Combs, Bullets, Baseball, and other Magic Systems

Here's me overthinking it again....

I find it healthy from time to time to step back and appreciate the weirdness of the phrase “magic system.” What could be less systematic than… magic? (Cue that gif of Shia Lebouf waggling his fingers.) But the fact of the matter is, ‘magic’ does tend to have a sort of structure in stories, a structure that far predates modern commercial fantasy fiction. Even in fairy-tales and myths, magic is a kind of tug-and-pull between cause and effect on one hand and the raw chaos and terror of the world on the other. When our heroine flees Koschei the Deathless, a forest doesn’t just happen to spring up behind her to impede Koschei’s progress and save the day. It springs up behind her because she threw a comb over her shoulder. And not just any comb—a comb she was given by an animal she treated kindly, earlier in the story. That is a system, of a sort. Things don’t just happen for no reason.

When writing fiction or drama, there are good mechanical reasons to explain the consequences of any choice our characters might make. If our hero chooses to confront a person who she thinks might be a vicious killer, alone, and without backup, we know she might die. We know that no one will come to save her. That knowledge relies on common sense, on our experience. But most of us don’t have a lot of day-to-day experience with, say, magical duels, so in stories about magical duels, not even our consistent intuitive sense of physics can guide us, as it does when we read about ‘realistic’ situations like John Wick gunfights. So, a writer who wants to include a magical duel in her story needs to make clear what failure looks like, what success looks like, and what sort of choices and developments might lead to either outcome.

For this to work, you don’t need much of a coherent or continuous (in the mathematical sense) “system.” The writer has the power to tell the reader anything they need to know about a fantasy world. You don’t need to offer a unified and complete menu of everything magic can do, but the reader does need to understand the rules that matter for the dramatic situations they’re likely to encounter in the narrative. Think of that stunning moment in Tolkien when Frodo draws close to the mirror of Galadriel and the queen warns him, with a hint of fear: “Do not touch the water!” Or of LeGuin, in Earthsea: magic can mend boats and heal and bind dragons and do all sorts of things, but the one extremely clear and consistent rule is that speaking a person’s true name locks them into their true shape, and can be used to work magic against them. So when Sparrowhawk tells someone his true name, we know the depth of trust he has just displayed.

If you add rules carelessly as you need them and only as you need them, the reader will start to feel like they’re playing Calvinball, but that’s also true of the introduction of relevant detail in ‘realistic’ fiction. (Thank god someone left a trampoline down here!) The trick is to introduce necessary detail seamlessly, so the garment feels all of a piece. So it seems that it was always thus.

This approach is easier when the point of view character is not, themselves, a magician, or a wizard. A layperson PoV character is not supposed to have an expert’s command of magic, or of the world—they know only what others tell them. What about when magic is something our point of view character does? We, as readers, need to understand her weaknesses and strengths, her options and weapons, like we understand Valjean’s incredible strength, or Beth Harmon’s addictions, so we know when they’re in danger, and when they’re not.

Brandon Sanderson has set out a Law that often gets quoted when this issue comes up: “SANDERSON’S FIRST LAW OF MAGICS: AN AUTHOR’S ABILITY TO SOLVE CONFLICT WITH MAGIC IS DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO HOW WELL THE READER UNDERSTANDS SAID MAGIC.” (Caps in the original.)

I’ve been turning this proposition over in my head for years, and I’ve never been altogether comfortable with it. Part of that is just my own iconoclasm—every Law of Writing I’ve ever met has stoked a little anarchist bonfire in my heart. But it’s a useful bit of writing advice, not because it’s one hundred percent true so much as because it’s fun to wrestle with!

The author, surely, doesn’t need tools to ‘solve’ conflict, be they magical or mundane. After all, the author, within the story, is omnipotent and omnipresent. She can solve conflict however she likes. “And then a rock fell on the Emperor, and he died, and the day was saved.” That’s well within the author’s power. But that isn’t very satisfying, because it’s clear to the reader that the author is the one acting, rather than the characters in the story. A finger is on the scale. “And then Clever William pushed that rock off the cliff. It fell on the Emperor, who died, and so the day was saved.” This is still, on some level, a thing the author has done. But it does feel more persuasive—and it would feel even more persuasive the more we knew about Clever William, why the Emperor was standing under the cliff, how the rock got there, and so on. How about: The author’s ability to set up satisfying problems and resolutions involving magic (or, really, anything else) is directly proportional to the reader’s understanding of the structure of magic (or horses or 19th century revolvers or tea brewing or whatever) within the narrative? Maybe. A bit wordy. Let’s unpack.

The author’s job is by and large to tell a good story. Telling a good story often involves giving a character a hard day—kicking up obstacles, introducing antagonists, conflicts external and internal, highlighting tensions that the characters must resolve (or fail to). If we’re meant to empathize with and be compelled by a wizard’s struggles, we need to understand the rules of the system within which they struggle, and the options available to them, just as we need to understand that a cowboy’s gun has bullets, and only so many of them, and if the bullets are spent, the cowboy has to reload. (We understand those rules so well and so intuitively that Stephen King’s reloading trick, in The Gunslinger, is an all-time great moment in literary special effects.) If we’re telling a long story, it’s important that the reader understand how the protagonist’s choices in each moment gel with her previous actions and experience. Why she might do this now, and not that other thing she did three chapters ago? “Oh no, she’s in a pit and she can’t cast Spider Climb, because she’s out of Spider Climb spells for the day.”

Of course, once the audience is perfectly clear about the gun and the bullets and the reloading, the writer still has to choose a particular moment to make the gun run out of bullets, and ask herself what it means for the moral universe of the story when that happens. And that is the writer’s choice. No matter how honest we claim we might be, no matter how clear and fair the rules, the writer can, at any point in the drafting process, change the rules and the circumstances as needed to reinforce her chosen effect. It might be appropriate for the story we’re telling that our hero end up in a pit at this moment, so the writer takes it upon herself to deplete the hero’s store of Spider Climb spells in an earlier chapter, or introduce super-slippery anti-magic rocks on page eighty-two, or whatever. Rules, be they never so clear, rarely impede the careful author, who can, of course, travel in time an rewrite established rules as needed, so long as she’s careful to clean up after herself and those rules aren’t established in preceding, that is to say, already-published, books of the series. In books, while characters and subconscious powers do sometimes assert themselves and exercise something that looks a great deal like free will, it’s the author’s imagination and work that manifests that will, channels it, and incorporates it into the narrative time and structure of the story. Our choices—to be easy or tough, to permit grace or ensure tragedy, to play a beat for laughs or tears, to go with our gut instinct or take a different path—contribute to the overall meaning of the story.

I find the Sanderson Law interesting when set against what actually happens in Sanderson’s books, such as Mistborn, or Elantris, or Way of Kings. The climax of each hinges on a central character realizing, due to introspection or desperation: “oh wait, the magic doesn’t actually work the way we think, it actually works this other way,”or “in this particular situation, special rules apply!” This breakthrough, combined with grit, gumption, etc, lets the hero turn the tide, demonstrate new powers, and save the day.

So the dramatic effect at the end of Way of Kings (for example) is that of divine grace: according to the rules as we know them, it seems that our hero is boned, up a creek without a paddle, truly hosed, but in fact the day is saved. It works on the page more or less the way it works in Narnia: we have spent a lot of page space establishing that the Heroes Lose because of deep magic from the dawn of time, but, gasp, it turns out that there is actually deeper magic from before the dawn of time and therefore the Heroes Win! But it stands to reason, doesn’t it? I mean, if deep magic from the dawn of time exists, why not even deeper stuff? Theoretically the baddies could know about the deeper magic too, and have outflanked us by using it, but they don’t know about deeper magic, because they don’t work, or think, in a way that would have brought them into contact with the deeper magic. What lets heroes access that deeper reality? Grit? Wisdom? Sacrifice? Faith? Brutality? Kindness, as in the Koschei story?That choice has little to do with the architecture of the “magic system,” and everything to do with what the story means.

The ‘magic system,’ then, in a fantasy story, has a similar role to sports rules in sports movies or sports anime. If you’re telling a story about volleyball players playing volleyball, it’s important that the reader know the salient rules of volleyball, so they know, at any particular point in a volleyball match, whether our hero’s team is winning, losing, by how much, how many points are left in the set, how much trouble will that injury cause, can we possibly make up that much ground, have we ever come out of a situation this bad in the series before, and so on. Volleyball creates dramatic context, and defines the space within which our main characters succeed or fail. And volleyball can mean different things for different people: the girl who’s in it to crush opposition, the girl who’s in it because she loves and supports her friend who’s the team leader, the girl who’s in it because she wants to be cool or popular, etc. The climax takes place in a game, but between characters. Think about the ending of A League of Their Own. Even if you don’t know anything about baseball going in, the movie makes sure you understand the skeleton of the final moment in the final game… because it’s the framework within which our central characters, and the moral shape of the narrative universe of the film, are revealed.

(All of this implies a corollary, a not-quite-exception: if a given character attribute or rule set or ‘magic system’ is instrumental to the structure and meaning of a story, but the story isn’t actually about whether or not the character can use this method to solve problems, we don’t need to understand that method in any great detail. One of my favorite O. Henry stories is A Retrieved Reformation, a story about a safecracker—I actually prefer the Classics Illustrated comic version to be entirely honest, but the original text is also great—and that story hinges not on whether Jimmy Valentine can open the safe, but on the fact that there is no safe Jimmy Valentine can’t open. As a consequence, that story features precisely zero details about safes. If I’m writing a story in which Count Dracula deals with a crisis in his marriage, the precise limits and nature of his vampiric powers don’t matter as much as they would if I were writing a Count Dracula vs. Blade the Vampire Hunter story.)

The “sports story” framing also allows for a range of rigor and plausibility, much as in epic fantasy—you can have stories all along the spectrum from Hikaru no Go, which is pretty careful and realistic with its depictions of go playing if I recall correctly, to Prince of Tennis, where I’m told people make serves that turn into black holes. In the middle you have something like Yuri on Ice!! which “just” has skaters landing an improbable number of quads and triples, and improvising jumps in the middle of their program, which I’m given to understand doesn’t actually happen.

Even when the rules of the sport, or of magic, seem neutral on paper—offering advantage not to the just or to the moral or to the innocent but to those who play the game well—a story’s narrative makes a powerful claim about what it all means. Yuri on Ice has Opinions about figure skating. Naruto has Opinions about its made-up ninjitsu. Queen’s Gambit has Opinions about chess. The rules of the game may be clear and to some extent neutral, but the limits of the main characters—their intelligence, their wisdom, their grit, their compassion and love and understanding—are not, until they are tested. “We do not yet know what the body can do”—but one job of narrative is to test the body’s limits. Where and how we meet those limits, is where the meaning comes in.

Will you make that last, winning run and retire from the game a hero, or will the catcher who cannot afford to lose tag you out at home plate? You have one round left in your gun: what’s your target? Koschei the Deathless is on your heels, and if he catches you, you’ll die, and all you ever were will be unmade. You have no weapons, you have no power, you only have a comb that you were given in repayment for a kindness. But because now, here, today, kindness is enough, that comb becomes a forest, and you are safe.