Magic in fantasy stories is generally accepted as a defining element of the genre. Often this is interpreted by writers as wizards throwing fireballs, people with wands warding off curses, mythical beasts, and so on. There was once a time when this magic actually helped to make the story feel more fantastic, to inspire the sense of wonder and adventure that is key to the genre’s appeal.
However, our world has changed since the myths and fictional works that the modern fantasy genre is based on were first written. Things that would have seemed like magic just ten to fifteen years ago seem commonplace, even mundane at times. The smartphone in your pocket would have been difficult to believe in the year 1999 when most people were sitting in front of giant CRT monitors waiting for Windows ‘95/‘98/NT to load (probably to play Starcraft). The rapid explosion of technology that has facilitated the ability to project power and automate tasks has basically made magic a reality. In some ways reality has more magic than many fantasy stories.
In response to the technological explosion causing magic to seem less magical, fantasy content creators have entered a kind of arms race. Every film tries to be more fantastical than the last, every book has more and more colorful stories, every game has more and more outlandish art. Unfortunately, this has the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of the fantastical elements popping out at us and eliciting that genre defining sense of wonder, it just adds more to the noise. The audience filters it out, and too often there’s little left to enjoy afterwards.
So what is a fantasy creator to do? I can see two basic solutions, one is to systemize the magic in a story, and the other is to reduce the ambient magic so that magic in a story is more strongly felt.
For the first method let’s look to the works of Brandon Sanderson (he does a lot of things right, but for now, just think about how he handles magic). All of Sanderson’s works include magic which permeates through each story, but, unlike other works of fantasy that turn into a slog, magic moments in Sanderson’s stories never feel like a drag. The reason he can do this is because he systematizes the way magic works in his stories. There are things that magic can do and things that it can’t, and in this way he can pump out high intensity magic encounters without losing the audience. Instead of creating noise, magic is contained and coherent.
It’s like Brandon is a master guitarist blasting through an epic solo, whereas someone else would just be making a racket. By making magic a system, the author has control and the story never breaks free to make a mess that the audience is just going to skim over.
The second method is to simply reign in the use of magic, to make the fantasy story more relatable by rooting it more closely to reality (this is my preferred method). By doing this, you don’t have to create a system, but you do have to restrain yourself. This can create its own problems, for example, plot issues can’t as easily be hand waved out of the way by saying “a wizard did it,” and any time that magic is used in a story, it should always be to impart a specific emotive response, never simply to move through the plot. Use of magic should be oriented toward the goal of evoking emotions that are inaccessible or unnecessarily difficult to reach by other means.
Tolkien’s use of magic can be described using this framework. It’s obvious that there is magic in his stories, but he never really laid out a rhyme or reason for it, other than that they furthered the goals of the narrative. For example, when discussing the eagles, he always said that they must be used carefully or the stories would become trivial (Letter No. 201, 1957 and No. 210, 1958). Instead, they serve an important role in establishing the magical tone of the story, and help to evoke the characteristic sense of wonder and adventure.
Regardless how a content creator may choose to do it, magic will always be an important and defining part of the fantasy genre. Because of this, it’s imperative to know how to use it as a narrative tool. The main thing to do is to reduce noise by exercising restraint, either by making magic a system, or by only using it at absolutely necessary narrative moments.
