Details of a magic system
In a comment on my previous post about magic systems James asked a few questions about about the possible origins of a system, and the amount of details I would want to see in it.
Trying to find an answer to those questions was one of the reasons I wrote the last post; to help organise my own thoughts around magic systems and thus help me create better ones for my own fantasy settings.
The origin of the structure isn't really that important in my opinion. I care more about the actual structure and how it has (and will) affect the setting. If the magic is an inherit part of the world, power from another realm, or something given to people by their Gods does not really matter.
If the system is carefully laid out with mathematical formulas I, as a reader, don't need to know that. I want enough information to predict results and options within the system, but an approximation is enough in that regard. The difference between knowing the character can create a 10" fireball and a 11.5" fireball is not that important (in most cases), knowing the character can create a fireball is the important part. For the author it might be a good idea to lay out the rules with all the small details made clear. I know that I at least have an easier time keeping track of everything, and figuring out all the possible implications of my system when I have it clearly written in front of me.
Balancing the amount in information, and figuring out how to give is a very difficult task. The reader doesn't want an info dump with all the rules, but he should learn enough to anticipate the limits and available options set by the rules. I've noticed that it is often solved with the character learning about the system alongside the reader (e.g Brandon Sanderson in the Mistborn books or J.K. Rowling's approach in the Harry Potter books), but that option is not always available. I cannot think of a book that does it any other way at the moment, without info dumping, but there has to be some out there.
You can of course avoid all of this by making magic a secondary part of the story. If it is never used to solve any conflicts it does not require the same amount of exposition.
Dreadnought – Cherie Priest
After having read Boneshaker I was really looking forward to this book. The story is based around a journey from eastern USA to the west coast while the country is ravaged by civil war. Transportation ranges from walking on foot, to dirigibles, steamboats and trains. It sounds like a very promising start, especially when you know the great care Cherie Priest takes in creating her steampunk version of a late 19th century America.
It is a very fast paced story. The main character, Vinita "Mercy" Lynch, is never given much time to rest on her journey as new obstacles are thrown in her way. The only problem with all of these obstacles is that Mercy is never shaken by any of them, and the solution is always given too fast. That makes it harder to experience the tension that should have been present throughout the book. Another problem is that Mercy is rarely an active part of the solution to the problems. She does her part, but it never feels like she is actually driving the story forward as much as I would like.
I think another reason I found the tension lacking in this is that one of the main plot elements in this book is explained in the first Clockwork Century book, Boneshaker. So the questions and mystery around that part fell flat when I already I knew the answer, and thus had good idea of what was going to come.
But even with a passive main character, and knowledge that I might have been better off without, I enjoyed reading the book. Cherie Priest is a good writer and it is very fun to experience the world that she has created. The other characters in the book make for an interesting travelling party, even though we never learned a lot about those characters, and the quick pace of the story makes it easy to ignore the bad parts.
Arguments saves the day
As I was working on solving my problems with ending dialogues I came across a pod cast on Writing Excuses about how to avoid stilted dialogue. I have always had a problem making the dialogues that I write seem natural, but until I started the current rewrite of my draft that had never been my focus.
As I was rereading the conversations my characters were having I realised that they almost always ended up with one person acting as an information dump, while the other person asked (bad) questions to keep the information coming. Often this was information that both characters should have known, so the whole sequence was just to feed the reader with information.
I solved a few of those cases by moving the information to the thoughts that the point-of-view character had, or by removing the dialogue all together. The sequences became a lot better, but it reduced the amount of dialogue a bit too much. Dialogue can tell you a lot about a character and it is a great way to convey the difference between characters, so I did not want to remove too much of it.
As I listened to the pod cast from Writing Excuses I learnt another way to make my dialogues better. I should write each dialogue as an argument between the participants. This piece of advice also fit perfectly into the general advice that each scene in a book should have some sort of conflict, and an argument is the natural way to add conflict into a dialogue heavy scene.
Rewriting the information dumping sequence to become an argument forced me to flesh out the characters, and once that was done the information that I required felt like a natural fit on the page. The cases were I needed to convey more information I knew something more fundamental was wrong. At least the times I have come across so far have been signs of me trying to force the characters to take actions based only upon what I need for the story, not upon what would be natural for the characters.
This realization has caused me to rewrite large parts of the book as the characters have become more defined and I have gotten a better idea of what information both the reader and the characters require at the various parts of the book. At least I know this trick now and can take it into consideration from the beginning when I start my next book.