May 2019: Making Magic Support Your Big Idea

Moderator: Eric Scoles
Location: Barnes & Noble, Pittsford
Meeting Time: May 7, 2019 from 6:45-8:45 p.m.

This month we'll have a group discussion about how magic in your story can support (or fail to support) your story's Big Idea(s). We'll talk about how to identify your Big Idea and see how it interacts with nuts & bolts such as where the power comes from, who gets to deploy it, & how they learn to do so - and what that all means for the story you're trying to tell.

Guiding Questions

Before we get to Big Ideas, it’s helpful to have a framework for how to think about magic in a fantasy story. Here are a few questions I find helpful – you may have your own list.

• Where does power come from? Is it:
  • Inherited? (Bloodline)
  • Bestowed? (Midichlorians/Sheev Palpatine making Anakin [Star Wars]; Iluvatar & the Ainur [Tolkien])
  • Random?
  • Learned/achieved?
  • Combination?
• Who has a right to magical power? Is it:
  • Class-based? (Either social or character.)
  • Inherited? (Assumes a distinction between having it, & having a right to it.)
  • Meritocracy? (And to you merit it based on innate worth, or hard work?)
  • Arbitrated/bureaucratically-sanctioned? (Grossman’s Magicians, Stross’s Laundreyverse)
  • Mix?
• How do they learn to manipulate magic?
  • Schools? (Endorsed social hierarchy. Unseen University; Hogwarts; Brakebills.)
  • Apprenticeships? (Pratchett’s witches, or wizards in many stories.)
  • Auto-Sacrifice? (Odin hanging from the tree.)
  • Other sacrifice? (Blood, energy, lives, pain.)
  • Is the knowledge external or internal [received vs won]?
    • Books of forgotten lore
    • "...myself from myself..." [Havamal] (I.e., internal)
• How is magic valued in society?
  • Feared?
  • Respected?
  • Sought vs. avoided?
  • Secret
• What is its nature?
  • Created vs. Naturally-occurring?
  • Renewable vs. Exhaustible?
  • Growing vs. declining?
  • Creative vs Destructive?
• How do you pay for it?
  • Immediate or deferred consequences?
  • Personal cost? (Physical, spiritual, mental.)
  • Mundane consequences?
  • Lucre? (Anyone sufficiently rich…)
  • Does it necessarily cost anything at all?
• How science-like is it?
  • Can you do experiments? Do people?
  • Defy close examination?
• What’s the frame of reference w.r.t. magic. How much is known…
  • ...by the reader?
  • ...by the characters?
  • ...by the narrator?

What’s the Big Idea?

First, what do I mean by ‘big idea’? Some use the term to talk about a key setting or plot idea, how a story idea is born, or even a theme. ‘Theme’ is closest to what I want to talk about. In SpecFic, “Big Idea” often refers to some problem an author is trying to work out through narrative.[1] For the current discussion, I’d like to focus on the latter usage. (Look at John Scalzi’s Big Idea guest-blog for examples of all of these definitions, from many different writers.)

All of these will tend to blend, so we could summarize it as: Why the author is telling this story in this way.

How can we identify the big idea, and especially how do we distinguish it from setting, plot, or story conceits?

One way to approach this question is to ask: What do the principle characters learn? Or: In what way do the principal characters change (or fail to)?

Example: Howl’s Moving Castle

The story In Diana Wynn Jones’ satirical fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle follows two characters, eponymous wizard Howl, and hat maker (and point-of-view character) Sophie, as they inadvertently push one another into solving one another’s problems.

Where’s the ‘Big Idea’? The idea for a wizard’s castle that moves came from a young fan, but you could tell this story without Howl’s home ever sprouting legs. Similarly the intricate plot could be very different and end up taking the characters through a similar arc, as was the case when Hayao Miyazaki adapted it for film. In the end, Howl avoids falling into the clutches of the Witch of the Waste and, more importantly, turning into a ruthless, bitter old wizard, by facing consequences of his actions and allowing himself to be vulnerable with Sophie. Meanwhile Sofie learns to embrace her own magical power and choose her course in the world, rather than deferring to convention and becoming an old maid in her stepmother’s hat shop.

So let’s apply the questions:

• What do Howl and Sofie learn?
• How do Howl and Sofie change?

Answers:

• They learn to take responsibility for their own lives, which allows them to save the day.
• They change by growing up, which allows them to find one another.[2]

So the “Big Idea” of Howl’s Moving Castle isn’t moving castles or stories about an evil witch, it’s that growing up might actually turn out to be a good thing.

Let’s look at how magic works in Howl’s Moving Castle, and how that relates to this as the Big Idea. The key seems to me to be that magic is both a talent and a skill, and it doesn’t extract immediate, obvious payment for its use:

Magic requires innate talent before you can be really good at it.Howl and Sophie both have natural magical talent, but they approach it in nearly opposite ways: Howl assumes it, Sophie has to admit this about herself.[3]

Howl’s teachers and friends recognize him to be a wizard of great potential, who hasn’t yet achieved greatness. At several points he’s criticized for lack of dedication, and it’s eventually revealed that part of the reason he ran away from his mundane, native Wales because he was too lazy to make a real success of University. His arrogance makes him vulnerable at one point to manipulation by the Witch of the Waste, and at another persuades him he’s wise enough to make a bargain with a fire-demon that ends up compromising both of them.

Sophie possesses a natural talent for ‘talking’ power into things, as it were. In her stepmother’s hat shop, she creates what are later revealed to be charmed ladies hats by telling stories to them as she decorates. Her hats then bring good outcomes to the women for whom she makes them. Several characters she encounters (Calcifer, Howl, the Witch, and later her own stepmother) recognize Sophie to have great natural magical talent, but they mostly say nothing to her about it – in at least one case, because they assume someone that powerful must already know. She spends most of the book under the grip of a powerful enchantment that turns her from a pretty young woman to an old crone. Sophie finds this surprisingly convenient, since it relieves her of obligation to face the problems pretty young women face. The curse actually loses its hold over her early in the story, but it’s strongly implied she blocks out the knowledge that she could break it.

The commonality is that in both cases, their lack of maturity is impeding their ability to fully realize their own talent: Howl is too arrogant, Sophie too demure.

Becoming genuinely good at magic requires skill, honed through practice.While he’s a powerful (to some, even terrifying) wizard, Howl hasn’t achieved greatness in no small part because he’s lazy & self-centered, e.g. devoting literally hours each day to making himself beautiful. Sophie for her part has simply not yet had the practice, because she’s never allowed herself to think of herself as having agency or power, and so hasn’t branched out beyond talking hats to life.

Each in a different way has taken a path of least resistance. In Howl’s case, he avoids making hard moral choices; in Sofie’s, she avoids exercising agency on her own, instead essentially tricking people like Howl (or herself) into placing constraints on her.

Magic has consequences that are both supernatural and mundane, and the mundane consequences are sometimes more problematic.Sophie as the story opens is allowing her (very not-evil) stepmother to plan out her future. She’s reluctant to seek a suitor or strike out on her own. When she runs afoul of the Witch of the Waste and is cursed to live as a crone, she finds her options drastically reduced – and secretly revels in her new limitations. She’s now old and conventionally ugly, and can devote herself to the things that old women do in societies such as this, like cleaning and taking care of others.

Howl has taken actions which have magical consequences (e.g. bartering his heart to the fire-demon, Calcifer, could lead him to become cruel and dangerous like the Witch of the Waste), and ordinary consequences (he dallies romantically with the Witch and thus turns her into a terrifying enemy).

It’s important that the consequences are mundane and deferred because that makes them easy for Howl & Sofie to miss. Even as wizards, they’re both still only human, after all.

Where could this go wrong?

Our premise is that how magic works will have an impact on your Big Idea. A lot of stories that fail, we simply won’t see (because people won’t continue to read them). But we could ask how things working differently might have affected the story Jones is trying to tell:

• If magic required immediate sacrifice (you age with each powerful spell as Tom Baker does in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, or turn to living stone as in N. K. Jemisin’s ‘Broken Earth’ trilogy), this becomes a different story:
  • The tone risks becoming too serious.
  • Alternatively, if the tone is kept light, the Big Idea may become too obvious, too quickly.
• Mundane and delayed consequences allow Jones to contrast male- and female-coded modes of immaturity, as well as provide a clearer mapping to our own mundane life-choices.
• If magic were mostly about getting gifts from Iluvatar (as it were), instead of a talent that one develops through hard work, it would deprive Howl & Sofie of things to do & choices to make. It’s hard to tell a story about growing up if the growth is mostly about getting gifts-of-passage from the gods. (One could argue that how much a character has to work for what they get is a good way to distinguish myths from stories.)

Series & Career

Sometimes a series will have a unifying Big Idea, and sometimes it won’t. Each book in the Harry Potter cycle could have its own Big Idea, even as the whole series has another. (I’d suggest ‘Friendship wards off evil’ for trial consideration.)

And sometimes authors spend most of a career working out one or more closely-related Big Ideas. John Crowley’s career could be summed up as variations on ‘You have no idea what’s really going on,’ or Michael Moorcock’s as ‘Exercise of power is a moral choice.’

Other Examples & Genres

What are some other examples, either where magic supports or undermines the Big Idea? It might be helpful to work with some stories many of us know:

• The Harry Potter cycle.
• The Lord of the Rings. (This could be particularly interesting since, at least in the trilogy, hardly anyone actually does magic. One school of thought holds that that’s very significant.)
• Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden stories, or Charlie Stross’s Laundryverse.
• Hayao Miyazake’s Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke.
• Stories by H. P. Lovecraft.

Can we look at other genres in a similar way? For example, how could we extend these ideas to science fiction, or even mysteries?