Keeping the Magic Magical
Keeping the Magic Magical
How do you know when to explain vs. what to keep hidden?
It’s inevitable: when editing a longer work like a novel, there comes a point when I have great ideas about edits and additions, but I don’t know if they’d make the story stronger and answer the unanswered questions, or lengthen, complicate, and demystify the story. And I’m using “demystify” in a negative sense, here. You do want to demystify Italian wine labels, just not, always, a ghost story.
But you also don’t want to confuse readers, or leave too many dangling storylines that are never resolved.
When I’m writing, the most compelling parts of my stories are those which I don’t fully understand. Mostly, I tie these up in the plot or characters by the end, but sometimes, some of them remain undefined. The trick is knowing how much and what, if anything, should remain unknowable and unexplained, and therein lay my editor’s block as I read through my book.
Something George R. R. Martin once said in an interview has always stuck with me:
“I try to keep the magic magical — something mysterious and dark and dangerous, and something never completely understood. I don’t want to go down the route of having magic schools and classes where, if you say these six words, something will reliably happen. Magic doesn’t work that way. Magic is playing with forces you don’t completely understand. And perhaps with beings or deities you don’t completely understand. It should have a sense of peril about it.”
The interviewer immediately says: “So no Hogwarts?” And Martin answers, “No. [Laughter]”
Of course, this philosophy has led to several of Martin’s own story threads never being tied up at all—famously an entire final book in Game of Thrones—so take this with a grain of salt. And not to be taken lightly, the magical rule book of all magical rule books Harry Potter is just as, if not more? famous as GoT. So. There you have it. No real conclusion, here, except to follow your writer’s instinct for your own book because both “schools of magic” can work successfully, depending on your story.
The most important message from Martin’s quote and the success of other mysterious, haunted, not-everything-is-fully-explained books (Imajica by Clive Barker, Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, anything by Jeff Vandermeer) is that ghostly or magical qualities can remain largely unexplained and still be effective. The fact that much of their rules and regulations remains in shadow is why they’re so effective. This is such an important “non-rule” to understand because all genre-writing advice unequivocally says KNOW THE RULES OF YOUR WORLD, and I always took this to include the rules of magic.
Perhaps knowing the rules of your world includes the fact that some rules are never explained. Therefore as long as you, the writer, know what the consequences of the unexplainable are, you never have to explain it in the story or even allow your characters to understand it. At the very least, make sure there aren’t any contradicting rules.
But here I am putting fences around Martin’s statement—he says, magic shouldn’t be completely understood, period. Maybe the result is its consequences and effects in your world do seem contradictory. And the only really important guideline to follow is to ask yourself, Does it work? Does it make the story stronger? If you include contradictory elements that layer on the mysterious to exactly the effect you want, and they don’t render the story unbelievable or the characters false, then heck—contradict yourself to your heart’s content.
That being said, I do think avoiding contradictions is the hardest rule to break effectively, and here might be the crux of the issue: to break the rules, first you have to know them. And this might mean writing an entire story with magic rulebooks and clear, knowable consequences first before you understand how breaking them, and leaving mysterious phenomena unexplained, could affect your story.
I don’t have a solution, here; all I can do is work on what I know needs to be fixed, trusting that my mind will work out the other parts in its own time. This has certainly happened before; and if it doesn’t, well, that’s what beta readers and editors are for.
Stuff I Like
Chaotic Shiny: Talking about rules and magic and mysterious story elements, here is a really fun tool to play around with. Chaotic Shiny is a world-parts generator. Need a fun character name? A rule of magic? A town’s motto? A motive? A poem, a poison, a random object?? Chaotic Shiny will generate a name and definition or description of all of these and more. The results can be silly, but they’re fun and will definitely spark something.