of telekinesis
and telepathy and clairvoyance. Regardless of its truth or untruth in our
world, it’s the sort of magic that can be used to great emotional and
conflict-creating affect.
-Mental Incantational
magic lies within the mind, but isn’t ESP. It’s much like incantational
magic, but requires only a mental sort of “grasping” at whatever sort of magic
there is. The best example of this would be the True Source in The Wheel of Time series by Robert
Jordan or Metallurgy in Mistborn by
Brandon Sanderson. It’s all within the mind, sometimes requires words (usually
thought, not spoken), and is usually more constrained than the Incantational
Magic. It’s often from an outside source that the character “connects” with
mentally.
-Exterior magic is
something outside of your characters which contains “magic”. A good
published example would be Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive and the “Stormlight” infused spheres which
convey the power to those who can use it. My recently finished novel Agram Awakens uses this sort of magic. The
“mystical object”, as it’s referred to, can be anything: a potion or a wand or
a broomstick or an ark of the covenant.
There are other, more specific types of magic that you might
bring up, such as elemental magic (your
standard go-to for online RPGs and RPG fanfiction… don’t ask me how I know,
10-year-old me was weird), mythological magic
(such as in Rick Riordan’s Percy
Jackson series), or even real magic
(communing with spirits… which is usually a frowned-upon magic in conservative
circles, and often the backdrop for horror stories in liberal circles). But the
four I outlined are the “big four”, the ones you’ll find in the majority of
fantasy novels out there.
The Importance of Developing Your Magic
There’s quite a bit of discussion (sometimes friendly, sometimes not) about how structured your magic system needs to be. I’ll talk a little bit about that (and how both ways can work well for your story) next Friday, but for now, I wanted to say this:
Using free-form magic doesn’t
excuse you from developing it. That would be like choosing not to develop a
character or not to form a plot. You still have to decide “okay, my characters
can do this with the magic”. Even if you don’t set strict boundaries like a
structured magic has: “you can’t do
this”, you still need that “can do”.
Your reader can tell when you’ve developed something. They know
the time and effort you’ve put into it. Because when you right it, a developed
magic system can shine as brightly as a well-developed character.
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