Magic Breaks Stories: Can We Fix It?
Magic (with its hundred other pseudonyms) is the staple concept of fantasy. It’s the excuse for a thousand plots and the solution for a million problems. In some people’s minds, magic can do anything, solve any plot hole, fill any gap. The fact that dragons exist, they say, justifies any contrivance, nullifies any improbability or impossibility, up to and including must-have-been-teleporting armies1. Every sane author and reader, of course, can point out the problem with that: magic doesn’t do everything. Magic does what the story says it can do, no more and no less; if no magic suitable to teleporting an army has been established, the army should not be teleporting. This answer, however, has jumped straight to (half of) the solution; what’s the problem in the first place? What pitfalls exist in magic for the aspiring author to contend with?
The problems of magic come in three flavors:
First, cheapness. Sometimes magic solves problems too well. Consider what The Lord of the Rings would have been like if Frodo had been teleported from Hobbiton straight to the center of Mount Doom. Barring Sauron being actually in the forge at that time, the story would have ended almost before beginning; the conflict would die. Difficulty and danger are the life-bread of the story, the necessary ingredients which turn ‘and-therefore-then’ into an actual story, one people can care about. When magic can solve the problem without danger, it’s a deus ex machina2, a story-killer.
Second, plot holes. When magic could have solved the problem or should have solved the problem, but it didn’t, that’s a plot hole. Imagine a world where the Council at Rivendell knows the One Ring exists, knows what its destruction would do, and never even bothers to address it, whether to destroy or to use. Imagine a world where magic swords are readily available (and the only magic humans can use), but nobody ever suggests using them on the enemy who can only be harmed by magic. The plot of the story loses its coherence, both internally and apparently3. This fault can even have metaphorical children. If a character has an ability or resource or skill which would be useful and does not use it, a reason must be provided, whether of practicality (it wouldn’t actually work, and he knows that) or of character (he swore never to use the edge of a blade in anger; because he is angry, therefore, he will not use his magic sword). Otherwise the reader will either find a reason on his own (the hero, for some reason, just didn’t care about the baby being eaten; that’s why he didn’t cast Fireball) or realize that, well, the reason doesn’t exists and the author was just lazy (he didn’t cast Fireball because re-drafting that scene would be too much work). Alternatively, he may just get frustrated, arguing that the only reason magic isn’t solving all the problems is that the characters are unbelievably stupid.
Third, dissonance. Magic, improperly handled, can create tonal or thematic disruptions. Imagine, for example, a children’s story about Suzy and her friends using their magical shovels to make the perfect garden. Now imagine that the shovels are powered by burning infants on an altar to Moloch (or visiting the local abortion clinic; they’re much the same, theologically). The magic system does not line up with the tone of the story. Or imagine Lord of the Rings, but Gandalf’s stand against the Balrog requires him to recite a limerick running, ‘There once was a man from Gondor, who thought he would ride on a condor…” and finish the rhyme with a falsetto ‘bippity-boppity-boo’. Any reader not on an extensive regimen of drugs would recognize this tonal divergence as a sign either of tampering with his copy of the book or a truly impressive case of self-sabotage by the author. Furthermore, magic can cause theological problems. Even leaving aside the thematic problems which character distortions (outlined above) can produce by making the character the story wants you to imitate into a moral villain (e.g. turning the hero into the type of person who stands aside while babies are slaughtered), we have problems like resurrection magic. In numerous magic systems, flat-out resurrection, resurrection without any origin in God, is perfectly possible. The theological problems inherent to this assertion are many, the first of which is a denial of the ultimacy of God’s power in respect to sin, of which death is a consequence (resurrection being, of course, the reflection of forgiveness, being to it as death is to sin).
So, we’ve got real problems. Our plots, our characters, our themes, all of these are at risk (from magic, from setting). The answer is twofold: coherence and fittingness. The first solves the problems of cheapened and broken plots; the second deals with dissonance.
What is coherence? A coherent magic system possesses logic consistency with itself in its abilities and limits, in the relation between its causes and those properties, in the relation between all its parts- users, powers, inabilities, origins, results, side-effects, etc. This internal consistency, however, is not the whole body of the necessary coherence. The magic must interconnect with the world it exists in in a logical and (so far as is shown or implied) understood4 way. In some instances, this interconnection only appears at certain points, as with a traditional fairy tale wherein castles, forests, and objects may be magical but the world outside of these odd instances runs along mundane rails (though the story is all about those mundane rails being torn up and played with before an altered and exalted mundanity returns5); in some, the magic is inextricably integral to nearly everything in the world- Narnia, for example.
This coherence solves the problem of cheapened plots. Because the magic has known rules, it cannot solve the plot as a deus ex machina, provided you’ve made the plot and the magic to fit. If it can still solve the plot so, either the plot or the magic needs re-jiggering to remove this flaw, but the path to that result is now open, as the magic has a logical corpus to grapple with. Likewise, because magic has known rules, the reader can predict what it can and cannot do, can predict what he can expect. Some surprises will still exist, but because these must be consistent with what has come before, both in the magic system and without, he can understand those surprises as natural growths of what he already knew, can assume that what came before has not been invalidated and what will come next will remember the previous. This fix leads straight into the second set of problems coherence solves. By making the magic system consistent (and the world’s connection to it likewise), you eliminate the plot holes which appear where the magic should have solved (or caused) problems6. Characters will have established capabilities and established relationships with those capabilities; they will not therefore be mis-portrayed by an inconsistent magic.
One caveat must be stated here. Coherence in your mind and coherence in the audience’s mind are two different things, and often are better remaining so. How much of the magic’s rules needs to be explained and how much of the character’s abilities needs to be known to the reader are not questions for today, but they are questions you must answer7. Generally speaking, you will know more about how the magic works than your reader; sometimes, you will have to explain effectively the entire corpus, and sometimes you’ll only have to explain peripheral parts. Some general principles to keep in mind (partially derived from Branon Sanderson’s Laws of Magic8): you can use what the reader knows to solve problems, what he will accept to make problems, and what he doesn’t have a clue about to start the story.
Fittingness means that the magic system coordinates with the stories tone and theme, that it fits. To a lesser extent, it means that it fits with everything that communicates that tone and theme, the rest of the story. To say that it solves the problem of dissonance, therefore, is almost saying that ‘making it consonant makes it not dissonant’. The concept is nevertheless important, however unhelpful it may seem. The magic system must intuitively fit the world, tonally and thematically. Note that the fit should be intuitive after both world and magic system are created; the magic system does not have to rise from the world via intuition. Think of it like a puzzle: you may not know what the next piece looks like, but once you’ve found it and put it in place (coherence) you can tell that it obviously belongs. For example, Aragorn’s ability to heal (or speed the healing) of evil-corrupted wounds fits with Tolkien’s world, thematically and tonally, simultaneously cohering with its symbolism9 (and the symbolism of the milieu it draws upon) and operating along a tonal line harmonic with the mythic-poetic tone10 of the story as a whole. A well-fitted magic system should be to the story (in tone, theme, and everything else) what harmony is to melody in the most consonant strains of classical music11.
In sum, for today, magic systems can cause problems, but these problems are fixable. Improperly aligned magic can cheapen plots, removing the stakes or rendering the audience unable to parse what the current events actually mean for the story’s future. It can slaughter plots and characters, opening up unanswered (or worse, unanswerable) questions of ‘why didn’t this happen?’ and ‘why didn’t this solve the problem of the plot?’ while also painting characters as other than what the author wishes them to be. It can clash fatally with the tone and theme of the story, breaking the effect and muddling the morals. The solution comes in two parts (two parts which, honestly, are sides of the same coin12): coherence and fittingness. Simply put, the logic and the timbre of the magic must coordinate with the story, to lift it higher and be lifted in turn. Thus the story will be better for its magic and not worse.
God bless.
Footnotes
1 – Continuing my tendency to reference shows I’ve never watched but have seen reviews of, please welcome last season Game of Thrones. I don’t recommend watching it- unlike the early seasons (I’ve heard), it’s not just morally reprehensible but artistically so.
2 – This article has a good explanation of why readers need to be able to have expectations of the story; jump here for the most direct reference.
3 – Even if their is actually an explanation for the magic, you’re going to have to expend much of the reader’s faith in you in order to get them to believe that, unless you actually include a hint at the explanation. This is where foreshadowing and its relatives (subtle worldbuilding, for instance) come into play.
4 – The interconnection can be incomprehensible or beyond-man’s-ability-to-comprehend as long as it is so intentionally, in a way consistent with the rest of the world, and so long as this connection, along with the rest of the magic, fulfils the second criterion.
5 – Hopefully I’ll get around to analyzing this someday.
6 – If you do, the magic isn’t yet coherent with itself or the world or the characters.
7 – These two sources are a good start: [Brandon Sanderson’s First Law of Magic] [Storycraft: 3 Types of Magic Systems – David Stewart]
8 – Which are, I think, fundamentally correct, though not always the rules that should be applied to a given story. They fail somewhat in addressing what I term ‘theological’ soft magic, at least if interpreted by the letter rather than the idea.
9 – For the hand of the true king to bring healing is a reflection of the king’s role, in much of Western thought, as the father of his people- the one who heals the country’s wounds and guides it on its way. It can also be seen as a reflection of Romans 13:1-7, in the punishing of evil (in the wound) and the rewarding of good (healing the faithful).
10 – What could perhaps be termed ‘the timbre of faery’, in reference to On Faery Stories, an essay I will probably cite in over 50% of my blog posts. Consider also, ‘The Smith of Wootton Major’ available here on PDF (Free!) or here in print.
11 – I’m thinking here of Vivaldi, not Liszt, Chopin, or one of the other (immensely skilled) lovers of pleasant dissonance. Also, please ignore polyphony, for the purposes of the illustration. Or don’t; maybe the thought will bring you somewhere interesting.
12 – As you may have noticed. In all honestly, I hesitated to separate them, ultimately deciding that the emphases were large enough to merit it. Coherence is about logic; fittingness is about intuition. Do one well enough and the other follows, so long as your application is wholistic. The dichotomy can also be though of in terms of hard v soft magic. Hard magic emphasizes and is built upon coherence (with a dash of fittingness) while soft magic (at least in my conception) emphasizes and is built out of fittingness (with a necessary undergirding and superstructure of coherence).
