Exercise #9: Making Trouble from Unexplained Magic
Brandon Sanderson, Brian Evenson, Diane Cook, Annie Baker, Octavia E. Butler, Tochi Onyebuchi, Ben Marcus.
Hi all,
I’m writing this month’s exercise a little earlier than usual, although you’re receiving it on the first of the month, as usual. Why? Because if everything goes as planned, by the time this goes out I’ll have received the copy edits for Appleseed, my next novel, and will hopefully be buried in the work of making what will be more or less the book’s final edits. I started writing it in 2016, finished in 2019, and have been working on and off with my editor throughout 2020, prepping it for release in July 2021. There’s always a time in the middle of every novel when it feels like it’ll never be finished—and then, suddenly, you arrive at the point where you’ll never be allowed to change it ever again. As you’re reading this, I’m inching ever close to that deadline for this book, a moment that has in the past been simultaneously joyful and relieving, mixed with just the smallest bit of anxious sadness: you always hope this will be the book that turns out perfect, and then comes the moment you usually have to admit it’s merely as perfect as you could make it (and that’s with a lot of help).
That said, there’s a real pleasure to every part of these last stages of the process: this is probably blasphemy to say, but turning in final final edits might actually be a more fulfilling emotion experience than the book actually coming out many months later.
As always, if you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to tell me so. You’re also welcome to pass this prompt on to others, if you’d like, either by forwarding the email or sharing the link on social media. If you do, know that I appreciate it.
Be safe this week, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading:
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook. I feel like 2020 has been a great year for new novels so far, and Diane Cook’s first is one of my favorites: I loved her collection Man v. Nature, and her novel extends and expands so many of that book’s pleasures. It’s a very smart book about climate adaptation and about seeking new ways to live and dwell, as well as the difficulties of doing so. How much of the old world comes with us, when we set out to make a new one? Is there truly anywhere to escape to, once we decide it’s time to leave?
The Antipodes by Annie Baker. A couple weeks ago, I gathered with some friends on Zoom for a virtual table reading of this play, which was an absolute blast. It’s funny and strange and plays its cards close. A really smart story about the nature and purpose of storytelling in difficult times.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. I’ve been rereading Parable of the Sower for class and loving it even more this time. There are some books that give and give and give, rewarding rereads or additional familiarity with the writer’s body of work, and this is definitely one of them. Weirdly, the more I revisit Parable, the more hopeful it feels: not for its world, which is at least as grim as our sometimes is, but for its belief in community, in the necessity of diversity and hybridity, in what might be done better next. A good companion to this difficult year.
“How to Pay Reparations: a Documentary” by Tochi Onyebuchi. (Published online at Slate.) Onyebuchi’s story about a city that implements its own AI-driven reparations program is a smart thought experiment, but also a great example of the documentary/oral history form, one I’m always surprised isn’t more common in fiction. It’s such a natural fit for any writer who can produce a variety of voice-driven characterizations, and Onyebuchi’s use of it is a pleasure.
Exercise #9: Making Trouble from Unexplained Magic
I mentioned last month that I’m teaching a course on Worldbuilding for Science Fiction and Fantasy this semester, which has been a total blast so far. Each week, students complete an exercise in which they flesh out some part of their world through a short piece of fiction, and last week’s was one everyone in the room had been looking forward to: designing magic systems and/or inventing new technologies. One of the most useful ways of teaching magic design that I’ve found is to refer to novelist Brandon Sanderson’s “Three Laws of Magic,” which I believe can be useful not just to fellow fantasy novelists but also to writers of other modes of fabulist fiction. Today’s exercise will focus on the latter usage: how can we use these design principles to create successful fabulist, fantastical, speculative plots, especially in short fiction?
Sanderson explains his Three Laws of Magic (modeled after Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics) in great detail at his blog, but at their most basic they are as follows:
An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.
Limitations are more important than powers.
Expand what you already have before you add something new.
All three of these laws are good advice, but today let’s focus on the first, and especially one of its implications. In his First Law, Sanderson suggests that while solving conflicts which magic requires the stakes, mechanics, and costs of magic to be explainable and understandable, creating conflicts with unexplained or unexplainable magic is entirely workable.
In other words: poorly-explained magic should not be used to solve problems, only to create them.
What happens next, after you’ve put a fantastical and unexplained problem into play? The protagonists, without access to their own poorly-explained magic—whose use Sanderson says would only result in an unsatisfactory or cheap story—have to solve the problem using more mundane means.
In classic fantasy, this often means that magic is countered with martial might or an epic journey: In Lord of the Rings, for instance, Aragorn has to raise an army of men and elves and dwarves and hobbits to stand against the magical Nazgul and the other monstrous forces of Mordor, while at the same time Frodo and Sam defeat Sauron by destroying the One Ring… with a very long walk and a rock scramble up a small volcano.
In other modes of literature, including short stories that might be labeled “speculative” or “magical realism” or “fabulist,” the solutions to a magical situation are often even more mundane, in their action, or even almost entirely emotional, in both cause and effect.
For instance, in Brian Evenson’s “Windeye”—the title story of his 2012 collection and one of my favorite stories of his—the protagonist loses his sister during the course of a childhood game where the siblings are trying to find a particular window that seems to appear only on the outside of their house, which he calls a windeye after a misremembered story of their grandmother’s. Here’s the moment where the sister disappears:
He was worried she was going to ask questions, but she didn’t. And then they went into the house to look again, to make sure it wasn’t a window after all. But it still wasn’t there on the inside.
Then they decided to get a closer look. They had figured out what window was nearest to it and opened that and leaned out of it. There it was. If they leaned far enough, they could see it and almost touch it.
“I could reach it,” his sister said. “If I stand on the sill and you hold my legs, I could lean out and touch it.”
“No,” he started to say, but, fearless, she had already clambered onto the sill and was leaning out. He wrapped his arms around her legs to keep her from falling. He was just about to pull her back and inside when she leaned further and he saw her finger touch the windeye. And then it was as if she had dissolved into smoke and been sucked into the windeye. She was gone.
The sister vanishes, and while the interpretation of that moment is purposefully made ambiguous—this is my go-to text for teaching how to generate ambiguity instead of confusion and mystery instead of secrets—it remains true that this is the only instance of anything like magic that occurs in the story. The sister is gone in an instant, and for the rest of the protagonist’s life, he’s beset by doubts about her very existence, doubts that are compounded by everyone else in his life: even his mother claims he never had a sister—“Stop pretending,” she says—and then, when he drags her outside to see the windeye, it’s gone too.
The disappearance of the sister and the windeye is a bit of trouble-making unexplained magic, and afterward there’s no other such magic available to undo the trouble it’s caused. The brother is traumatized by his grief, and only the most mundane solutions to his emotions are available to him: a “line of doctors that visited him as a child,” “years of forced treatment and various drugs,” “years of having to pretend to be cured.” Evenson’s tale is a tragedy, so the protagonist’s problem goes unsolved as he loses everything except his desperate hope that one day the sister will reappear. But it is possible to imagine a version in which these mundane solutions heal him, with a kinder mother and more effective doctors helping the brother instead of further harming him.
What if you’re an entirely mimetic writer, with no use for magic in your fiction? Even then I this idea can be useful. I’m not sure I want to definitively say emotions are magic too but perhaps that’s close enough in certain situations to apply Sanderson’s rules even in more definitively realist stories. Wherever a character’s emotional journey is the primary plot pleasure, you might seed a story with an unexplained emotional event occurring whose consequences then have to be worked out via new actions whose motivations are more clearly visible to the reader. (Ben Marcus’s “What Have You Done?” is a good example of how this might work: the protagonist did something in the past that’s so horrible it influences everyone’s perception of him, but what he did is never explained, only responded to.)
Time to put these ideas into practice! Your exercise this month is to write a short piece of fiction in which the inciting incident of the story is a moment of unexplained (or poorly explained) magic, but where the resolution of the story’s conflict is accomplished by mundane, non-magical means. Likely, you will be very tempted to explain, despite the title of this exercise! But every explanation you write will only invite questions, and the questions will slow your characters down from the pursuit of their solution.
Focus on what real and possible actions the characters might take to undo or overcome or learn to live with the effects of the magical event: What’s changed because of it? What new obstacles or difficulties does the protagonist face? What steps might they take to overcome these problems, to hide them or mitigate them or conquer them?
Most importantly, usually: What character changes or new emotions are made possible by this intrusion of magic into the protagonist’s life, and how will their actions help to realize those possibilities?
No length requirement this time out: I feel like this can be capably accomplished in a 750-word short or a twenty-page story. But if this move feels especially new or challenging, why not try it in a shorter piece first? It can be a pleasure to prototype new tactics at smaller sizes, or to try them in various ways in a consecutive series of shorts rather than in one longer story.
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.