Author of The Secrets of Jin-shei, The Embers of Heaven, and the Worldweavers series
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Writing is hard enough when you're doing it in a story set in the "real" world, the world of our everyday experience. But when it comes to fantasy, the reader cannot assume anything about the world in which a particular story is set anything at all beyond the things that the author tells them about it. Worldbuilding from scratch is a pretty intensive process.
But things get nuttier faster when there's magic in the mix. A solid idea of what magic can, and what it can't do, is important in developing a story. Everything has a price, and magic perhaps more so than most.
Magic may be wild, but it has its rules, and how it functions in a given context is utterly essential to telling a coherent story. Magic in a story is not and cannot be all-powerful; there have to be limits. Limits may be breachable by virtue of heroic effort and/or virtuous sacrifice but it has to be understood that there WILL be a price. Characters who don't have a weakness at all, or who are simply not willing to pay such a price in the context of the story, are extremely difficult to make sympathetic to the reader.
The reader does NOT need to know precisely what the source of all magic is. It is sufficient to know how it functions in a given world, what makes it stronger, what limits it. And THAT the author has to have an inkling about before the characters are flung into the fray. Magic in your story has to come from somewhere consistent, believable, unshakeable, or else the world you have built has been built on sand and the foundations will not stand.
The first rule of breaking rules is to know what they actually are.
The second rule is that a character should have a decent reason for breaking them.
The third rule is
that none of this, of course, is gospel.
If you want the magic to be real, you have to make it real. YOU, the author, have to make it real. Before you can ask anyone else to do it, you yourself must believe.
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2008 - Dates are always getting added, check back regularly!
2009 - So far
I'm represented by Jill Grinberg of Jill Grinberg Literary Management in New York. I also welcome comments from my readers in e-mail. (Note: To keep spammers at bay, JavaScript is required for the e-mail link. If it doesn't work for you, make sure JavaScript is turned on in your browser.)
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