Sanderson's Second Law of Magic

[Kuiper]

A few years back, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn, Wheel of Time, Stormlight Archive) wrote a series of essays describing laws of magic systems. In the second of these essays, Sanderson posits that limitations are of greater importance than powers when it comes to effective magic systems.

I agree with the premise of Sanderson's essay, for reasons which I recently detailed in a post on my own blog. This post pulls several illustrative examples from Death Note, a series which I suspect many people in the visual novel community have some familiarity with.

I highly recommend that aspiring writers give the original essay a read. Though it's explicitly targeted at fantasy writers, Sanderson's laws are really just principles of good storytelling. Notions like "Limitations are more important than powers" and "what a character can't (or won't) do is often more interesting than what they can do" can apply to any genre of fiction.

[RotGtIE]

It seems like the rookie mistake is to imagine a power which, in the real world, would be fantastically amazing, and then expect that amazement to be drawn from the audience by simply demonstrating those powers in a world of fiction.

Of course, once you alter the variable of not taking place in the real world, that kind of dampens the effect, doesn't it? Readers know that the author can make up whatever nonsense they like and have it be regarded, at least within their own fictional setting, as the word of God. That's exactly what makes these things so unimpressive once they hit text - it's not the spectacle of what is being described which is what readers are looking to be impressed by.

People don't tune in to works of writing for the spectacle. They tune in because they want a compelling story, or to see writing executed well. The rules around writing fiction are much easier to understand when you re-align your focus to the quality of your performance as a storyteller, and away from the details of what exactly is occurring in the story. Just like with any other performance art - even athletic sports - it's the performer's execution which people are looking to be impressed by. Hitting a ball with a stick is not inherently impressive in and of itself - it's the batter's performance which has the capacity to impress an audience.

[Kuiper]

Since this is a thread about Brandon Sanderson, and you brought up the baseball analogy, I feel obliged to post this transcript from one of Brandon Sanderson's writing class lectures.

I want to disabuse you of a few notions. Writing is not about inspiration. Writing is not about ideas. Writing, or more specifically, getting published, is not about luck. What is writing about, then? Writing is about skill. And today I want to try and prove this to you.

When someone sits down to play piano for you, how quickly can you tell if they're a good pianist or not? Basically everybody in this room can judge a pianist's level of skill within a minute or two of play. Not exactly, but you can know if this is someone who's good at piano, or if this is someone who's still an amateur at the piano. You can probably tell if this is a master versus someone who's just pretty good.

Editors, published writers, people who know what they're doing, can do the same thing with one page of your writing in the exact same way. That is why it's not about inspiration, ideas or luck, because in one page I can judge how good a writer you are. People wonder why can editors reject manuscripts or, in this new age, where we're sometimes bypassing editors, how come the readers just put something down after one page when they haven't given it a real shot.

You guys can judge this too. You've read enough, you know enough, you can judge if something is going to work for you pretty quickly. Perhaps not as quickly as most editors can, but you'll know. You'll read a chapter and you'll know if that person is a master, if they're in that medium grade where they've got some good things going on (it's still readable, but they're obviously not a master), or if this is someone's first novel they wrote when they were 12. You can tell all these things. So how do you develop this skill? PRACTICE.

The reason I say it's not about inspiration or ideas or luck - those things are all important, but it's not about those things. Let's take another metaphor. You're a world star batter on a baseball team. When you step up to the plate to hit that ball and you connect, is that inspiration or ideas or luck? Ideas are the wrong metaphor here, but is it luck? It's SKILL. You have done that so many times that when you step up to swing you know exactly what to do.

For the baseball player, it's not a matter of luck when they connect. It's a matter of having spent thousands of hours practicing how to do that. One thing that I want to encourage in you is to start looking at writing as a little bit more of a performance art.

When you sit down to write, all that skill comes to bear, and if you have practiced enough your mind will figure out the problems that you're trying to work out on the page. It will figure out how to bring out the characters. It will figure out how to create a plot that is really engaging. It will do this all in interesting ways because it's just natural to you the same way that the pianist sitting down to play that piece doesn't think about it.

We'll talk a lot in this class about the behind-the-scenes. We'll break it down. We'll say "This is what writers are doing." The trick to remember is that most of the time we are not sitting there consciously thinking "I need to follow Brandon's First Law of Magics" or "I need to build a try/fail cycle for this character". We're not thinking that any more than the baseball player is thinking "All right, I bring my bat down to this trajectory at this exact force in order - " They don't think that. Perhaps they have thought that on occasion, but they're not thinking it at that moment.

One of the things I like about Brandon Sanderson's writing essays is that the ideas they present are not (generally) controversial--in a lot of cases, I feel that "Sandersons Laws of Magic" are ideas that I had internalized as a reader many years ago, but never really considered consciously until Sanderson presented them to me in essay form. (Similarly, I enjoy Mike Stoklasa's film commentary because I generally agree with him when it comes to taste in films, but he has a filmmaker's vocabulary that allows him to articulate why certain films and scenes are good or bad. It's somewhat telling that the Stoklasa reviews I enjoy watching the most are those for films I have already seen.)

I think it's very common for us to get analytic about what makes a good story--most of the threads in this forum are related to that topic. And there is a place for that. But writing a good story is mostly about being a good writer, and being a good writer is mostly about sticking with the craft long enough to learn from experience what works and what doesn't. I think that discussion of "what makes a good story" is best when it is seen as descriptive, not prescriptive.

I find it a very helpful exercise to say, "Here's a story that I loved very much, let's analyze it and figure out what exactly made it so good," or "Here's a story that I think could have been better, let's dissect it and try to discover where it fell short." (That's descriptive. And I do it for my own work all the time.) It's much less useful to say, "Here are the ingredients that go into a good story, so go write a story that includes these ingredients, and voilé, you'll have a good story." That's prescriptive. It's not a useful exercise, but a lot of people actually begin with the mistaken notion that because they know what a good story looks like, they have all that they need to write a good story. Recognizing good writing and producing good writing are different skills.

To make another analogy, you can treat it a bit like physical fitness. Education is important, and learning proper technique so that you can perform certain exercises more effectively can improve the effectiveness of a workout. Having a teacher (personal trainer) to instruct you on proper form and develop routines that concentrate on specific areas you want to address in your workouts can really help to maximize the efficiency of your workout sessions. However, simply reading a book or listening to someone talk about personal fitness will not make you any more fit if you don't exercise and apply the techniques you've learned. Having a super efficient routine means nothing if you're not willing to put the hours in and just practice.