The interesting thing about comparing Sanderson's end-of-book scenarios with his Law is that I think the scenarios *do* need the explicit magic systems, *but not for the reasons the Law says.* Rather than being "so the reader can think through situations with the characters" (which is definitely *a* valid reason for more structure) Sanderson spends the entire book explaining to us what "normal" looks like and what it's consequences are so that when he shows us something that is fantastic *to the characters*, we can feel the appropriate emotion.
If, f.e., a fairly realistic story about a Navy ship were suddenly to discover a mermaid, we'd all understand the character's feelings of surprise, awe, fear, or similar, because we know more or less what the "normal" part of the story involves. But if "normal" is a world like Mistborn where characters can already jump over buildings and hurl coins like bullets and fight armies, if you want to get that same reaction from the reader, you need to have very carefully established the parameters of "normal". Then when someone does something that breaks the rules the reader is there for the "whoa!" moment.
I think you're exactly right. It's a magic trick, in that way. You create an expectation, you confirm the audience's expectation, you confirm it even more, and then, when the expectation has become reality, something magical happens. "The extent to which the author can totally flip the tables on the reader is proportional to the confidence the reader has that they know what's actually going on."
Oh no, I'm waiting to go in for an MRI and having big feelings about the way you ended this post. How inconvenient (& yet very welcome!).
I have so many thoughts about all of this, but right now they're a bit tangled up with Imminent Medical Procedure so hopefully I'll come back later with more coherence. But regardless: I love this post very much.
I appreciate both your heart's little anarchist bonfire(s) and that they lead to you wrestling with the asserted Writing Laws rather than just ignoring them wholesale (which tends to be more my impulse). There's so much to be gained in the wrestling!
I have vague thoughts about how I tend to find rigorously defined magical systems unsatisfying (she says, currently playing a warlock in D&D) versus finding approaches to magic that *taste* right, that are satisfying narratively and symbolically more than being overly-defined.
Arguably my approach to Story is more intuitive than tends to be approved by any canon of writing rules; I personally am well-content with that.
Oh wow. I hope the Imminent Medical Procedure went well--and thank you for the kind words. You know, I think just ignoring things is often a bit healthier than wrestling with them--shades of xkcd's "someone is wrong on the internet" comic there. But wrestling can be productive!
I know what you mean about magic systems that "taste" right, though. I think 'magic' qua magic is often a bit of a distraction, an easy point of focus when actually the difference is more fundamental. Some narrative worlds feel closed, known, totally described and describable, and other narrative worlds feel wonderful, open, numinous--a difference that has little to do with whether people can throw fireballs around or whatever.
Imminent Medical Procedure went fine, thank you! (Sorry for the triple-post; tech glitch!)
It depends how one engages with what one is wrestling, I guess! I like wrestling with some things (thinking of Talmud, but talking about religion is weird unless I know my interlocutor doesn't mind), but not so much the "someone is wrong on the internet" kind. And writing rules generally fall squarely in the later category for me.
I just listened to a talk at Flights of Foundry about building expansive-feeling game worlds & which talked about storytelling & worldbuilding by inference, about how the goal is not to have built a world but to have implied a world in the service of the experience of the audience, and I feel like that nails part of what we're talking about here. The goal shouldn't be to have a complete set of rules, it should be to have something which hangs together and conveys what one wants for mood & story without contradicting itself or ruining the emotional or plot stakes.
A thoroughly-defined magic system doesn't actually convey the need to respect the emotional needs of Story or audience. IMO it feels like it's putting out rules to address specific instances (don't 11th-hour nerf things in ways that make your audience feel like a fool to have cared or trusted you) without actually addressing the broader thing I think is key (make your audience care, treat their experience with care; honor that trust).
I love the words you've chosen here; wonderful (or wondrous), open, & numinous are exactly what I yearn for in worldbuilding, my own & others’. I don’t understand why anyone would want to take the wonder out of magic. What’s the point, then, at all?
And for future reference, I certainly don't mind talking about religion (though I don't know much about Talmud beyond the extreme basics).
I guess, when it comes to productive vs nonproductive wrestling, it's really a question of whether or not you're actually 'wrestling'--that is, developing your skills in a sport and testing them against someone else who's looking to do the same. That's different from just trying to hurt one another, or show off to a third party, or whatever. Honest wrestling seems rare in public social media.
I love your point about care and trust. I think that's the heart of it--regardless of the reader or the genre. A reader trusts you, when they enter your story. What will you do with that trust?
You know, I think a key aspect of wrestling being WRESTLING and not fighting is the sense of play, of collaboration -- and that too comes back to trust.
I think it's very hard to trust in large public social media, and it becomes harder the larger a following you have and thus the more public your public becomes. My default experience of twitter is so obviously, enormously different from that of my friends who have followership that tip over from individual personal relationships into fans or Social Media Randos or whatever happens at that point. People forget that others are people, and you can't have mutual trust when you forget there's a person on the other side of the screen.
Yes! Productive debate or conversation, like wrestling, doesn't happen except between people who accept the same ruleset. If we're wrestling and you do something extremely against-the-agreed-upon-rules to "win," no one has actually won, because we haven't actually been wrestling. And, in public-facing social media, there are no rules... some people are trying to gain points with their own in-group, some people are trying to build a professional brand, some people are just there because dopamine... it's all a mess. Sometimes a useful mess? But a mess nonetheless.
Excellent post! This reminds me of Hello Future Me's video series on storytelling and magic systems, especially this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fUKBrkDsOw on storytelling and magic systems, using The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra as illustrations. To close the loop, Hello Future Me also has a video interview with Brandon Sanderson talking about magic systems. :)
I have been thinking about this question a lot in terms of game design -- where, I would argue, one grapples with exactly the same issues as you've outlined here plus the added complexity that some games (e.g. classical CRPGs) allow the player to improve their own magical abilities, giving them control over how their magic can affect the story. I think this complexity frequently makes it harder to tell compelling, dramatic stories in games (either the player knows they have the Turn Comb into Forest spell, or they do not) but occasionally, it can lead to amazing spontaneous interactions (in Act One, the player chooses to learn then Turn Comb into Forest spell on a whim, and in Act three, she is running away from Koschei). For me, a lot of the challenge, and the reward, of writing games is building in opportunity for exactly these interactions, so the player almost feels like they have written their own story twist!
Thanks for the link! I'll give that a watch when I have a minute.
I think you're spot on about the added challenge of game and narrative design. But that constraint presents opportunities, too, doesn't it? The player has to understand their own abilities, so they feel they're playing the game competently. But that understanding can be subverted, transformed, or used to surprise them. Think about the revelations about the Exile in KOTOR 2: you learn that the core game loop of "kill monster, gain experience" is itself destructive. Or the ways rogue-lite loop games like Dead Cells or Hades handle depression and trauma recovery...
When narrative desire and systems understanding sync up, the players have a real sense of mastery--they're the table moments people talk about ten years later. Huge design challenge, but wonderful when well-executed!
The interesting thing about comparing Sanderson's end-of-book scenarios with his Law is that I think the scenarios *do* need the explicit magic systems, *but not for the reasons the Law says.* Rather than being "so the reader can think through situations with the characters" (which is definitely *a* valid reason for more structure) Sanderson spends the entire book explaining to us what "normal" looks like and what it's consequences are so that when he shows us something that is fantastic *to the characters*, we can feel the appropriate emotion.
If, f.e., a fairly realistic story about a Navy ship were suddenly to discover a mermaid, we'd all understand the character's feelings of surprise, awe, fear, or similar, because we know more or less what the "normal" part of the story involves. But if "normal" is a world like Mistborn where characters can already jump over buildings and hurl coins like bullets and fight armies, if you want to get that same reaction from the reader, you need to have very carefully established the parameters of "normal". Then when someone does something that breaks the rules the reader is there for the "whoa!" moment.
I think you're exactly right. It's a magic trick, in that way. You create an expectation, you confirm the audience's expectation, you confirm it even more, and then, when the expectation has become reality, something magical happens. "The extent to which the author can totally flip the tables on the reader is proportional to the confidence the reader has that they know what's actually going on."
Oh no, I'm waiting to go in for an MRI and having big feelings about the way you ended this post. How inconvenient (& yet very welcome!).
I have so many thoughts about all of this, but right now they're a bit tangled up with Imminent Medical Procedure so hopefully I'll come back later with more coherence. But regardless: I love this post very much.
I appreciate both your heart's little anarchist bonfire(s) and that they lead to you wrestling with the asserted Writing Laws rather than just ignoring them wholesale (which tends to be more my impulse). There's so much to be gained in the wrestling!
I have vague thoughts about how I tend to find rigorously defined magical systems unsatisfying (she says, currently playing a warlock in D&D) versus finding approaches to magic that *taste* right, that are satisfying narratively and symbolically more than being overly-defined.
Arguably my approach to Story is more intuitive than tends to be approved by any canon of writing rules; I personally am well-content with that.
Oh wow. I hope the Imminent Medical Procedure went well--and thank you for the kind words. You know, I think just ignoring things is often a bit healthier than wrestling with them--shades of xkcd's "someone is wrong on the internet" comic there. But wrestling can be productive!
I know what you mean about magic systems that "taste" right, though. I think 'magic' qua magic is often a bit of a distraction, an easy point of focus when actually the difference is more fundamental. Some narrative worlds feel closed, known, totally described and describable, and other narrative worlds feel wonderful, open, numinous--a difference that has little to do with whether people can throw fireballs around or whatever.
Imminent Medical Procedure went fine, thank you! (Sorry for the triple-post; tech glitch!)
It depends how one engages with what one is wrestling, I guess! I like wrestling with some things (thinking of Talmud, but talking about religion is weird unless I know my interlocutor doesn't mind), but not so much the "someone is wrong on the internet" kind. And writing rules generally fall squarely in the later category for me.
I just listened to a talk at Flights of Foundry about building expansive-feeling game worlds & which talked about storytelling & worldbuilding by inference, about how the goal is not to have built a world but to have implied a world in the service of the experience of the audience, and I feel like that nails part of what we're talking about here. The goal shouldn't be to have a complete set of rules, it should be to have something which hangs together and conveys what one wants for mood & story without contradicting itself or ruining the emotional or plot stakes.
A thoroughly-defined magic system doesn't actually convey the need to respect the emotional needs of Story or audience. IMO it feels like it's putting out rules to address specific instances (don't 11th-hour nerf things in ways that make your audience feel like a fool to have cared or trusted you) without actually addressing the broader thing I think is key (make your audience care, treat their experience with care; honor that trust).
I love the words you've chosen here; wonderful (or wondrous), open, & numinous are exactly what I yearn for in worldbuilding, my own & others’. I don’t understand why anyone would want to take the wonder out of magic. What’s the point, then, at all?
Congratulations!
And for future reference, I certainly don't mind talking about religion (though I don't know much about Talmud beyond the extreme basics).
I guess, when it comes to productive vs nonproductive wrestling, it's really a question of whether or not you're actually 'wrestling'--that is, developing your skills in a sport and testing them against someone else who's looking to do the same. That's different from just trying to hurt one another, or show off to a third party, or whatever. Honest wrestling seems rare in public social media.
I love your point about care and trust. I think that's the heart of it--regardless of the reader or the genre. A reader trusts you, when they enter your story. What will you do with that trust?
You know, I think a key aspect of wrestling being WRESTLING and not fighting is the sense of play, of collaboration -- and that too comes back to trust.
I think it's very hard to trust in large public social media, and it becomes harder the larger a following you have and thus the more public your public becomes. My default experience of twitter is so obviously, enormously different from that of my friends who have followership that tip over from individual personal relationships into fans or Social Media Randos or whatever happens at that point. People forget that others are people, and you can't have mutual trust when you forget there's a person on the other side of the screen.
Or the other side of the page.
Yes! Productive debate or conversation, like wrestling, doesn't happen except between people who accept the same ruleset. If we're wrestling and you do something extremely against-the-agreed-upon-rules to "win," no one has actually won, because we haven't actually been wrestling. And, in public-facing social media, there are no rules... some people are trying to gain points with their own in-group, some people are trying to build a professional brand, some people are just there because dopamine... it's all a mess. Sometimes a useful mess? But a mess nonetheless.
Excellent post! This reminds me of Hello Future Me's video series on storytelling and magic systems, especially this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fUKBrkDsOw on storytelling and magic systems, using The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra as illustrations. To close the loop, Hello Future Me also has a video interview with Brandon Sanderson talking about magic systems. :)
I have been thinking about this question a lot in terms of game design -- where, I would argue, one grapples with exactly the same issues as you've outlined here plus the added complexity that some games (e.g. classical CRPGs) allow the player to improve their own magical abilities, giving them control over how their magic can affect the story. I think this complexity frequently makes it harder to tell compelling, dramatic stories in games (either the player knows they have the Turn Comb into Forest spell, or they do not) but occasionally, it can lead to amazing spontaneous interactions (in Act One, the player chooses to learn then Turn Comb into Forest spell on a whim, and in Act three, she is running away from Koschei). For me, a lot of the challenge, and the reward, of writing games is building in opportunity for exactly these interactions, so the player almost feels like they have written their own story twist!
Thanks for the link! I'll give that a watch when I have a minute.
I think you're spot on about the added challenge of game and narrative design. But that constraint presents opportunities, too, doesn't it? The player has to understand their own abilities, so they feel they're playing the game competently. But that understanding can be subverted, transformed, or used to surprise them. Think about the revelations about the Exile in KOTOR 2: you learn that the core game loop of "kill monster, gain experience" is itself destructive. Or the ways rogue-lite loop games like Dead Cells or Hades handle depression and trauma recovery...
When narrative desire and systems understanding sync up, the players have a real sense of mastery--they're the table moments people talk about ten years later. Huge design challenge, but wonderful when well-executed!