The Authoritarian Society

Before I go any further, let me take the time to remind you that we’re about at the halfway mark on The Skybound Sea ARC Giveaway!  Please feel free to enter, if you haven’t already!  Also, if you’re a reviewer or blogger in the US and haven’t yet received an ARC, please let me know so we can get one into your hands!

Now, then…

I often feel as though there are a multitude of ways to possess a professional relationship with someone.  And while I never count myself as in a professional relationship with anyone without counting them first and foremost as a friend, I admit that when it comes to someone as awesome as N.K. Jemisin, I often feel that my chief role is as a buzzard on the savannah, swirling about a mighty impala she has brought low and swooping down to nab pieces of stringy red meat in my beak and fleeing before she can finish rending its flesh between her jaws.

That metaphor is just weird enough to warrant further explanation, and I hope to do so by piggybacking off her post on Magic Systems and why we sometimes misuse them.

See, “magic system” is one of those of pairings of words that makes my eyes involuntarily glaze over, along with “feast scenes,” “poetry interludes” and “training montage.”  To me, “it has a great magic system” is one of those left-handed compliments you give someone when you’re trying to keep their interest without directly answering their question.  It’s like when you’re asking how much gas mileage a car gets and the salesman points you to the roomy trunk instead.

“So, is the story any good?”

“Well, let me tell you, it has one of the most in-depth magic systems I have ever seen.”

Now, I know that’s not entirely fair.  A well-thought-out magic system does not necessarily suggest that the rest of the story is subpar.  It’s perfectly possible to have a compelling story, interesting characters and an interesting magic system in the same book and there are several examples of this.  Magic systems, on their own, don’t harm a story.

On their own.

But I can’t help but accredit magic systems with being a symptom of a problem that faces us as fantasy writers, and that is the obsession with rules.  And as any writer will tell you, following the rules in writing is a very easy way to turn a good story into a bad one.

Now, this obsession with rules came from good intentions, as did the obsession with homage and influence and the recent obsession with grimdark: people wanted to be taken seriously.  In a way, fantasy’s entire quest (often misguided) has been to be taken seriously by mainstream fiction.  To that end, we created a bunch of rules and systems to govern our lands so that we couldn’t just bust out a flight spell to get ourselves out of pits we fell into, literally and metaphorically.

Ultimately, this is a good thing.  It’s always been a mainstay of fantasy that magic used recklessly has a price that must be paid.  And in the case of using recklessly in fantasy fiction, the goat that must be slain is tension.  It’s hard to feel a sense of danger for characters if we know they can cast a Flight spell to get themselves out of pits.  It’s difficult to believe that there’s anything that can challenge a character if they all have Swords of Doomenheisers (of the New Jersey Doomenheisers).  It’s hard to take things seriously if, at any moment, someone can just bust out a laser beam and fry their enemy into ash.

As conflict is the soul of character, so is tension the blood of conflict.  We need that tension to keep invested in the conflict.  We need to not be sure if the hero can pull this one off, if he can survive this blow, if he can come back from this defeat.  Even if we’re pretty sure he ultimately can, tension is what keeps us reading to find out just how he’s going to do it.

And when he can just make up the rules as he goes along, then there’s no point in reading, since every conflict has new rules and thus there’s no way for us to get invested.  Magic systems, rules in general, go a long way toward addressing this.

But only to a point.  A very fine point.  Put at the end of a sentence that reads “THAT WAS A GOOD RULE YOU MADE AND IT IS FINE TO STOP HERE.”

Because when you don’t stop there, rules become…well, something more.

At its absolute best, a rule isn’t even totally immutable.  It’s a suggestion of consistency, a generally-accepted pattern of behavior that we can usually assume will be followed.  This serves to illustrate and lend weight to the moments when that rule is broken or otherwise defied.

As a caveat, though, I urge you to consider this rule from Pixar’s 22 Rules for Story (which is quickly becoming my favorite thing on the internet): coincidences to get characters into trouble are great, coincidences to get them out of trouble is cheating.  As rules are made to be broken, so are broken rules meant to be punished.  Consequence needs to happen.

And magic systems work great when they’re in the background as generally accepted schools of thought that prevent us from just leaping straight to flying out of pits (even if it is a possibility later).  I treated my magic system much the same: something hard, but not immutable, that was used mostly to further the characters of Dreadaeleon and Bralston.

At its commonplace worst, rules become immutable.  Rules are stringent, unbreakable and never defied.  Rules never change, nothing ever happens to contradict the rules.  There is no consequence for breaking rules because it never even occurs to anyone to break them.

The problem with this is the same problem that comes from having no rules at all: the tension is absolutely shattered.  We can assume that, so long as the rules are followed, everything will work out in the way it’s supposed to.  Things become inexorably tiresome as every opportunity to defy the rules is smacked down, repressed or outright ignored.  We already know how things are going to happen because we have a set of rules that cannot be defied.

Typical offenders are epic fantasy stories where characters are robbed of humanity and will to fulfill an obligation to the story.  Where magic systems and worldbuilding are more important than individual drive or desire and character motivations fit the plot exactly to best tell how the Dark Lord was defeated.

When rules become absolutely intolerable, however, is when they begin to govern humanity.

This is where we see the most egregious examples.  We begin to see things like Fantastic Racism (all orcs are evil all the time, no exceptions).  We begin to see human psychology presented as a simple, immutable thing.  We see our characters stagnate, fall back, regress and rarely change.

Typical offenders are grimdark settings who occasionally fall in love with their own grit.  These are settings where characters are suppressed to usually serve a mood or theme.  When they experience desires, they will usually be of the negative sort.  When they change, it will rarely be for the better.  This often becomes just as tiresome because it always moves in the same direction.

I often feel like a buzzard when it comes to these sorts of discussions we have because, far too often, I feel like I’m constantly squawking.  I illustrate the problem well enough and then rarely spend as much time on solutions.

And truth be told, that’s kind of unavoidable.  One of the best/worst things about writing is that there’s plenty of ways to identify a problem and no clear cut method of identifying a solution.  Just as there’s no roadmap to succeeding as an author, there’s no easy way to say which rules you need to enforce and which rules you need to relax on.

But in providing identity to the problems, I hope that some people will learn a lesson that I learned way too late for my liking.  Like many, I was obsessed with rules.  I thought there was a hard and fast way things needed to be at all times, I was stringently unwilling to budge on these things and it’s apparent in a few instances of Tome of the Undergates.

It will haunt me to my dying day, I am sure.

Lest I begin to ramble, though, keep in mind that, as all rules are meant to be broken, everything I say here is also up for interpretation.  Some people do everything I advise against and still pull it off.  Some people do everything I recommend and still manage to create a poor story.  All I can do is advise you to invest in your characters more than your world, invest in their psychology more than your rules, invest in their rebellion more than their obedience and you will rarely be disappointed.

Kind of useless advice, isn’t it?