In all my favorite science fiction and fantasy novels, the enemy has access to equal or better science or magic. The story is about how the characters overcome the limitations of their science, magic, or superpower and succeed in their quest.
Magic should exist as an underlying, invisible layer of your written universe, the way gravity exists in reality. We know gravity works and accept it as a part of daily life.
Magic should operate with the same limitations that, say, light photons have. Photons can do some things, and they cannot do others.
Your story won’t contradict itself if you establish the known physics of magic before you begin using and abusing it.
As a confirmed lover of all things fantasy, I read a great deal of both indie and traditionally published work. Both sides of the publishing industry are guilty of publishing novels that aren’t well thought out.
Inconsistencies in the magic system are usually only one aspect of a poorly planned world. It’s easy to tell when an author doesn’t consider the possible contradictions that might emerge as the story progresses.
When the magic is mushy, the rest of the setting reads as if they just wrote whatever came into their head and didn’t check for logic or do much revising.
If all the typos are edited out of the manuscript, and the characters are brilliant and engaging, the author might be able to carry it off. Unfortunately, mushy magic or science usually results in a book I can’t recommend.
We have several things to consider in designing a story where magic and superpowers are fundamental plot elements.
First, the ability to use magic is either learned through spells, an inherent gift, or both. Your world should establish which kind of path you are taking at the outset.
- Magic is not science as we know it but should be logical and rooted in solid theories.
As a reader, I can suspend my disbelief if magic is only possible when certain conditions have been met. The most believable magic occurs when the author creates a system that regulates what the characters can do.
Magic is believable if the number of people who can use it is restricted, how it can be used is limited, and most mages are constrained to one or two kinds of magic. It becomes more believable if only certain mages can use every type of magic.
Why restrict your beloved main character’s abilities? No one has all the skills in real life, no matter how good they are at their job.
Consider musicians. A person who wins international piano competitions most likely won’t be a virtuoso at brass instruments.
This is because virtuosity requires hours of practice on one thing, working on the most minor details of technique and tone. That kind of intense focus doesn’t leave room for branching into other areas of music.
Magicians and wizards should develop skills and abilities the way musicians do. Virtuosity requires complete dedication and focus. Some are naturally talented but without practice they never rise to the top.
Magic becomes believable if the physics of magic define what each kind of magic can do.
Those rules should define the conditions under which magic works. The same physics should explain why it won’t work if those conditions are not met.
Are you writing a book that features magic? I have a few questions that you may want to consider:
Are there some conditions under which the magic will not work? Is the damage magic can do as a weapon, or is the healing it can perform somehow limited?
Does the mage or healer pay a physical/emotional price for using or abusing magic? Is the learning curve steep and sometimes lethal?
When you answer the above questions, you create the Science of Magic.
So, what about superpowers? Aren’t they magic?
Superpowers are both science and something that may seem like magic, but they are not. Think Spiderman. His abilities are conferred on him by a scientific experiment that goes wrong.
Like science and magic, superpowers are believable when they are limited in what they can do.
If you haven’t considered the challenges your characters must overcome when learning to wield their magic/superpower, now is a good time to do it.
- Are they unable to fully use their abilities?
- If so, why?
- How does their inability affect their companions?
- How is their self-confidence affected by this inability?
- Do the companions face learning curves too?
- What has to happen before your hero can fully realize their abilities?
These limits are the roadblocks to success, and overcoming those roadblocks is what the story is all about. The struggle forces the characters out of their comfortable environment.
The roadblocks you put up force them to be creative, and through that creativity, your characters become more than they believe they are. The reader becomes invested in the outcome of the story.
The next post in this series will delve into powers that are familiar tropes of fantasy: healing and telepathy.
We are not alone. We are part of a vast cosmos of authors much like us, some far more advanced and others less so.
Modifiers change, clarify, qualify, or limit a particular word in a sentence to add emphasis, explanation, or detail. We also use them as conjunctions to connect thoughts: “otherwise,” “then,” “besides.”
Feel free to copy the above image and save it to your files as a .png or .jpeg, and also the modifiers as connectors image, above right.
Authors need to understand the rules of how the language we write in works. When we are just starting out, we might have a grip on the basics, but we don’t understand how or when to use the rare punctuations.
This bring us to creative punctuation, such as the symbol “!?.” An exclamation point followed by a question mark, these mutant morsels of madness are called “interrobangs.”
The semicolon. This joining punctuation is not complicated once you know the one rule about when to use semicolons:
Compound sentences combine two separate ideas (clauses) into one compact package. A comma should be placed before a conjunction only if it is at the beginning of an independent clause. So, use the comma before the conjunction (and, but, or) if the clauses are standalone sentences. If one of them is not a standalone sentence, it is a dependent clause, and you do not add the comma.
Explain why you want that particular grammatical no-no to stand, and your editor will most likely understand. If you know the rule you are breaking, you will be better able to explain why you are doing so.
However, we can learn a great deal from books embodying poorly executed plots and badly scripted dialogue.
Structurally, the books in this subseries feel like he knew how to end it but struggled to fill in the arc. Past events and conversations get repeated verbatim to every new character. Long passages of remembering and agonizing over what is done and dusted fluffs up the narrative.
To me, book 21 reads as if (while books 19 and 20 were in the publishing gauntlet) he still had to fluff up the ending to make book 21 long enough to be considered a novel. The evidence of a lack of genuine inspiration is the absurd “scar” the protagonist is left with after winning an unbelievable victory and nearly dying.
Everyone, even your favorite author, writes a stinker now and then. 
Or, in some cases, as in the book I am focusing on today, it takes us back to the world we thought we left behind.
How do we survive when who we are is not the person our family expects us to be?
Judy’s writing achievements include two one-act plays that paced among the top three winners in national competitions and were staged in Colorado in 2005 and 2015. She was commissioned to write a ninety-minute program for Stage Left Theater in Salida for the 2010 winter holiday season. She describes herself as a glass-half-full, gay Christian and enjoys traveling—whether exploring faraway places or nearby towns. Judy and her wife managed a real estate appraisal business for eighteen years in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and following retirement, relocated to Olympia.
Artist: Frans Hals (1582/1583–1666)
It deals with things like the mass of objects, the speed at which they travel, how speed and mass are converted to energy, and how mass warps the fabric of space and time.
But what about “It?” Here, we are dealing with possession by the inanimate. We don’t need an exorcist, although a good maid service would resolve a great deal here at Casa del Jasperson. But in this case, we are referencing something owned by the inanimate:
In the case of number 4, the sentence would be stronger without it. Most of the time, the prose is made stronger when the word “that” is cut and not replaced with anything. I say most, but not all the time.
In the written narrative, the many forms of this verb are what 
“Lay” is a transitive verb that refers to putting something in a horizontal position. At the same time, “lie” is an intransitive verb that refers to being in a flat position.
To lie is an intransitive verb: it shows action, and the subject of the sentence engages in that action, but nothing is being acted upon (the verb has no direct object).
The verb that means “to recline” is “to lie,” not “to lay.” If we are talking about the act of reclining, we use “lie,” not “lay.” “When I have a headache, I lie down.”
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 