The Cost of Magic
Yesterday's post from Brandon Sanderson about his second law of magic got me thinking about how I have approached magic, or science fiction technology, in my own writing endeavors. I wrote a little bit about it in May last year when I shared my thoughts on what a good magic system needs, and then a follow up post with some thoughts on how to handle the nitty-gritty details of a magic system without boring the readers.
Brandon Sanderson's focus on how the cost is an important part in making magic interesting reminded me of the problems I had with that. The most recent occurrence was with the magic system I was going to use in my nanowrimo novel last year. I had a magic system where people could focus their aura into various parts of their bodies to become strong/faster/better (inspired by the magic used in Hunter x Hunter for those of you that read manga or watch anime). The usage part of the system was working out fine. I felt like I had a good system were the limits on what they could do was easy for the reader to see and the visual aspect of the magic made it fun to write about. The only problem left was how to make the magic users not omnipotent compared to a non-magic user. If they could go around and enhance their own abilities the whole time it would create a strange power balance in the world.
In the story I wrote for nanowrimo I ended up using the simplest solution; they get very tired after prolonged use. That restriction turned out not to be enough. The nanowrimo story spiraled out of control as I wrote it. As soon as the main character learned how to use his own power I realized that any interesting challenge would require the antagonist, or his minions, to have the same magical power as well. This in turn created a world were too many had magical powers, while I had created the setting based upon the thought that the magical power was a rare attribute. Thus the whole world, and all the challenges that the protagonist met, started to feel very contrived.
I realized that the abundance of magic was the source of the problem, but until I read the post on Sanderson's Second Law of Magic I had not been able to pin point the exact cause. It had to be harder to use the magic.
Now that I know the cause of the problem I'm looking forward to reworking the setting, and seeing what will happen to it when I add a better cost to the magic system. Not sure what the cost is going to be, but now that I know where to look I should be able to find something fitting.