The Magic of Brendan Detzner
I’m Eric Cherry, the emcee for Twilight Tales. If you have attended the show when I’ve been there, you’ve probably witnessed a discussion of writing technique. It’s something of a habit: I study the craft by dissecting fiction, interrogating authors, and experimenting with tools. This week, Brendan Detzner read a good section from his continuing piece, “Sleepwalking.” Afterward, we had a chance to chat (read: I interrogated him), and he passed on some observations about magic.
Magic exists in fantasy stories of all sorts, from Conan-style sword-and-sorcery tales to surreal, urban prose poems. Characters encounter magical forces, and some characters wield magic themselves. A character with the power to wield magic can perform impossible feats of wildly varying descriptions, and a story that contains magical elements can cover some incredible ground. Writing a story that contains magic can be its own kind of challenge.
Brendan’s first observation was about the kinds of magic: a good world wherein evil magic intrudes; a neutral world with neutral magic as a kind of natural force; and a wicked world occasionally saved by good magic. As a general description in broad strokes, this strikes me as perfectly reasonable.
Knowing which kind of world I’m writing about can help me to avoid certain problems. In the novel that I’m outlining just now, I’ve been treating my world as neutral with magic as a neutral, natural force. However, that’s a default state for me, and it’s entirely wrong for the novel: my story demands a good world invaded by evil magic, and invaded on a semi-regular basis. A few major events make this clear, and remembering this broad-strokes classification will help me to incorporate this fact into several lesser events for the sake of integrity and conflict.
The second observation has been in my thoughts since we talked, and it strikes me as immensely valuable. Brendan has two rules for magic, which I’ll give in reverse order here.
One: Magic has a cost. This wasn’t new to me, though it bears repeating. If there are no consequences to using magic, then why not use it all the time for everything? Special effects are pretty, sure, but it’s the costs paid by the characters that are interesting.
Two: When things get dull, introduce a man with a gun and make damn sure that the magic-wielding character can’t ignore the gun. This might sound obvious, but how many times have I written exactly this sort of error into a scene? How often have I seen this abomination on screen, or yawned at it in some other story? Magic that nullifies a conflict without a cost also nullifies the dramatic interest.
A counter-example springs to mind: Spiderman. He’s magical, for all that his powers stem from technobabble sources, and his magic lets him ignore all manner of guns, and generally without cost. Now and then, comic book writers and movie makers show off the special effects and let Spiderman wow us, but the narrative purpose is generally to establish the rules. They don’t do it for long, they keep it entertaining, and then they move on. What do they move on to? Costs and bigger guns: personal obligations in conflict with heroic duty, guilt and grief, and sadistic choices. Explosions, magical villains, and one crisis too many to juggle.
My novel’s setting imposes costs on the practitioners of magic: taint. Exposure to magical forces afflicts people with taint, and taint has an array of unpleasant effects. The stuff is evil, and people tamper with it at their peril. So I’m good there, but it’s good to check the basics now and again.
At a few points in the story, assorted non-magical folk use mundane force against magical beings. Do these magic-wielding beings worry about the guns? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. When they can ignore the guns because of their magic, the magic has a cost. For now, I think that my on-again, off-again magic obeys consistent rules, but I’ll revisit that as I go along. The important thing is that I have acceptable magic:guns power ratios.
- emc
You can catch Brendan’s writing in The Book of Dead Things, published by Twilight Tales, and you can find him most Mondays at the show.
