The Writer's
Attic
Issue
Twelve
The Art of Magic
Disclaimer: I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Any advice/opinions in this column come straight from my own experience which is not all-encompassing and may not necessarily apply to you. I do not guarantee success with my methods. Everyone's different, and everyone has their own writing styles, which may or may not apply only to them. With that in mind, I hope something I say is of use to you, and that you enjoy reading my column.
Note: I don't know what is going to happen with the column upload. I'm thinking of trying to get a website going so that I can run this column in a form that is a little easier to access. Would anyone be interested in reading The Writer's Attic offsite?
Quote of the Month:
"The
universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to
grow sharper."
--Eden
Phillpotts
Book
of the Month:
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This is the first Writer's Attic book
recommendation by a Nobel prize-winning author . . . boy, is it
overdue. I chose this book to fit in with this month's topic:
magic. It uses magic realism, which is discussed below in the
Workbench.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a touch of
senility, a lot of confusion, and not a little sadness. It's hard
to tell just whose story Marquez intended to tell—that of the
Buendia family, or of the town Macondo that they founded. It
follows the family through three or four generations, obsessions,
deaths, loves, and everything else under the sun. It follows the
village through it's hundred years of solitude, cut off from the
outside world—before death reaches the village until the last
member of the Buendia family dies, knowing that there are no second
chances.
I won't lie—this book is very hard to follow,
because Marquez writes with a stream-of-consciousness style. His
timeline is all over the place, and it certainly doesn't help that
most of the members of the family have the same name. However, if
you can stick with it, it's well worth the effort. It is by turns
absurd and heartwrenching—and when you reach the end, you'll be
sorry there isn't any more.
The Writer's Workbench:
We'll take a look at two subtopics today—magic for fantasy writers (the "real", wandwaving stuff), and afterwards magic realism, for those of us who prefer the more mundane genres.
Section I: Abracadabra!
"It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules."--Eric Burns
That, in a
nutshell, is what I am going to tell you today. First I wrote a
whole lot of stuff that I thought was useful and possibly even
insightful, and then I found that quote, which summed it all up in
three short sentences. I've found that, most of the time, if you
think you have something profound and/or interesting to say, you will
discover, on saying it, that a) nobody cares anyway or b) it has
already been said, either by somebody far more awe-inspiring that
you, or, occasionally, by you yourself. The point of all of this is
. . . I could really just stop here, but then I wouldn't get to
write anything, this wouldn't be much of an issue, and the
probability of my boring you so much that you actually decide to go
out and write would drop severely. This, I'm sure we can all see,
would not do at all.
Let's
start at the very beginning—with the creation of your world. If
you're writing fantasy, chances are that magic is going to be a
focus of your novel. Now, before anyone calls me out over that one,
yes, it is conceivable that you can have fantasy without magic, but
since I can't think of any examples at the moment, we'll ignore
the possibility and continue.There are several decisions that need to be made
about magic. These generally relate to the characteristics of your
world. As regards people—what kind live here? How does magic
shape who they are? Who has magic, and who does not? How does that
affect their interactions? For example, for a story set in our
world, you would need to decide whether magic is hidden, or secret,
or blatant. In an alternate world, aside from the aforementioned
question of whether there is magic at all, you will, as I have said,
need to decide who has it, and what kind of magic it is. If it is
extremely strong and/or prevalent, it is likely to exert its
influence on the social structure in your world—powerful
wizards/magicians/sorcerers are in charge of the government, and
weaker magic users are peasants (or some analogue of peasants). In
the case of omnipresent magic, local customs are also likely to be
structured around it. On the other hand, what if magic is bad? Is
it accepted? Or are the people in your world trying to stamp it out?
If magic is perceived as "bad," does it help or hinder your
protagonist?
Once
you know these types of things, you have to implement your magic
carefully. It must fit seamlessly into your world. For example, in
a "real world" story, you will need to have some sort of
explanation for why regular people (i.e., you and me) don't have
any idea, or, for the most part, believe that there is magic. The
Harry Potter books are this kind of story—"muggles" go
out of their way to invent logical explanations for magical
happenings. Not to step on any toes here, but this has always stuck
me as a rather weak explanation. Maybe you can do better.
And
then, of course, there is the question of how your protagonist
discovers magic. If he/she has always known about it, then magic
should not be a large part of his/her quest or journey—it's
nothing special to the main character, and it is therefore nothing
special to the reader. With this type of augmented "real world"
story, the common (and generally successful) approach is to have the
protagonist discover magic during the initial part of the story.
Examples of this include, of course, Harry Potter, So You
Want to Be a Wizard, and, to some extent, The Neverending
Story. You don't, of course, need to explain everything from
the get-go—but for this kind of story, magic is what makes it
exciting, and your readers will be asking all the questions they can
think of. Your story, eventually, should attempt to answer all the
obvious ones unobtrusively.
For an
alternative world, of course, the implementation is slightly
different. You need to establish what kind of a factor magic is. To
put it in a clichéd manner—magic is as magic does—that is,
the magic and the way it is used need to fit together. To illustrate
this point, if everyone in your world has magic and the same basic
abilities with magic, then that magic, clearly, is not what
distinguishes your protagonist and can hardly be what makes him or
her successful. It's simply background. If, however, your
protagonist comes from one of the few races with intrinsic and/or
powerful magic, or is the only one in his/her family to have magic,
then it makes him or her special, and would understandably be key to
his or her success.
In any
case, the most important thing is to have some logical framework for
everything that you are creating. At first glance, it might seem
contradictory to ground the fantastic in logic, but it is logic,
ultimately, that grants believability, and it is believability that
is key to successful fantasy. Bear in mind the idiom—there's no
such thing as free lunch.
Magic
simply cannot be allowed to do everything. If it could, then Gandalf
could have transported the One Ring straight into the fires of Mount
Doom without all that mucking about with orcs, Saruman, Gollum, etc,
Frodo would still have had his fingers . . . and no one would be
reading Lord of the Rings today. It simply wouldn't work.
If you can
just snap your fingers and make things happen . . . it is, frankly,
boring. For anyone who has seen the new Bewitched, it is for
precisely this reason that it's not at all a good movie. Nicole
Kidman waves her hands and creates money, cars, and ideas in the
minds of others. This doesn't make sense. If she creates money,
doesn't somebody notice that there's more in the system than
there was before? Shouldn't this create the same kind of problem
as counterfeit? We could go on . . .
In
essence, up must remain up, and down down. Magic, as Mr. Burns said,
must have a price. Most writers end up equating magic and energy—the
difficulty of a spell is directly related to the energy required to
perform it, which, in turn, is directly proportional to the results
of performing it. This sounds like physics, and is therefore
believeable—it appeals to our sense of how reality functions.
So, you
need laws even for imagination? Exactly.
Think
like a kid: "If you pull the covers up over your head, the Bogeyman
can't get you!" "If you break a mirror, you'll have seven
years' bad luck." (Incidentally, I only have on year's worth
left.) You get the picture. You can have any sort of system you
like—there's a wide range of choices out there—from more
natural, Wicca-type forms, to Garth Nix's "charter," to Robert
Jordan's saidar/saidin (which, in my humble opinion, is the
only thing about the Wheel of Time that was well done). The
point is, once you have a system and laws, you need to stick to them.
Break a spell in the middle, and it snaps your fingers like a
rubberband. Try to work untrained, lose control. Stop a storm from
hitting you—exchange it with the weather in Cancun.
As
readers, we want to enjoy your story, and we will willingly suspend
disbelief. We will accept that there is magic, that carpets can fly
if you try hard enough, and that your molecules can disappear from
one place and simultaneously appear in another. We will never,
however, suspend logic. You can't sit comfortably on the underside
of the carpet as it flies through the air, and you can't appear in
a new place without disappearing from the old one. Logic, for good
or evil, is part of who we are as human beings—and must, therefore,
be part of what we create.
Section II: Magic Realism
Like metaphor or synecdoche, magic realism is a
device which is used to tell part or all of a story. It is very
effective when used correctly, but is (of course!) quite difficult to
use correctly. It is a little like a daydream or a dream sequence to
read—magic realism is when extraordinary, supernatural, and/or
impossible things happen in an otherwise realistic work of fiction.
The term was coined in the 1920s by a German art
critic seeking to describe a certain style of painting, and has since
been associated with the work of Latin-American novelists such as
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. However, it has also been used by authors
from a wide range of countries, including Isabel Allende, Franz
Kafka, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, and Milan Kundera. In
Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (this month's
book), an unearthly character rises up to heaven while hanging out
the washing. In Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, two men fall
from a burning aeroplane singing to one another, and land on a beach
in England to become, respectively, a demon and an angel—mimicking,
to some extent, the fall of Lucifer.
As you might have gathered from the above
examples, this technique is used to describe something of great
significance—to make it clear that an event is incredible or
important, or perhaps excessively emotional. Kundera, who writes
largely from personal experience of Czechoslovakia during the Russian
takeover, usually uses it for this last purpose. The unbelievable
quality lent by magic realism adds a dimension to an experience that
mimics human emotions that might otherwise be impossible to portray.
Although a fantastic event is described as though it is actually
happening, magic realism is usually a kind of extended metaphor.
People achieving enlightenment float off into the sky and are never
heard from again, a murderer holds nightly conversations with death
in the form of his dead victims.
As I have said, it is difficult to use magic
realism effectively, so there are some things to remember. For it to
succeed, a writer must maintain a distance from the events he or she
is describing—fantastic events must be told in a deadpan fashion.
If the telling becomes emotional on the part of the teller, the scene
becomes redundant and loses its power. At the same time, distance
must not be confused with ridicule. If it sounds as though you are
skeptical or think what you are writing is ridiculous or
preposterous, your readers will think so, too, and wonder why you
bothered.
Magic realism is, in fact, quite a controversial
label. Some believe that it constitutes an established (or possibly
emerging) genre, while others claim it is little more than a highbrow
name for fantasy. For those who are interested in my opinion—having
read Marquez, Kundera, and Rushdie, I would argue that magic realism
is a valid concept. It is not yet perhaps a fully-fledged genre, but
it is certainly an existing technique, and, to my mind, an effective
one.
The
Social Commentary:
I was
going to talk about the brouhaha going on in Kansas right now over
biology textbooks . . . but then I thought that the easiest way to
share my opinion on that issue without ticking people off explicitly
(I'm sure I'll manage it anyway) is to share with you something I
wrote a few weeks ago:
The Evolution
there was a
man who
had a lot of
funny ideas about
the way the
world worked, and
more
specifically, how
wethepeople
came to be
and because
he was, after all
more than a
little ridiculous
they laughed
at him and didn't
bother to
burn his books
which might
have been a mistake
in the long
runbecause by
the time it got to
let's amend
theconstitution
and we don't
necessarily hold these truths to be
selfevident
anymore there had
already been
a big fuss
about the
monkeyman in the
south
somewhere
and this time
nobody said that it
wasn't
important
and
eventually they all forgot
just how
funny it had been to
begin with
and
justliveandletlive
people
went ahead
and started to think maybe
he had a
point before
they were
convinced that it was
all too
dangerous
and just the
other day
somebody said
if
there really
was an
intelligentdesigner
and if the
universe didn't just
bigbanglookhereiam
then they
probably would have
given Kansas
a
better
boardofeducation
and if, as
the wise men
say, man
indeed created god
in a
proofdeniesfaith sort of way
then what is
religion
really but an
advanced and somewhat
complicated
form of narcissism?
The Glossary:
Sort of a weird glossary this time—more of an index. I listed a few authors up above, so I thought I might name some of their books in case anyone is interested in reading:
Isabel Allende—The House of Spirits, The Infinite Plan, My Invented Country, City of the Beasts, Zorro
Franz Kafka—The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Castle, Amerika (this is a collection of short stories)
Doris Lessing—The Sweetest Dream, The Fifth Child, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (part of the Canopus in Argos—Archives Quintet)
Salman Rushdie—The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Midnight's Children, Shame, Fury
Milan Kundera—The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Joke (a personal favourite), Laughable Loves
Insomniacs Central:
I didn't receive any responses to last month's challenge, which I guess is understandable, as the column is up in a somewhat weird form. As a result, I don't really have anything to put here, so I'll leave last month's challenge open and also issue a new one for anyone whose interest might have been caught by this month's Workbench.
Option 1: For the fantasy side of things, I'd love to hear about your "system" of magic. In your story, novel, epic, etc, how does magic work? Who uses it? How do they use it? Is it hard to use or easy? And so on . . . If you haven't worked one out already, make one up! After all, that's what it's all about.
Option 2: If magic realism sounds like an interesting style to you, send in a passage that uses it to enhance some sort of intensely emotional or similar situation.
Enjoy!
The
Microphone:
Excellent essay. I've been reading your column for a long time, but haven't commented. The guilt is overbearing, and the review button for a story doesn't intimidate as much, so here I am. Commenting ... yes...
I was very pleased to see someone touch on the issue of people and their lacking usage of their own language. Quite honestly, it's only slightly pathetic that people fail to understand the major way they communicate with one another. More than once I've ventured among the fiction on this site, and have been sorely disappointed. People need to understand not only the intelligence that knowing the English language gives, but also the ability in which they can affect people when they use it. It's quite amusing to amaze another individual by speaking articulately.
Ah ... self-release, that above ringding is ... I apologize. Really, I'm just expressing my gratitude for this very interesting article. I very much appreciated it. Until your next addition, I suppose. Ta!
Yes.
Verbal jabs . . . are the best kind.
Touchstone,
from
"Touchstone: I did dislike the cut of a certain courtier's beard. He sent me word if I said his beard was not well cut, he was in the mind it was. This is called the Retort Courteous. If I sent him word again it was not well cut, he would send me word he cut it to please himself. This is called the Quip Modest. If again it was not well cut, he disabled my judgement. This is called the Reply Churlish. If again it was not well cut, he would answer I spake not true. This is called the Reproof Valiant. If again it was not well cut, he would say I lie. This is called the Countercheck Quarrelsome. And so to the Lie Circumstantial, and the Lie Direct.
Jaques: And how oft did you say his beard was not well cut?
Touchstone: I durst go no further than the Lie Circumstantial, nor he durst not give me the Lie Direct; and so we measured swords, and parted.
Jaques: Can you nominate in order now the degrees of the lie?
Touchstone: O sir, we quarrel in print, by the book, as you have books for good manners. I will name you the degrees. The first, the Retort Courteous; the second, the Quip Modest; the third, the Reply Churlish; the fourth, the Reproof Valiant; the fifth, the Countercheck Quarrelsome; the sixth, the Lie Circumstantial; the seventh, the Lie Direct. All these you may avoid but the Lie Direct; and you may avoid that, too, with an 'if'. I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an 'if', as 'If you said so, then I said so', and they shook hands and swore brothers. Your 'if' is the only peacemaker; much virtue in 'if'."
--As You Like It
Autumndark