Last week, I got a series of questions from a student who was working on a worldbuilding project. Several of them caught my attention, most notably the one that asked when it is “appropriate” to use magic that has no strict set of rules in a story, and when it is appropriate to use magic that does have rules and fixed abilities.
This is the kind of question I usually get from non-writers and would-be writers who haven’t actually started writing yet, and it makes the standard fundamental mistake that people almost always seem to make when they’re asking about writing, namely, it lumps together a whole lot of assumptions about story construction, creativity, and the writing process and then conflates that lump with what shows up in the eventual story.
Which means that the short answer to this question, as with nearly all writing questions, is “It depends.” It depends on the writer’s preferences, and on the type of story the writer is doing, and on what the magic is a metaphor for. It depends on the style and the atmosphere and the focus of the story, on the writer’s usual process, and on whether the story demands a change in that process.
The long answer is, well, a lot longer.
First off, all magic in stories needs some limits, or there is no story. If a spell will solve the story problem, the witch will cast it on Page 2 and the story will be over. There are different kinds of limits: in some cases, magic just can’t do that; in other cases, the price of solving the problem magically is unacceptable; in still others, magic can solve the problem, but only under certain specific conditions (say, if the spell is cast in a particular, usually distant, location, or at a specific time or date, or using an extremely rare item or ingredient). The limits of magic do not have to be explicitly stated inside the story; all that is really necessary is that the reader get a sense that there are limits and/or costs for working magic within the world of the story.
How those limits are presented in a given story depends largely on the needs of the story. A story that needs to be dark and moody and atmospheric is going to be a lot harder to pull off if the writer insists on presenting magic as a sort of substitute-science-and-technology, with known rules that magician-engineers use to design shiny magical machine-substitutes. Conversely, a story set in a school for wizards usually requires rules and categories of magic that the students can be taught and can specialize in (Caroline Stevermer’s A College of Magics is one of the clear exceptions). Explicitly stating the rules may be distracting in a story that focuses on the emotional effects of doing magic (whatever the writer has decided those effects are), but laying out the rules can be necessary when part of the point of the story is that spells must be spoken in rhyme, or that the same wizard cannot be proficient in both fire spells and water spells.
To a lesser extent, the way magic appears in a story depends on the writer’s style and preferences. Some writers really like writing “engineering magic,” while others prefer a more unspecific, atmospheric feel. The stories each type of writer writes will skew toward that preference, even when the story itself leans in a different direction. In other words, a moody, atmospheric story written by a rules-and-engineering-magic writer will almost certainly have more evident magical rules than the same sort of story written by a writer who prefers magic-without-rules. Both will, in all likelihood, present far fewer clearly defined rules within the atmospheric story than they would within a magic-as-science type of story, but the rules-magic writer is working outside his/her comfort zone, and has to tone down his/her usual style to fit this particular story.
The most important aspect of presenting magic in a story is not whether or not it has rules, but whether it is convincing. The simplest way to make magic convincing is to keep it consistent in some way. (More on this in a minute.)
And none of that has anything whatever to do with how stories and magic systems are developed in the first place.
Most people are aware that some writers are pantsers and others are planners, but they don’t think about what that means in the case of designing worlds or magic systems. A total seat-of-the-pants writer has no idea, at the start of a story, what the magic will be like, any more than they know what the plot is or who the characters will be. These writers do one of two things: either they develop their “magic system” by feel and instinct and have a good enough memory (or take careful enough notes) that it ends up convincingly consistent over the course of the story, or else they go back over the story once they’ve finished and revise the magic until it is convincing. There are also writers who are partial pantsers – they plan out some aspects of their story, but not others. If magic happens to be one of the aspects the writer doesn’t plan in advance, they operate like the total pantsers; they make up the magic “by feel” as they go, and revise as necessary when the first draft is done.
Obviously, the planners are the ones who lay out specific rules and limitations for their magic systems in advance, to at least some degree. What isn’t obvious is that the type of writer (planner or pantser) who is writing the story has no relationship to the type of magic in the story (obvious rules or no-rules). Some writers are perfectly capable of creating a story in which magic appears to have hard and fast rules that are completely consistent…and that the author never bothered to work out. Other authors need a specific list of rules and limitations for their magic right from the start, even if they are writing a story where the rules of magic seem very vague or nonexistent to the reader.
So ultimately, the answer to that question depends on whether the questioner is asking about the use of magic within the story, or about how to develop a convincing magic system to use in a story. Inside the story, it depends on what the story needs to have in order to create the effect the writer wants; outside the story, it depends on what the writer needs to know to write the story.
As a planner, and as a role-playing writer whose creations are going to be bashed about by other people, I have a bias towards explicit and consistent structures. But I think that for conventional fiction this can be treated like other sorts of world-building: just as you don’t need to spool off all the research you did into Celtic inheritance law and the economic life of Scottish islands, just the bit that’s relevant to the story, you don’t need to lay out the full magic system with all its dependencies and quirks. I’m a whole lot happier if I have such a system in my notes, but that doesn’t mean that anyone in the book’s world understands it all, and it certainly doesn’t mean that anyone’s going to recount it in full when they could be getting on with putting the rightful queen on the throne.
I’m thrilled that you mentioned the atmospheric type of magic, since I tend toward the fairy-tale sort. Lots of mist and fairies with hair like the night sky with stars winking among the strands, and I’ll throw in the occasional seven-league boots, but I’m not much for mechanical aspects. Trying to come up with a magic system of the sort that could be learned by wizards would bore me to tears, but that’s what I tend to think of when people talk about creating a magic system (though, really, a magic system could be as simple as the idea that magic only works once you cross the border into fairyland).
I will disagree slightly that magic needs to have limits.
You can have an interesting story with lots of conflict and character growth and other things people like to read about centered around limited entities (people) dealing with an unlimited system (magic) and how it impacts them.
Hmm, depending on style etc just writing about people might build in enough limits to make the story ineresting. I know I’ve seen stories that work fairly well done with Mary Sue characters and superheroes who are trying to find meaning or get beyond boredom when they have or can do anything/everything
I’ve always been of the school that posits magic must have a price. I was highly disappointed in the ending to the _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ series because Willow just waved her hands and every potential slayer became one; there was no cost and so real effort. How boring!
As I said in an animation review a few years back, “When anything is possible, nothing is impossible. Without the potential for conflict, there can be no development.”
You don’t need any magic at all to have a boring or unsatisfactory ending where everything just comes out like the characters want it.
If the witch can cast a spell and solve the king’s problem on page two, you have a different story than solving that particular problem from the king. Next time the king wants something, who does he go to? What about the duke who’s almost as important? And the farmer down the road who’s desperate because his wife is sick. Word is going to get around and next thing you know the witch has people tromping through her garden and knocking on her shutters at all hours. Someone here has a problem. How long this goes on and possible solutions to solve the problem permanently are going to depend on what kind of story you want to tell and how long you want it to be.
The limit doesn’t need to be in the magic.
If magic has NO limits, the witch can solve this problem by waving her wand and giving everyone else the same ability she has, of solving problems instantly. You would, of course, eventually run into difficulties with two people wanting mutually exclusive things, but again, if magic has NO limits, they can each make a new world in which they get what they want.
It’s actually kind of hard to think this way. Every story I’ve ever seen that tries to explore the issue seriously eventually concludes that the idea of magic-without-limits is an illusion.
I think I’m expressing myself badly, so here’s another attempt:
It doesn’t matter whether or not the magic itself is limited.
People are limited. What they can do with magic is going to be limited by what they can think of or are willing to do with it. The character can make themselves unlimited (if they think to do so), but the author is still going to need to manage their own limitations in explaining what exactly that means and what effects it will have, and people are known to have trouble conceptualizing infinities.
Also, in order for people to use the magic, they need to do something. That something will be it’s own limitation even if all that’s required for the magic to work is the user thinking about what they want to happen. i.e. They have to be able to think and they have to want something to happen. This can be worked with in the context of a story.
And then there’s the aspect of how exactly the magic works. Does the person using it need to specify all the details of what it does? If not, how do the things not specified work out? I can see potential for conflict and problems with both those aspects.
The question, as I understood it, was whether you can have a story with unlimited magic. I think you can because the limits will come from other places.
Saying a magic system needs limits seems a bit redundant when it’s going to have them whether the author intended them to be there or not. It might be more useful to suggest thinking about what limitations the magic system inherently has and how those limits will impact the story the author wants to tell.
I also realize I’m probably just being unnecessarily specific. My only excuse is I’ve spent too much time working with computers. My apologies.
As an aside, giving everyone unlimited magic is a great five-second (it may not take that long for someone to think of it) setup for an evil overlord taking over: take access to the magic away from everyone else and slap all the protection s/he can think of on her/himself. The story works either from that perspective or from the perspective of characters trying to figure out what s/he didn’t think of so they can defeat her/him. <-I think you can also work with the idea of unlimited magic in a story without fully exploring it, although the world building may require a bit of hand waving because it's not a system with equilibrium.
As I remember the scene of “every slayer becomes a slayer” happened quite a few episodes BEFORE the finale. There was a price (a powerful artifact got used up) and a whole butload of assorted costs. Starting with language barriers and the need for magical boot camp!
And the reason why Willow decided the slayers needed to be an army is because she realized evil had them seriously outnumbered. The previous “rule” had worked when vampires couldn’t use social media to simply avoid the Slayer. And when the Watchers could take care of most of the small fry themselves.