Too Much Magic: The Pitfalls of Writing Fantasy
Too Much Magic: The Pitfalls of Writing Fantasy
Anything can happen in a fantasy story. So how can writers prevent theirs from spiralling out of control?
Fantasy (along with the more fantastical strains of sci-fi) is hazardous terrain for storytellers. Fantasy deals in magic, which can manifest itself in countless forms, from the secondary worlds of Oz, Wonderland and Middle-Earth, to levitating nannies, goblin kings and gold-hoarding dragons. Magic is about miracles, mysterious forces or inexplicable events that cannot be ascribed to the laws of reason, nature or science.
Magic in fantasy isn’t always about escapism; it’s often about redefining the real world to better understand and overcome its challenges. Judy Garland’s Dorothy had to venture into Oz and defeat the Wicked Witch of the West so she could understand how to live happily in the real world of Kansas.
Like language, like story itself, magic is protean. It can articulate anything the writer has in mind. Magic is kind of a big deal. The problem is magic is anathema to drama.
Drama obeys the unbendable scientific principle of Newton’s third law: “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.” A character does something, causing another character to react, which prompts another character to react and so on.1 Romeo gatecrashes the Capulets’ party and snogs Juliet, which causes Tybalt to seek revenge, which brings about Mercutio’s death, which causes the Prince to banish Romeo from Verona, and so on, all the way up that tragic ending. Thus character is plot and plot is character. Cause and effect; action and reaction. However, magic in fantasy, whether it’s a Gelfling sprouting wings to effect a getaway or a boy wizard pulling a Basilisk-killing sword out of a hat, is essentially effect without discernible cause.
It’s hard to sustain dramatic tension within a story if the reader knows that anything can happen for no apparent reason. Sloppy writers can kill an entire story the moment they resolve any dramatic situation with the wave of a magic wand.
Different fantasy stories handle this problem in different ways. Surrealist stories don’t give a toss about drama, so they’re allowed to go nuts. Fairy tales tend to project a dreamlike air in which magic is part of the fabric of the world. Everything here is mutable and uncanny, although good fairy tales usually establish a skewed sense of cause-and-effect dream logic.
Earthbound fantasies like It’s a Wonderful Life or Field of Dreams isolate their supernatural elements within specific rules (“If you build it, he will come”) or else embody the magical within specific characters (like the displaced mermaid of Splash! or the warring immortals of Highlander), within artefacts (like the wish-granting Zoltar machine of Big, or the living playthings of Toy Story2), or within portals into lost worlds of time and space. Conan-esque heroic fantasy and the Tolkienian epic have it harder. These must carefully quantify or rationalise the magic-infused worlds in which they take place, or else the fabric of their adventures just fall apart.
One way of tackling the magic problem in a fantasy story is by ensuring there’s only one miracle in play at a time.
The brilliant Disney fairy tale Tangled (2010) is a great example of this. The movie features only one story-affecting bit of magic: Rapunzel’s hair. Compare this to the Harry Potter movies, which present a smorgasbord of magic items, clauses and wotnot of which the viewer is expected to keep track as the story unfolds. For me, this is why all almost all the Potter movies fail as drama (as do every last one of the books, although they all get by just fine on charm and inventiveness). But back to Tangled.
Notice how Rapunzel’s magic ability is not only incredibly simple to understand (her hair can heal wounds and stave off old age when activated by a special lullaby, and it loses its power when it’s cut). These rules drive rather than dissipate the drama, as the other characters fight for control over Rapunzel’s magic locks or the heroine puts them to unexpected use herself (as in that scene with the flooding cave).
Stories playing more than one miracle at a time is what the screenwriting guru Blake Snyder calls ‘double mumbo-jumbo’. “A little goes a long way as far as ideas are concerned,” he writes, and he’s absolutely right.
Never overproduce a good idea by adding another one on top of it. Simple is almost always better, and this is especially true when dealing with fantasy.
To use Snyder’s example, the earthbound fantasy movie 13 Going On 30 (2004) has too much magic going on. It involves both a bodyswap and a timeslip and thus struggles to find room to incorporate two sets of routines.
If you’re introducing a magic artefact that does one particular thing (let’s say a belt that grants the wearer Hulk-like strength), beware giving that artefact additional powers halfway through the story, unless you’re revealing something that was there all along. In which case, make sure you’ve foreshadowed that revelation or else it’ll feel like it’s come out of nowhere and weaken the story’s overall integrity.
Don’t change the rules of magic just to fix a story problem. Establish the rules of cause and effect early on, then stick to them.
Heroic fantasy (a.k.a. sword and sorcery) is less concerned with its magical worlds and usually employs them like a static backdrop for bouts of swashbuckling adventure, a sandbox littered with magical creatures and artefacts for the hero to play with.
Epic fantasies like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, on the other hand, are more tightly integrated with their cast of characters, making this form of fantasy an exceptionally tough nut to crack. Getting to know the ins and outs of your secondary world and making it easily relatable to an audience is a truly Herculean task. There are so many extra balls to juggle when you use magic to turn the plot.
Writing a story set in the ordinary world places a welcome limit on how far your fantasy elements can evolve without breaking everything or turning your story into something else. Epic fantasy must have a handle on every last one of those magic threads. It must know what they can do, how far they run, and how they weave into accepted reality to enable the story to work as a whole.
I’ll end on this great quote from Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin.3
“Too much magic can ruin a fantasy. Magic is a very powerful ingredient and it unbalances everything. You can’t put in a lot of magic and then still have a medieval setting or the same social structure. The existence of magic would radically deform any society or culture in major, major ways. If you look at the history of the real Middle Ages, magic was very present. Of course it didn’t really work but they didn’t know that. They believed in witches and killed and burned many witches and wizards. They believed in alchemy and angels and demons. There were also doubters so I try to replicate that. When magic works, it works a little uncertainly and it’s not something everyone can work. I don’t like the idea of a magic system, which some fantasists use. If magic is systematic, then it’s not magic and more of a fake science. Magic is the supernatural and it’s beyond nature. It’s dangerous, uncontrollable and unpredictable, which is the flavour I try to deal with. Really my models were the great fantasists like Tolkien. There’s a very magical feel to Middle-Earth but there’s very little on-stage magic. Gandalf never tries to solve the problem by whipping up a potion or a spell. When he’s attacked he doesn’t throw lightning bolts from his fingernails, but picks up a sword like everyone else.”
Stay weird.
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I believe it was screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna who very rightly said that a scene must arrive as the result of a ‘because’ not an ‘and then’.
Yeah, my movie examples are all pretty ancient, I know. That’s because I’ve taken them from my 2005 book Empires of the Imagination: A Critical Survey of Fantasy Cinema from Georges Melies to The Lord of the Rings, published by McFarland.
Interviewed in SFX magazine in 2012.
Thanks Alec. I agree, I think wizards and magic can be a little dull (like "heroes" with ridiculous super powers). I do quite like the idea of black magic though, a Necromancer raising an army of undead, or, a witch putting a hex on someone. Bad things that add drama, rather than good things that make positive outcomes all too convient for the protagonists.
Magic is def-ly a tricky subject and I find even works that I like tend to struggle with keeping it from overwhelming the story. I love The Witcher series, for instance, but it def-ly suffers from having a lot of nigh-immortal wizards who wield potentially world-breaking powers. Heck, even The Hobbit has that issue, with Gandalf being such a powerful deus ex machina that Tolkien has to contrive ways to keep him out of the action.
On a side note, Alec, what is the source of that Martin quote? I ask as I've been collecting his quotes and interviews about magic but have never seen that specific one before.