In one of the essays on your website , you discuss what you called Sanderson’s First Law of Magics, which is “an author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.” And from there you used that to define “soft” magic systems as opposed to “hard” systems, and the ways in which each kind uses its magic to resolve story conflict.
Right, though one thing I should mention is that I’ve since added the word “satisfactorily” to the law: The ability of the author to solve conflict satisfactorily with magic is directly proportional, etc. I think that’s an important distinction to make.
So given that, can you discuss the magic system of the Wheel of Time in terms of your law? Robert Jordan’s “channeling” seems like a pretty hard magic system to me.
Robert Jordan’s magic system is both hard and soft. It’s similar to, for instance, the Harry Potter magic system, which I personally think is quite well done. Of course, I do think Jordan’s system is overall more consistent and a much better magic system. This is partially because of the strength of its limitations; for instance, that male channelers go mad, and the chance of burning yourself out with channeling, make it for a much more interesting magic system narratively. The “going mad” thing is basically the best limitation that I’ve ever heard of in a book series.
People like Tolkien, for instance, didn’t explain a lot of the magic, and so what the magic could and couldn’t do leaves you with a lot of that sense of wonder, so there’s something to be gained on that side from not explaining. Jordan, I would say, is about on the seventy-five percent mark toward a more hard, rigid magic system, and it actually tends to work really well, but you’ll notice that he liked to introduce new elements to the magic quite haphazardly—you know, suddenly someone is able to do this. It happens actually pretty frequently in the series as new things are being rediscovered.
Balefire, for example, is manifested quite spontaneously by the characters to solve little problems, and then it becomes a tool to solve bigger problems later on. Just like in a lot of storytelling, in the first third of the story, you will often have a dynamic rescue by a character the reader or audience didn’t know existed, and this is not a terribly satisfying resolution, but that’s okay because in the first third of a story, you’re not looking for satisfying resolutions, you’re looking for satisfying introductions. That’s kind of what the nature of storytelling is. So when the new character rides on screen and saves the heroes in the beginning of a story, and it’s the old friend of the hero who they didn’t know was in town, it becomes a very nice introduction for that character; we like that character, we’re interested in him, and it can work very well.
In the same way, a character manifesting a power in the beginning of the story that kind of comes out of nowhere to solve a minor problem, is a satisfying introduction, but not a satisfying resolution. And then later on when a major character gets brought back to life by balefire, because it’s used in a way that the audience could anticipate, suddenly we have a very satisfying resolution of a conflict, using a magic that we’re familiar with.
It’s the difference between Han Solo saving Luke by getting him off Tattooine by just kind of haphazardly being there in the right place at the right time, and then Solo coming back at the end of the movie to save him. In the first case, he just kind of drops into [Luke’s and Obi Wan’s] laps, but that’s okay because we’re introducing him. And then he comes back at the end to save them after great foreshadowing of all the changing he’s done as a character, and we love it.
It’s a Chekhov’s gun kind of thing.
Yeah. One of the big complaints about fantasy as a genre is that “oh, that’s the genre where just anything can happen, and so there’s no tension.” People complain that it doesn’t matter what the characters do because they can always be saved by some magical whatnot. And that’s actually a very poor way of looking at it, because if you think about it, regardless of what kind of fiction you’re writing, you can always save your characters with a handwave.
Even if you’re writing in “the real world,” a character can win the lottery, and suddenly all their poverty problems are taken care of, or someone can suddenly dramatically change their mind and fall in love with the heroine when they weren’t expecting to. Whatever it is, you can always just handwave to fix a problem. It’s not a thing that can be relegated only to fantasy. The challenge in fiction is to make all of these things feel satisfying, even though in some ways they are a wave of the hand. And that’s how I look at magic systems.
So it seems like it’s less of a magic law and more of a plot law.
Exactly. And all of the laws I’ve come up with, which really aren’t laws—they’re quite arrogantly named, I realize—have more to do with just good storytelling than they have to do with magic, but I framed them in terms of magic because people always ask me how I invent these magic systems. Well, I do that by trying to make them good storytelling devices.
Sanderson’s Second Law is that limitations are more interesting than powers. And this extends more deeply than in just magic, but if you look at magic, what magic can’t do is going to be more interesting to your readers, and more useful to you as a writer, than what the magic can do. This is why channeling [in the Wheel of Time] tends to be such a great magic system, because the limitations are very well-executed; it’s the part of the magic that shines the most.
But this is ultimately all a plot issue, because what a character can’t achieve, whatever is holding them back, is generally more interesting than what they can achieve. This is just kind of a general storytelling principle across the board.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.