Magic and World-Buildng: Who Needs 'Em?

The only map you will ever need. Or at least the only one you're getting.

Time to take Goodkind to task for the two things he takes "typical fantasy" to task for: magic and world-building.

As you will recall, Goodkind said this about the topic:

Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It's either about magic or a world-building. I don't do either.

And in most fantasy magic is a mystical element. In my books fantasy is a metaphysical reality that behaves according to its own laws of identity.

Because most fantasy is about world-building and magic, a lot of it is plotless and has no story.

*tamps down anger*

I'm actually going to give Goodkind some leeway on this quote, because he uses the word "most", and indeed "most" fantasy, as is true of any genre, consists of authors trying badly to imitate what made other authors successful and missing the point. We call such writers "hacks" and for the most part these writers either get better and cease to be hacks or they stop being published at all. In any section of any bookstore, you're going to find racks and racks of hacks. This is not unique to fantasy. And yes, the fantasy genre includes game designers pretending to be novelists (and being published because they work for the game companies producing the books), game players who tried their hand at turning their latest RPG scenario into a novel and managed to get published anyway, writers who were published by Baen, an infamous company that is more concerned with quantity than quality (and primarily survives by flooding the market), but let me state for the record that you'll still find some quality stuff produced by Baen.

By including "most" fantasy, he's not exactly wrong. After all, if I can fit a majority of the fantasy authors whose work is considered noteworthy into a single blog post with room to spare, then it goes without saying that "most" of the genre is pretty one-dimensional and silly.

However, I take issue with his insistence that the problem with other authors is a focus primarily on magic and world-building. I won't claim there are no authors so focused on their magic system that they forget to focus on the characters, or that are so in love with the world they built that they forget the world is supposed to be there to tell a story, but I will say that those writers are probably in the minority. Having read in the genre as much as I have, I feel the worst issue it faces is how acceptable it became for far too long a time for fantasy to be derivative.

I won't pretend I know exactly where it started, but I have a feeling the first person to succeed despite blatant derivation, or perhaps because of it, was Terry Brooks. I said as much in the last post; Brooks openly and unashamedly re-wrote The Lord of the Rings with some surface changes applied and managed to produce the first fantasy novel to hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, The Sword of Shannara. After that, for a long time, a lot of what became popular in fantasy (but by no stretch all of it) followed a distinct formula. The orphan farmboy, or farmgirl, would be swept away on a quest, usually to find a magical artifact, but sometimes already in possession of it, would end up winning the love of a young woman (or man if the heroine was female) that by all rights he should never have met, and visit every city on the map in the process. The formula was played with a lot, increasingly so as years went on, but never really went away. In fact, you can still find the "epic quest" in fantasy today, though it usually takes forms like a marching army or band of sellswords instead of the orphan farmboy and his ragtag group of friends.

So ultimately, what killed the genre was just that; too many people doing the same thing over and over again. Were magic and world-building contributors whatsoever to these books' issues? Honestly, not really, and in many cases were their only saving grace. If they were contributors to the problem, they were mere symptoms, not the cause. An author who produces a one-dimensional story with one-dimensional characters is likely to produce a one-dimensional world and one-dimensional magic. Or, if he produces a derivative story with derivative characters, his world and his magic will likely be just as derivative.

In some cases, the magic and the world are the only thing to recommend the books, but that doesn't mean the books are all magic and world-building and no story. It just means a story that isn't any good.

A bad story will not be saved by well-thought-out magic systems or worlds. But a good story will not be served by poorly considered worlds or magic.

Let's talk about magic first. Magic can be approached a variety of ways. Increasingly fantasy authors are relying on it less and less. Even back in the early days you had writers like Glen Gook and Guy Gavriel Kay using it sparingly and keeping it mysterious, something that a majority of the characters mistrusted. Some authors use it like espionage authors use spy tech. It's all over the place and just about every character uses it to some degree. Steven Erikson is one like that. Of the two approaches, Goodkind is more like Erikson than he is Kay. All three of his major characters are magic users, as are a majority of his supporting cast.

Some writers don't explain much about how their magic system works, at least not in-story, because most of the characters aren't magic users and probably wouldn't understand. Others explain their systems in great detail because a majority of the characters are indeed magic users and the reader is better served by knowing how their powers work. Joe Abercombie is a good example of the first group and Brandon Sanderson perhaps the ur-example for the latter. Goodkind definitely leans toward the latter. In his first book, he has Zedd give Richard a long lesson on how magic works, and in the process, explains it to the reader. In the second book, Sister Verna does the same.

There's no right and wrong way to do a magic system. It can be minimalist or detailed. It can be mysterious or functional. Used by many, used by few. Prominent or background. But it needs to be consistent, regardless of how it's presented. Don't tell me in one chapter that magic works one way if you're gonna tell me in another that it works completely different. Don't tell me it can't do something and then have a character do that very thing. And above all, don't spring on us the idea that for one character the rules don't apply.

If you're gonna include a magic system, you at least need to know how it works. Even if you don't explain it to your readers, you need to know what you are working with as an author. It's usually best to ask yourself the following questions:

• How is it learned and executed?
• How is it accessed?
• Does it have a will of its own?
• Is it restricted in space and time?
• What does available magic do?
• How does it relate to the character, plot and theme of the book?
• What is the cost of magic?
• What can it not do?
• How long does it last?
• Who can use it?
• How do others react to it?
• Why haven't people with this power taken over the world?

It becomes more and more clear as the books wear on that Goodkind has asked himself none of these questions, or if so, the answer changes depending on what scene he's constructing.

Goodkind disparages questions about his magic system, insisting it's not important. "Why are you idiot readers so focused on the magic system instead of the story and characters?" is his general attitude. Again, I feel like if he'd given us a story and characters that were more engaging and consistent, he would have had fewer questions like this, but remember his complaining that fantasy readers are more focused on the inner workings of a flashlight than they are in asking why the character is stumbling around in the dark?

As I pointed out, we know how a flashlight works, but if Goodkind had written a scene where a character uses a flashlight because he's stuck in a dark place, he would first remind us how long batteries last, talk about the beam's radius and circumference and how limited they are, and then proceed to have his character wander for hours on end with the beam never even flickering and the beam lighting up the space around him to daylight-level brightness. He doesn't, if we extend the metaphor, understand himself how that flashlight works and doesn't care, because he needs that beam to keep getting brighter and those batteries to be everlasting in order to write the scene the way he wants it. If the character has to worry about what to do when the flashlight goes out or if there's something he doesn't see because his beam isn't focused on it, Goodkind might have to re-think how he's approaching this scene.

Goodkind's magic is very prevalent. Characters use it on nearly every page. And Goodkind writes it as working however he needs it to in order for the scene to proceed as he wants it. Rather than write organically, he forces everything in his story, and everyone, to do what he needs them to do in order to get where he needs to go. And he never re-writes or reconsiders because he doesn't do rewrites. He has said many times that he does not feel the need, ever, to go back and try a different approach to the his narrative. And it shows.

It's not really a problem if Goodkind doesn't want to explain his magic system to us. If that's the case he never should have started, and definitely should not have told us what it couldn't do. He also, probably, should have cut way back on its use. What he did was include it but very haphazardly, to the detriment of his story. As I said, a good story about magic users is poorly served by a half-assed magic system, even if the main point of the story has nothing to do with using magic. Which, unfortunately for Goodkind, is not the case for The Sword of Truth.

Now let's talk about world-building. What is world-building? Essentially, it is the consideration of the world you're writing within, what its history is, what its present is like, and how it got there, and how it will serve your story. The world should definitely serve the story, rather than the story serving the world, and yes, I have encountered books where the latter is the case. But the bottom line is that whatever story you're telling, it needs to feel real.

I know what you're thinking. "How can you expect fantasy to feel real?" I don't mean "real" as in "could this happen in real life". I mean real as in "within the context provided, is it believable?" If the world itself feels hollow, plastic and little more than a backdrop, then I'm not invested in what the characters in the world are doing. I don't care if the world is saved by their actions, because nothing about their world really matters to me. I've read some books where world feels like faerie land, and others where the world feels as solid and grounded as the world I actually live in. The first sort of world has me wondering why the characters can't just wave a wand and solve all their problems. The second means that every action they take has consequences, the sort of consequences they might have in real life. If a person is killed, they're likely gonna stay dead, and if a wizard says "magic doesn't work that way, I can't do this", then he can't do it. Even more to the point, if two characters from different countries that don't trust each other end up alone together, I'm already more invested in their situation because there's a basis for distrust or even violence that feels real.

I have no idea how a random person from Nicobarese might react if they had to work together in close quarters with a person from Tamarang, because Nicobarese is just a place where people talk funny, and Tamarang is just a resting place for an evil queen.

For that matter, I have no idea how long it would take to get to Nicobarese from Tamarang. They look pretty close together on that map, but it apparently takes weeks to travel between them. Have a look at Hartland. Richard and Kahlan travel from there to the village of the Mud People (are you fucking kidding me!!??) in about a week. But from the Mud People (seriously??) to Aydindril takes weeks upon weeks. Richard and Sister Verna travel from the village of the Mud People (I'm seriously getting angrier every time I type that) to Tanimura and it seems to take at least two months, not to mention that Sister Verna has apparently been searching for Richard for years when it doesn't look like it would take more than about a year to visit every place on that map. Their journey is fraught with danger from various places that appear absolutely nowhere on that map. Now, this is the same map that Goodkind apparently never wanted to make and only did so under pressure from TOR. Yeah, I really don't think that's what happened. I think that, like his fantasy, Goodkind started realizing that people thought his map sucked, and once again decided that the map wasn't important and it was the complainers' fault for focusing on it.

Kinda like his magic and his world building. He didn't think he needed to put effort into either, so he didn't, and then he got mad when people pointed out that he didn't put much effort into them.

Let's liken Goodkind's works to a living room set. He's got a nice couch and love seat pair, with a neat little coffee table, none of which look bad but obviously came from Ikea, and he's really proud of it and wants you to look at the living room--just the living room. Because if you look anywhere else you'll notice that the ceiling is being held up by about five spindly-looking dowels, and the whole thing is about to come crashing down.

The worldbuilding is the wall, the foundation, the support structure. If you don't have it, the rest falls apart. No matter how nice it looks. And Goodkind flubbed it, so rather than fix it, or admit he could have done better, he just rants and raves at his audience for even bothering to care.

Goodkind, any time there's an element to your work that you yourself don't care about, then it is your work that is one-dimensional and silly. Maybe you don't do world-building and magic, but then, maybe you shouldn't have even tried. Then again, without magic your story wouldn't work, because it depends on magic (the inconsistent kind that you right) to be told, and without your invented world, it would become obvious how thin and flat your characters are, and how they don't act like real people, and how skewed their values are. Hell, we notice even in the world you invented.

Next time, we're gonna talk about Terry Goodkind's status as a fantasy best-seller. Stay tuned because this one required actual research.