magical story collection
Fable writers take a vast amount of crap from SF writers for what the SF writers understand as their "fluffy bunny" worldbuilding and their use of magic as an clean out for fixing their characters' problems. In reality, however, magic is not any extra of an clean manner out for well-written delusion than physics is an smooth manner out for properly-written SF. The subsequent are ten regulations with the intention to make your use of magic on your delusion novel rigorous, and will prevent from the "fluffy-bunny" label - and will, at the identical time, make your story better, greater entertaining, and extra exciting.
1. Not anything comes from not anything.
Additionally called There Ain't No free Lunch. Your magic have to come from some thing, ought to be caused by something. You ought to have a cause why your global has magic. You don't must nation your motive, but you need to know it.
2a. Each movement has an equal and contrary response.
Whilst your characters begin the use of magic, they have to be made to pay for it in some way. If it's far handy, it isn't actual, and no one will believe your story. In case your hero does suitable magic, the use of this magic may have a unfavorable impact someplace. Conversely, your villain's magic may have precise fallout somewhere.
2b. Movements have consequences.
This rule is the storyteller's fine pal - in myth, in SF, in mainstream... everywhere. Comply with the results of your characters' movements (from rule 2a) to their logical conclusion. Whilst you make your characters pay the price for his or her moves, whilst you make them both culpable and accountable, you've got made them actual. Supply a good deal notion to how the good and the horrific of what they do affect them, and write this.
3. Every spell has a weak spot.
The most stubborn magical stone wall created by using the mightiest evil wizard had better have a crack in it that a decided, intelligent hero can discover with effort.
Four. It ain't that clean.
The glorious hero had better not be able to find it through choosing up a convenient ebook and, while not having any earlier magical schooling, analyzing the spell a good way to convey the wall tumbling down.
If he does find a handy e book, studying it must backfire on him, leaving him in a worse situation than he became in earlier than.
Five. You only get one 'gimme' so don't waste it.
In a global with magic, magic is your 'gimme' - the one element about which your reader will unquestioningly suspend disbelief... so in case you really want to inform a tale that makes use of faster-than-light spaceships, you need to drop the magic.
6. In a global with magic, magic will touch everything.
Do no longer lock your magicians in ivory towers and leave them on my own up there with their dusty tomes and arcane paraphernalia. In a world in which magic works, and works properly, you'll see parents employing it in controlling traffic, jogging their septic tanks, baking bread, searching and fishing, and whatever else you could consider.
7. Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
If your magicians have been running successfully for a variety of years, they'll have truly advanced corollaries to the steam engine, the phone, the tv, the radio, the electrical iron and the toaster, the automobile, computers, the electric guitar, and the flush commode. They must no longer still be farking round with turning straw into gold. They in all likelihood received't put on goofy pointed hats, either, though of route they could if you insist.
8. Magic isn't your story. Human beings are your story.
There really isn't plenty else to say approximately this. Just understand that, regardless of how cool your generation, it will likely be uninteresting to read about except it is history for a character your readers can care about who has a hassle that engages their hobby.
9. In case your hero creates a 'golly-gee shop-the-day gimcrack' to remedy his very last hassle on the give up of your story, IT HAD higher not paintings!
By no means, ever, give your hero an clean manner out. He desires to remedy his problem along with his courage and integrity and compassion and local intelligence, no longer with a mystical repair-it that arrives out of nowhere for no cause other than that you obtain him into a jam you can't determine out a way to get him out of.
10. Each rule has its exception, however before you decide to be the exception, you need to spend a while using the rule of thumb.
Smash 'em all if you need - however don't ruin 'em all within the equal story, recognize which rule you're breaking whilst, and handiest wreck a rule due to the fact you've got a damned right motive to.
Eleven. All different regulations for writing each different form of fiction additionally observe.
All of them. And that is the exception to rule ten. There's no exception.