Right, settle in. Let’s talk about Magic.
For this purpose, we’ll define it broadly. ‘Magic’ means anything that works or happens in your written world that cannot, according to our understanding of science, work or happen in the real one.
It means dragons that fly and breathe fire. It means spaceships that travel faster than light. It also means ghosts, demonic possession, second sight and other things that some serious and intelligent people believe actually do happen in our world, but most of us can’t see how they would.
Magic can be great fun, for the writer as well as the reader. By all means write as much of it into your pages as you want. I have only one rule to suggest, and just a few tips on how you might keep to it.
The rule is: You Must Make Your Reader Believe.
Easy? Yes and No.
- On the one hand, you are telling your reader that something they think can’t happen actually can. So that’s an uphill start.
- On the other, most of us readers begin by wanting to believe you, or we would not have picked up your story in the first place. So that’s a following wind, if you like. It invokes another law, which applies to all writers of any description: Know Your Reader.
My tips would be:
- Explain what you must. If your plot turns on magic, your reader has to have grasped the key mechanics well before you get them to the turning point.
- Example 1: in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is told in Chapter 2 that the ring is powerful, evil, belongs to Sauron and that Sauron must not get it. At the start of Part 2 he learns that if it is thrown into Mount Doom Sauron will be defeated. Guess what happens?
- Example 2: the film Inception is about adventuring in dreams. In the opening sequence you see characters doing exactly that. At the start of Act 2 the heroine is introduced to the team. She is a newbie so DiCaprio’s character has to explain to her how she can build dreams and walk around in them, how she mustn’t let the creatures of the dream know she is an outsider, and that if she is killed in the dream she wakes up. All this is used in the main adventure.
- Example 3: my current loo reading is Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad. Yes, it’s about witches and they cast spells left and right. But the real magic, on which the plot turns, is How Stories Work. Pratchett tells the reader about this as early as pages 2 and 3. A story is a living creature. It bends its characters to its will. (This is true. See Basic Plots.)
I could go on. And onandonandon. But let’s not, for now.
- Don’t explain more than you have to. I say this for two reasons.
- The longer you go on to your readers about how this impossible thing really is possible, the more likely they are to spot flaws in your logic and see that it isn’t possible after all. One of my trial readers for WE, who was scientifically-trained, commented: ‘I can’t see how a magnetic field could be alive. Where’s its DNA?’ Good question, but I ducked it. Instead of inventing further staggering and implausible complexities for the structure of my unusual alien, I just put my reader’s question almost word-for-word into the mouth of one of my characters. It is entirely plausible that if we ever do meet aliens, there will be things about them that baffle us completely. It’s enough. On with the story…
- Magic would not be magic if you understood it all, in the way that we understand how a column of figures adds up. A little bit of mystery is fun. One of the charms of the film Spirited Away was that so much about the spirit-world was not explained. You just saw it in glimpses, like those shadowy figures on the train platform, and you moved on. Wonderful.
- Let them feel it. This follows on from the last point. You can’t make your readers see that your magic works (because it doesn’t); and you wouldn’t want to (because if you could lay it out like a column of figures it would be a dead thing). But you must say enough for them to feel that it does. You have to give them pegs on which to hang their belief. In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell we see the magicians trying to construct their spells almost like culinary recipes, but Clarke doesn’t let us look over their shoulders at the ingredient list. We are told of the mystic landscape of the King’s Roads, but she doesn’t give us a map. And we understand that the deep source of magic is the fairy world, which roots the story into our ancient myth. It’s enough. It works.
- Keep it consistent. The trap with magic is, if your characters can do something cool in scene four, why can’t they do something similarly cool in scene six, and get themselves out of trouble? You don’t want them to get out of trouble. It would ruin the story if they did. Reverting to The Lord of the Rings, there’s a point shortly after the Council of Elrond where the company gets stuck in a snowdrift. The characters ask why Gandalf can’t melt a way out for them. Tolkien makes them ask this because he knows his readers will be asking it, and he has to provide an answer. This is the problem with superpowers. They can only work some of the time, or your story would not be much of a story. So you have to put constraints on it, and both magic and constraint have to remain consistent in your story-telling, up to the point when you are ready for the spells to be broken or the new tech to be revealed. In this case Gandalf simply says ‘I must have something to work on. I cannot burn snow.’ Ok, that works. And on with the story…
- Believe it yourself. This one is so important that it’s almost another law. In fact it could be a law for all fiction-writing of any kind. Enjoy your magic. Explore it, revel in it as you write. Your readers will feel that, and they will revel too.
Last Updated on January 13, 2026 by John