Two weeks ago, I posted a list of what I thought were the ten most important rules governing magic in fantasy. When I wrote them, I was well aware that they (as any “top ten” list) might spark some debate – and I’m glad I was right. Here are some of the problems you identified and how I would address them:

You can’t take the magic out of most fantasy stories and expect to be left with the same story. I agree completely, and I wasn’t meaning to imply that magic should be inserted into a plot as an “after thought” to make it more interesting. Rule #1 was more than anything a reaction to the stories I have read where the plot was completely devoid of reality – characters were inconsistent, events jumped around and did not follow logically from one another, massive hurdles were overcome in a matter of minutes – and the author relied on deux ex machina conventions of magic to hold things together. If you removed the magic from, say, Sabriel, you wouldn’t have the same story, but you would still have a logical plot arch: girl is disrupted from peaceful life by disaster, girl must develop dormant talents to challenge seemingly impossible odds, girl discovers new, exciting places and makes new friends, girl finds a way to defeat evil, etc. Now, I would be very interested in reading a story where magic is integral to this kind of very basic story structure – the harder a rule is to break (and I agree that many of my original rules allow plenty of room for exceptions), the more interesting the story when it is broken successfully.

Protagonists or antagonists can go without magic as long as they have something equally powerful at their disposal. Agreed, but going back to my previous point, some authors make magic so powerful that there is nothing else in their fantasy world that can logically counter it. I personally believe that magic in every fantasy story should involve a price or weakness that characters can exploit, but be careful of writing yourself into a corner where a character just “happens” to discover this weakness without it being hinted at previously.

Magic does not always have to be morally neutral. This rule sprang from a personal philosophical preference more than anything else. Nothing in the real world is absolutely good or evil. Even things like (to take an extreme example) illicit drugs can be used in some cases to treat medical illnesses, and sweetness can be cloying if you get too much of it at once. So what is a moral absolute, really? By making magic purely good or evil, you are destroying this nuance. There are some interesting moral implications in a story where magic only corrupts and people still choose to use it, but in my opinion it is far more interesting when magic causes both ill and good effects (for example, a character must kill an innocent to save their companion through magic).

Any rule can be broken for the better with enough creativity. This week, write a story that violates one or more of my original rules.