Magic and your world.

 I had an interesting discussion with another author at the Ambler Creative Writers group meeting. A life-long Dungeons and Dragons player, he was struggling with how to make magic more believable in his writing.

I asked him how he defined magic. That stumped him and it stumps a lot of new writers to the genre because they tell me that magic is magic. It can do anything and everything; except it can’t.

Magic when broken down can only do three things, a) create, b) harm, and c) protect.  Magic is a non-zero-sum game; the expenditure of power is not equally proportionate to the effect created.  Then I asked him how magic worked, what was the system that allowed magic to work in his world. He stared at me aghast, as if I had broken some fundamental law of fantasy writing. He merely mumbled that magic was magic.

Magic in fantasy writing is a cost intensive situation; the expenditure of magical energy to create an effect is a cost. Effects don’t just happen, even though the reader may not see the mechanics underlying magic in your world, you as the writer have to understand how magic works.

Does it cost mana, chi, psionic energy? Maybe blood or even costs the life of another to create the effect.

Magic must be a cohesive system that makes sense in your world; it must be at least explainable to you so that you as the writer understand the limits of magic.

Do all spell casters in your world draw on the same energy pool to fuel their powers? Or is magic highly specialized? Do elemetalist have to carry and use their element, i.e. fire, water, earth and air to create their spells? Do high wizards need wands or staves and magic words that require years of study to master the intricacies to cast their spells?

As you can see there is a slew of ways that magic can be used in your works, but there must be a system that makes sense in the framework of your world to allow it to exist.