How Much For A Rabbit In A Hat?

The always delightful Sarah Hoyt started a post with "It is a cliche, tired and worn, that one has to remind new writers that magic must have a price."

My knee is quick to jerk about any statement that's so broadly unqualified. Surely, there must be some exception, some time when magic does not have a price. Maybe the price varies depending upon how you define price. And it depends upon how you define magic.

Let's suppose you define magic along the lines of many Grimm's fairy tales. For instance, you can get these magic powers if you sell your soul to the devil. (If you do, hire Daniel Webster, my Whig hero to defend you.) Another example of this sort of magic is one where you can do magical tasks, but each time you do someone drowns a kitten. This is a common approach in some stories including magic. Let's call this Aladdin-style magic.

One thing I have noticed about Aladdin-style magic is that it depends upon a mortal making some deal with some angel, demon, devil, or deity to get that supernatural being to do stuff. Hence the price of Aladdin-style magic is a matter of bartering with the supernatural being.

It also requires some cleverness on the part of the magic-user to prevent the supernatural being from becoming annoyed and squashing your hero like a bug.

Then I started to think more broadly and I found reasons to think that magic might not have a price. But I realized I was thinking of a different sort of magic. Something more procedural in nature like Harry Potter. Or better, think of the magic in Rick Cook's Wizardry novels. One needn't have any special powers, just the knowledge and intelligence to master certain abstruse studies. Let's call this Alchemical-style magic.

I happen to be a technologist of no small skill. I strongly identify with Rick Cook's fiction. Anyone who has ever engaged in software development can appreciate the magical aspect of using science and technology to do things mere mortals cannot. Most technical wizards can find similarities between what they do and Alchemical-style magic.

If I run a perl script, there's a few electrons that move around differently, some ones and zeroes change, and the electric bill is some quantum higher, but all told, that's too cheap to account for. If you want to make the case for magic that doesn't pay a price, then start with Alchemical-style magic and liken it to running software. And ignore the magical-utility bill.

But if you persist in saying that ALL magic has a price and you think the price is much more significant than a mere magical-utility bill, then consider again the technological world. The expense of custom-made software is my time and what's rare is my expertise. Sadly, while others were fitting themselves for high elected office (smoking dope and cheating on tests) I was studying mathematics and computer science. Tuition was expensive then and it's much worse now.

Presumably, the wizard's apprentice has some college tuition debts that must be paid.

My daughter drew a large tick on the back of her last bill from Sally Mae, and that image COULD fit nicely into a wizard's apprentice tale.

If I ended now, I suppose Sarah was right that all magic has a price. But it depends upon how you set up your world's rules of magic. And if you're dealing with Alchemical-magic, the price varies with one's skill set. Perhaps a very highly skilled mage can perform much more powerful magical tasks with much less effort than a low-skill mage. That fits with the technology analogue.

Today I can perform feats of computation on the little phone in my pocket that would melt NASA's lunar lander's flight computers. Moreover, I routinely use algorithms that are much more efficient than those available to me 20 years ago. Greater skill gives the technology user the ability to more at less expense. Moreover, that little phone I'm carrying around replaces my tape recorder, my walkman, my video camera, my still camera, my calculator, my daily planner, and my calculator. But it won't play Angry Birds. I won't let it. Technology has enabled radical deflation of the price of high-end goods.

One would expect that if all magic has a price, the creative author could figure out ways for the price to go way down. It really is up to you. You can do anything you want when setting up how your story's magic works, except be half-baked about it. Think through how magic works as a system itself without regard to the needs of your story.

Always make the story fit your world-building, never make your world-building fit your story.

The Reader's Contract

When the reader approaches a novel, s/he has a vague feeling of what it's about based on the cover art, blurbs, and/or reviews. As the reader commences to read, s/he should have some questions begin to form: Who is the body in the library? Who put it there? Who murdered the girl?

When this happens there is an implied contract between reader and writer. "Keep reading and I'll show you the answers to these questions." There are some things a writer ought never do, and failing to honor this contract is a Bad Thing. The longer the reader goes without these answers, the more impatient s/he is going to become. You don't want this.

And you don't want to be too hasty about answering all the story questions. It's a good thing for the writer to answer a question while raising another, bigger question. OK, the Bohemian guy put the body in the library, but why was she already dead when he found her in his living room?

I like Science Fiction, particularly, Space Opera. Any SF writer worth his/her salt will be adept at "world-building" creating a future history and populating that future history with various institutions and social constructs. The biggest mistake a rookie writer can make is to spend the opening ten pages of his novel describing the secret colonization of Sirius, the rise of the Terran Empire, and the Jim-Jones-In-Space cult called Camelot. The reader doesn't want to wade through the wars of Independence that brought about the stable configuration of great powers and non-aligned worlds that make up human space a few centuries from now. But the science fiction writer must know all this and keep track of it as scaffolding. Most never sees the light of day, but some of it spices up the narrative along the way through your story.

The reader parachuted into a Space Opera is immediately confronted with a bunch of story questions about the nature of the world s/he's reading about.

This is what I felt like when I began reading The Long Way Home, by Sabrina Chase. The story starts with a space battle with mercenaries and Fleet going up against aliens.

The hero is Moire, a girl who's on the run, and a very good pilot. She single-handedly saves the day for the humans and the reader clearly sees she's a tortured soul who's gone through hell. But we don't know anything about why and how she suffered. We have to read more to find out.

This is the stuff of page-turners.

What follows is the girl having adventures and keeping one step ahead of the evil corporation who's after her as well as a love-interest Fleet investigator who wants to arrest her for the Fleet's own reasons.

All along the way, she's just a decent person and that decency causes her to win friends. But to prevent the evil corporation from hurting those friends, she has to move on and abandon them. We see Moire sort of come out of her shell, but she doesn't really become a leader until the last quarter of the novel. Could Ms. Chase done a better job of showing Moire make that change? Mebbe.

The book had a Firefly/Serenity feel to it, and the evil corporation's chief minion had something of The Operative about him. And I think The Operative is the gold-standard for villainy.

The trouble with a book like The Long Way Home is that there are too many story questions in the first chapter to answer in the scope of a single novel. Most of those answers raise questions like "what's she gonna do about this?"

And this is why it requires a series of two or three novels to deliver satisfying answers to the reader. Happily, Ms. Chase is working on those sequels. I can hardly wait for them.

The bottom line is that you want to be intentional about how you disclose things to the reader and what you must NEVER DO is leave any story-question unanswered. I suggest you ask your beta-readers to keep a diary of story-questions that they consider while reading your work. Then you should take steps to make sure that every story-question has an answer either in this novel, or in a sequel.

Oh, and in The Big Sleep, how did the Sternwood's chauffeur die?

Was it murder or suicide?

Like I said, get your beta-readers to keep a diary of story-questions.