Magic & Mayhem

Magic is the key to our world.  Well okay, that sounded a little bit dramatic, it’s one of the keys to our world.  It’s what makes our world go and what makes our people different from the people in this world that we live in.  And with Magic like so many other things there come rules and regulations and the how to and how not to.  Unfortunately for us, it means that we have to sit down and figure out all those rules and regulations.  Who can do what and who should do what.  How you stop someone from being too overpowered, and how you stop someone else from being all knowing and turning them into a bit of a Mary Sue.  We don’t want Mary Sue’s nor do we want Gary Sue’s either.  But that’s the challenge sometimes with Magic.  There’s the chance that you’ll take that character and make them into a first rate learner, someone who can do everything perfectly every time.  And whilst that in itself isn’t a bad thing so long as you have some negative traits or something to counterbalance that, the danger is that you’d create the perfect person without realising it.

This has been our weekend.  Writing the rules.  Implementing the rules.  Making sure this person isn’t too Over Powered, and the other person isn’t too under powered.  If this person has this sort of magic, does it make sense?  Or have they suddenly become the nuclear missile that we’ve so feared in our world?  And then there are those other characters of ours.  Characters who are just lazy, who expect to have everything handed to them on a plate and refuse to get off their behinds and learn their crafts.  Which means that we, as the writers, have to work that much harder to ensure that the character does what we want it to do.  If we’re lucky.

This makes it sound as though all we do on our weekends is sorting.  It’s not, I promise it’s not really!  It’s just the best time for us to sit down and devote time to making sure our world is still ticking over and working properly.  This weekend might have been spent talking and sorting and discussing our rules and regulations but it’s also been spent writing.  Which at times is a blessing and at times it’s frustrating, sometimes we’ll be doing chapters of our book and at other times our writing is a couple of brief background chapters that probably won’t make the final cut.  But they are there for character development and give us more of an insight into things than often we realise at the time of writing.

So we’ve been writing, we’ve been character building and we’ve been world building.  Sometimes it amazes us what we can get done in a weekend, sometimes even just a day.  But we’re another step closer to having things sorted for good, and although we keep saying that we’ve got it we know that there’ll be something else that we have to deal with at some other point down the line.  But, in our defence there’s no point in saying ‘we have four areas of magic in our world’ if we don’t have the rules and regulations behind them.  Maybe those rules will never work their way into our books, but for us they’re an invaluable point of reference.  To know something and to make sure that our continuity remains in tact.  Something that is, for us, as crucial as a basic timeline!

 

~ Clara