Not to force kids to read anything they don't want to read, right here.
I'm not sure everyone resists the books that are forced on them, but no doubt it's extremely common.
Since I just got done making up, oh, my syllabus, I've been kind of thinking about this anyway. The classes aren't literature, fortunately. But even with rhetoric and composition, it can be really hard to get students past "I hate this" about any given piece of reading, to get to the interesting analysis, or even to the point where they can extract the content.
"I hate this" is where resentment of the process carries over to the subject itself. I don't know if any of us ever grow out of that. There are movies I've hated purely because I was on a hideously uncomfortable plane when I saw them. How is that any different?
So at that point I lose a movie that I might have liked otherwise, no great loss. But when it's my own writing I have to work on, dear oh dear. Editing, man. I hate it. And then I hate the writing because I hate the process.
Objectivity. I need some. I would love to hear how Meg deals with editing, which is homework, which is reading forced on you. Because that process is exactly what gets you to like To Kill a Mockingbird when it's assigned in class.
I never had that problem, actually. I like reading pretty much anything, so books they assigned in school were no big deal. Some of them I hated--Billy Budd, yikes--but mostly I liked them just fine. The only problem was that I'd read them the first night and then be four books down the line two weeks later and the teacher would think I hadn't read them at all, because I was thinking about other things already.
It only happened once, with Wind in the Willows, because it smelled funny and my mom kept pushing it at me until nothing on earth would have made me read that book on my own. She finally took away all my library books and grounded me until I read it. I really don't understand why anyone would go to such lengths. And I really disliked that book, as you might expect after all that.
Isn't that an odd story? I read constantly, everything, all the time, so why push that one book? Well, it was one of her favorites when she was that age. That's the big danger when you're making up a literature syllabus, thinking about what you loved instead of what would work for that class. You get waves of this, people assigning Catcher in the Rye because it meant a lot to them when they were in high school. But that's irrelevant. It's not a universal book, seriously. I promise you! I've had multiple classes of freshmen shake their heads in bewilderment and ask me what "you guys" see in that book.
Then again, one of our jobs teaching is to show them the awesomeness of any book. If you can't show a class what's wonderful about a book you love or hate or feel ambivalent about, you really shouldn't be teaching. They still may not like it, but they'll GET it.
So maybe that's my job with editing, right? Look at the book clearly. Figure out what's awesome about that book I'm trying to edit, hold it at arm's length while examining it with a microscope, and be able to explain to myself exactly what's so glorious there. Get past that day-one-freshman thing of going "I love it!" or "I hate it!" or "I don't wanna!" and analyze and think and study and really figure it out.
Good plan.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Read this and this
Read this and this.
But I have to argue with Sarah's argument about character A and character B in The Demon's Lexicon. Because one of them is a deeply awesome person in complete control of his environment and the other is a wannabe (nothing wrong with being new to something, but it's intrinsically less awesome than having mastered it) who switches her affections from one person to another person and seems to toy with both of them and hurts at least one, yet somehow without any panache, which might excuse it.
Sarah argues we don't like the second one because she's a girl, but actually it's for the reasons I just stated. So there you go. Except she's ABSOLUTELY RIGHT about everything else in the whole article, especially Harriet Potter. Writers punish and/or undercut awesome girls. It's a fact.
There is also a scene where the other three all mock that character for her admittedly silly outfit and laugh at her and put her down, and she gets embarrassed, which is part of my whole giant ongoing argument that we learn how to see people (and characters) because of how other people treat them. I think that scene right there caused all of the backlash against her. No one else gets mocked or ashamed. Just the girl who's among four boys. I don't think she ever recovered from that.
Which teaches me something about writing, like maybe people can knock down your character but if the character *believes* the badness then we believe it too. I sort of wonder whether if our girl had come out of that scene being mighty instead of abashed, we'd have been on her side.
Sarah is allowed to be a little myopic about her own characters, though. It's impossible to be objective!
You've bought the book now, right? Because hello, BUY THE BOOK! The Demon's Lexicon! So very very good! It's so good I got all Holden Caulfield calling authors up and emailed Sarah to say "YER SO AWESOME!!!" then turned bright red and ran away.
I think I've read it six or seven times already. That book is brilliant. Brilliant!
But I have to argue with Sarah's argument about character A and character B in The Demon's Lexicon. Because one of them is a deeply awesome person in complete control of his environment and the other is a wannabe (nothing wrong with being new to something, but it's intrinsically less awesome than having mastered it) who switches her affections from one person to another person and seems to toy with both of them and hurts at least one, yet somehow without any panache, which might excuse it.
Sarah argues we don't like the second one because she's a girl, but actually it's for the reasons I just stated. So there you go. Except she's ABSOLUTELY RIGHT about everything else in the whole article, especially Harriet Potter. Writers punish and/or undercut awesome girls. It's a fact.
There is also a scene where the other three all mock that character for her admittedly silly outfit and laugh at her and put her down, and she gets embarrassed, which is part of my whole giant ongoing argument that we learn how to see people (and characters) because of how other people treat them. I think that scene right there caused all of the backlash against her. No one else gets mocked or ashamed. Just the girl who's among four boys. I don't think she ever recovered from that.
Which teaches me something about writing, like maybe people can knock down your character but if the character *believes* the badness then we believe it too. I sort of wonder whether if our girl had come out of that scene being mighty instead of abashed, we'd have been on her side.
Sarah is allowed to be a little myopic about her own characters, though. It's impossible to be objective!
You've bought the book now, right? Because hello, BUY THE BOOK! The Demon's Lexicon! So very very good! It's so good I got all Holden Caulfield calling authors up and emailed Sarah to say "YER SO AWESOME!!!" then turned bright red and ran away.
I think I've read it six or seven times already. That book is brilliant. Brilliant!
Friday, August 21, 2009
Understatement
Okay, so, yesterday I wrote a whole giant batch of book and I am VERY VERY pleased about that. I'm doing all my usual things wrong, of course. Understatement is the worst. Would you have predicted that was a writing flaw of mine? Well, it is. I'm a criminal understater in third person.
I'm not entirely sure I know how to write at all in third person, though I think I've got it pretty well in first person. Blah! In third I go back and look at it later and think, "Oh, that's nice, except I left out everything important because I didn't want to bonk you over the head with it."
Must learn to bonk you over the head with it! Okay!
But I'm still extremely happy with what I wrote. You can't fix it until you do it in the first place. I mean, criminy.
Essentially everything turned out awesome and great except you have not the slightest idea what the main character is thinking or feeling about anything, or what motivates her, or what she wants or plans or is going to do.
Like I said, it's not perfect. Heh.
I was always trained that (this was some screenwriters who had left Hollywood and were teaching at a large state university, for perspective, which I have now but did not have then) you're not supposed to SAY any of that stuff. You should be able to tell everything from what they do and say.
That is wrong. I've been fighting that training ever since. Ask my patient and long-suffering readers and mentor type people. It's like Soviet bread line sparseness. See, that writing wouldn't even contain something like Soviet bread line sparseness because that's too vivid.
Basically I have to learn how to write people better, such that you know what they're all about.
Nothing BIG or anything. Ahahahahahahahahaha. I cry now.
Oh well, you can't fix it if you don't know what's wrong. It's easy enough to think of exercises for working on this. It's not that I don't know how to do it. It's that I scrupulously avoid doing it.
I was taught to put two spaces between sentences, too, and learned not to do that. I learned to type with the Dvorak keyboard. Surely I'm trainable?
I'm not entirely sure I know how to write at all in third person, though I think I've got it pretty well in first person. Blah! In third I go back and look at it later and think, "Oh, that's nice, except I left out everything important because I didn't want to bonk you over the head with it."
Must learn to bonk you over the head with it! Okay!
But I'm still extremely happy with what I wrote. You can't fix it until you do it in the first place. I mean, criminy.
Essentially everything turned out awesome and great except you have not the slightest idea what the main character is thinking or feeling about anything, or what motivates her, or what she wants or plans or is going to do.
Like I said, it's not perfect. Heh.
I was always trained that (this was some screenwriters who had left Hollywood and were teaching at a large state university, for perspective, which I have now but did not have then) you're not supposed to SAY any of that stuff. You should be able to tell everything from what they do and say.
That is wrong. I've been fighting that training ever since. Ask my patient and long-suffering readers and mentor type people. It's like Soviet bread line sparseness. See, that writing wouldn't even contain something like Soviet bread line sparseness because that's too vivid.
Basically I have to learn how to write people better, such that you know what they're all about.
Nothing BIG or anything. Ahahahahahahahahaha. I cry now.
Oh well, you can't fix it if you don't know what's wrong. It's easy enough to think of exercises for working on this. It's not that I don't know how to do it. It's that I scrupulously avoid doing it.
I was taught to put two spaces between sentences, too, and learned not to do that. I learned to type with the Dvorak keyboard. Surely I'm trainable?
Learning to teach writing to SF novelists
Isn't that a miraculously apropos subject to find?
This article was pretty eye-opening.
I don't know how anyone can generalize about teaching writing--this author doesn't, by the way--because it's all so very specific. What one person needs is completely different from what another person needs. And even if they need exactly the same thing, you might have to use completely different techniques to get there.
I remember a student who wanted to write novels, who already had a contract to write for some kind of cookie-cutter series of fantasy novels. He was doing great, right? But he had not the slightest idea how to do anything more. Fortunately he knew that and came to me for answers, so we had a semester-long running battle over it because he was so utterly frustrated.
It sounds absurd now, but he couldn't see what made one book better than another and wanted to know how to tell the difference. It was like teaching color to the color-blind. And then to try to do that in his own writing at the same time. Brave young man. I give him all the credit in the world because that is insanely difficult, and he was just beside himself the whole time, but he kept coming back.
We had days where I'd say, "Okay, well, one of the traits English professors like me tend to like is vivid imagery." Him: "What's that?"
Go ahead, try to explain imagery. I think I got out my Margaret Drabble book, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and found him a clear definition, because all my hand-waving wasn't going to cut it.
I still feel like I kind of failed that student in the end. (Not in the sense of failing the class, obviously.) He got everything, but it was like trying to explain the buffalo joke to the Japanese exchange students in my History of the English language course. It was so much work for so little payoff.
Jacob loves the buffalo joke. I got it from a mathematician friend. Here's the sentence: Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
[These large bovines][who are flummoxed by][those large bovines] [then flummox] [other large bovines][who are flummoxed by][yet more large bovines.]
Except the order is off in the translation.
Also I'm not entirely sure buffalo are bovines.
ANYWAY.
Teaching is hard.
The larger point being, I don't know what I need to learn as far as writing, I don't know what techniques they're going to need to get it through my thick skull, I hope I can be as patient and persistent as my student was and come back for more every week like a boxer who doesn't know when to stay down, and I hope I can GET BETTER, because that's what I want. Eyes on the prize.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Lucky Break
Reading Roald Dahl's book The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which I read a million times when small and which of course had me staring into candle flames and trying to see what was on the other side of playing cards. I got pretty good at it, too!
As far as I remember.
The book ends with the first story he ever wrote, but right before that is his novella (or something) called Lucky Break, the story of how he became a writer. Basically he had not the slightest intention of doing so, was flying fighter planes and all but got injured and sent to some embassy, but one day C.S. Forester walked into his office to ask questions about the war, and they went to lunch and couldn't eat and write things down at the same time, so Roald Dahl offered to write up notes for Forester to use in his story. Easy, right?
C.S. Forester gave him only these directions:
"Please, let me have plenty of detail. That's what counts in our business, tiny little details, like you had a broken shoelace on your left shoe or a fly settled on the rim of your glass at lunch or the man you were talking to had a broken front tooth. Try to think back and remember everything."
R.D: "I'll do my best."
The story he wrote is outrageously brilliant, but it's also kind of not a story. It tells of several flights he made as an airman in WWII and about getting shot down and being rescued and then recovering in delirium at a hospital. Finally he comes back to consciousness.
Is that a story?
I don't think I know what a story is. My definition tends to be kind of more Robert McKee, with the big changes and the character arcs and the first A then B.
But I don't know how to write a short story AT ALL, or maybe I'm too tangled up in my brains to do what is actually the simplest thing. Just tell what happened. Even if you're making it up.
Are you really allowed to do that? Just tell what happened? About things that actually happened? Because if that's the case, I'm full up with stories. I just don't think of them as stories.
I tend to think: would someone sitting across from me at a table, each of us with a beer, want to listen to this all the way through? Or would we get diverted 1/8 of the way in with their story about a road trip to University of Michigan? Maybe that can be part of it, come to think of it.
Maybe I spent too much time studying medieval exempla, these sort of fables with a giant moral imposed on them. They're actually kind of hilarious because they don't mean anything--I mean, it's not like Aesop, it's just weird little stories about a king and his daughter and he ended up getting run away with by a donkey and lived on bitter aloes at the well and when he came home his daughter had married the shoemaker and had twin boys. And at the end there's the moral: the daughter is the united church, see, and the twin boys are the Eastern and Western church....
Maybe you're not supposed to know what point your story is making until it makes it. I'm sort of afraid they are all going to mean LIFE IS SAD or WHAT CAN YOU DO BUT TRY? or other grim existential themes that will make you want to stab yourself in the eye. Oh well, I guess if that's what we find, then that's what we find.
I've also spent my life listening to someone trade stories with people. That person's are always about How She Triumphed Over Some Cheater or how she Knows Better Than That or how She's Meaner And So She Won. I mean, the overall picture is really not pleasant once you step back for a second.
The stories you tell and how you tell them reveal an awful lot about you. That is the whole entire point of the Canterbury Tales.
Speaking of C.S. Forester, how cool a story is that? The man calls his start in writing Lucky Break, because it really was. I think that's completely awesome.
I think the secret is to shut up and tell the story. Want to tell about all your road trips? Tell about your road trips. Tell about the one with that stupid girl I brought along to share gas (who ended up having no gas money) who told all the chemistry PhD candidates at Caltech that it was great to see people get excited about science for once. Want to write the saga of the horrible fiance from hell? Totally do it.
I also think it clears out your brain. And then you can read all that later and either it's cheap therapy OR you find something awesome you can use for something else. It's making quilt fabric, right? Later on you might cut it up for quilts, but you have to make the fabric first.
I never, ever do this. I don't write this way. Never ever ever never. Anne Lamott says to do it, I think Roald Dahl just said to do it, certainly C.S. Forester said to do it.
Maybe all you need to do is start out, "Here's an interesting thing that happened one time..." Remember all the detail, every bit. Write the beginning, middle, and end. See what happens. It's crazy but it just might work.
As far as I remember.
The book ends with the first story he ever wrote, but right before that is his novella (or something) called Lucky Break, the story of how he became a writer. Basically he had not the slightest intention of doing so, was flying fighter planes and all but got injured and sent to some embassy, but one day C.S. Forester walked into his office to ask questions about the war, and they went to lunch and couldn't eat and write things down at the same time, so Roald Dahl offered to write up notes for Forester to use in his story. Easy, right?
C.S. Forester gave him only these directions:
"Please, let me have plenty of detail. That's what counts in our business, tiny little details, like you had a broken shoelace on your left shoe or a fly settled on the rim of your glass at lunch or the man you were talking to had a broken front tooth. Try to think back and remember everything."
R.D: "I'll do my best."
The story he wrote is outrageously brilliant, but it's also kind of not a story. It tells of several flights he made as an airman in WWII and about getting shot down and being rescued and then recovering in delirium at a hospital. Finally he comes back to consciousness.
Is that a story?
I don't think I know what a story is. My definition tends to be kind of more Robert McKee, with the big changes and the character arcs and the first A then B.
But I don't know how to write a short story AT ALL, or maybe I'm too tangled up in my brains to do what is actually the simplest thing. Just tell what happened. Even if you're making it up.
Are you really allowed to do that? Just tell what happened? About things that actually happened? Because if that's the case, I'm full up with stories. I just don't think of them as stories.
I tend to think: would someone sitting across from me at a table, each of us with a beer, want to listen to this all the way through? Or would we get diverted 1/8 of the way in with their story about a road trip to University of Michigan? Maybe that can be part of it, come to think of it.
Maybe I spent too much time studying medieval exempla, these sort of fables with a giant moral imposed on them. They're actually kind of hilarious because they don't mean anything--I mean, it's not like Aesop, it's just weird little stories about a king and his daughter and he ended up getting run away with by a donkey and lived on bitter aloes at the well and when he came home his daughter had married the shoemaker and had twin boys. And at the end there's the moral: the daughter is the united church, see, and the twin boys are the Eastern and Western church....
Maybe you're not supposed to know what point your story is making until it makes it. I'm sort of afraid they are all going to mean LIFE IS SAD or WHAT CAN YOU DO BUT TRY? or other grim existential themes that will make you want to stab yourself in the eye. Oh well, I guess if that's what we find, then that's what we find.
I've also spent my life listening to someone trade stories with people. That person's are always about How She Triumphed Over Some Cheater or how she Knows Better Than That or how She's Meaner And So She Won. I mean, the overall picture is really not pleasant once you step back for a second.
The stories you tell and how you tell them reveal an awful lot about you. That is the whole entire point of the Canterbury Tales.
Speaking of C.S. Forester, how cool a story is that? The man calls his start in writing Lucky Break, because it really was. I think that's completely awesome.
I think the secret is to shut up and tell the story. Want to tell about all your road trips? Tell about your road trips. Tell about the one with that stupid girl I brought along to share gas (who ended up having no gas money) who told all the chemistry PhD candidates at Caltech that it was great to see people get excited about science for once. Want to write the saga of the horrible fiance from hell? Totally do it.
I also think it clears out your brain. And then you can read all that later and either it's cheap therapy OR you find something awesome you can use for something else. It's making quilt fabric, right? Later on you might cut it up for quilts, but you have to make the fabric first.
I never, ever do this. I don't write this way. Never ever ever never. Anne Lamott says to do it, I think Roald Dahl just said to do it, certainly C.S. Forester said to do it.
Maybe all you need to do is start out, "Here's an interesting thing that happened one time..." Remember all the detail, every bit. Write the beginning, middle, and end. See what happens. It's crazy but it just might work.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
How science/magic works
I like figuring this out. You have to know exactly how the science/magic works in your SF or you are going to make incredibly stupid mistakes all the time and also nothing will make sense or hang together.
I like it when it costs. I mean in the sense that if your spaceship flies from point A to point B, somebody has to foot the bill. Fuel costs, maintenance costs, there are cranky people at the docks, there are taxes and inspectors and all sorts of annoyances.
I like when magic costs. If kayaking knocks me flat for a day, then surely exerting any other kind of force should also. And it should change you, just like kayaking, which builds certain muscles (no, I'm not wearing linebacker shoulder pads, that's just me) and supposedly burns off other things (I see no evidence of this but what do I know?) and you get sunburned and there's sand in the car and now you have less Jungle Juice and sunscreen and your hat is icky.
I am a big fan of the consequences. Maybe that's why I'm so in love with Season 6 of Buffy, which is all about this exact thing. You can do really huge good stuff or bad stuff but it totally changes you and has major lasting repercussions.
In retrospect, wouldn't it have been awesome if the thing that got loose when they brought Buffy back had turned out to be harnessed by the Trio and ultimately turned around to be the thing that kills Tara at the end? Though of course I LOVE that it's just a dumb gun. I love that!
I am thinking a lot about S6 because I'm in magic school right now.
Also reading Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy again. It's about...okay, that's a joke.
It's an excellent book. He has a great section on how science/magic should cost, which is no doubt where I got all my strongly held beliefs on the subject.
I really don't like it when these things come for free. I don't even like it when they kind of just make you tired. They should take something away to give you something else.
Most of the very best science/magic does this.
So I'm working out my systems and rules and what it gives and what it takes. This will sound facetious but between the constant bangs on the head that I get (someone should really examine my head one of these days, I've had so many--it hasn't been x-rayed since I cracked Nancy's skull with mine, but I've had dozens of very hard whacks since then) and a silly thing Bill Bryson wrote in passing, where he hit his head so hard he suddenly remembered where he'd put the coal shed key last winter, I decided to start the story with a really hard bang on the head.
I mean, fictionally. I'm not hitting mine again. Not on purpose, anyway.
Also a good hard crack on the head means that we're not sure whether the strange things that happen next are really happening. And neither is our character. Like!
I love how in fairy tales it always works out that if you get something very cool, you'll end up paying for it later. You can make promises now to get out of a situation, but later on you'll have to pay up, and you really might not like what you have to pay.
So I'm looking at those laws that govern physics and all that in order to figure out what laws govern this world. Is there an exchange rate? Can you actually buy power? Or is it always intrinsic and earned? What if buying power twists it somehow? What if there's something like blood money, power that you wouldn't actually want? Can you cut a deal with any of this stuff or is it fixed and immutable? How does your essence change when you mess with this kind of thing? Can too much magic give you cancer (or cure cancer) or does it function entirely on some other level besides the physical?
I like thinking about it in terms of how it functions in the world, though that might be kind of like thinking, "How do Matchbox cars function in the world? How do jukeboxes function in the world?" Or is it more like, "What does the lymphatic system do and how can we learn to use it better?" Or whatever. I actually have no idea what the lymphatic system does except make glands in my neck swell up when I get allergic to things. Like after kayaking two days ago. Why? I DO NOT KNOW.
There are so many lazy ways of writing magic, but I think that tracks back to a fundamental failure to understand how things work--or to believe that the systems behind the workings of all things are comprehensible deep down. You trust your car even though you may not grasp how the internal combustion engine works. (Oh please learn. It is not hard. If I learn what the lymphatic system does, will you learn the basics of internal combustion? It's a deal.)
People who don't believe that physical processes they use every day are comprehensible terrify me. And write really, really bad magic. They write magic like it's a bill no one has to pay. Or like it's some kind of inexhaustible natural resource, whereas we know none of them are. It's careless and irresponsible and ultimately doesn't work because it's so very sloppy and lazy. Things cost. Causes have effects. There are ramifications to everything.
I think magic is more like giving blood. You can lose a pint with no harm done but you should wait the appropriate amount of time before doing it again, or you're going to get anemic and weak and sick. I think anyone just learning how to use it or control it is going to get mistaken for a drug user, with the crazy highs and lows she's going to go through--which comes with another whole set of problems.
I know the usual metaphors for learning to use magic are drugs and puberty and learning a musical instrument, but surely there are more? More interesting ones?
I've put my girl trying frantically to keep a sinking ship afloat (not literally) and given her a severe bang on the head and a lymphatic system that leaks green from the scab. Oh and a whole story that's screaming to get written so I should shut up and go do that right now.
I like it when it costs. I mean in the sense that if your spaceship flies from point A to point B, somebody has to foot the bill. Fuel costs, maintenance costs, there are cranky people at the docks, there are taxes and inspectors and all sorts of annoyances.
I like when magic costs. If kayaking knocks me flat for a day, then surely exerting any other kind of force should also. And it should change you, just like kayaking, which builds certain muscles (no, I'm not wearing linebacker shoulder pads, that's just me) and supposedly burns off other things (I see no evidence of this but what do I know?) and you get sunburned and there's sand in the car and now you have less Jungle Juice and sunscreen and your hat is icky.
I am a big fan of the consequences. Maybe that's why I'm so in love with Season 6 of Buffy, which is all about this exact thing. You can do really huge good stuff or bad stuff but it totally changes you and has major lasting repercussions.
In retrospect, wouldn't it have been awesome if the thing that got loose when they brought Buffy back had turned out to be harnessed by the Trio and ultimately turned around to be the thing that kills Tara at the end? Though of course I LOVE that it's just a dumb gun. I love that!
I am thinking a lot about S6 because I'm in magic school right now.
Also reading Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy again. It's about...okay, that's a joke.
It's an excellent book. He has a great section on how science/magic should cost, which is no doubt where I got all my strongly held beliefs on the subject.
I really don't like it when these things come for free. I don't even like it when they kind of just make you tired. They should take something away to give you something else.
Most of the very best science/magic does this.
So I'm working out my systems and rules and what it gives and what it takes. This will sound facetious but between the constant bangs on the head that I get (someone should really examine my head one of these days, I've had so many--it hasn't been x-rayed since I cracked Nancy's skull with mine, but I've had dozens of very hard whacks since then) and a silly thing Bill Bryson wrote in passing, where he hit his head so hard he suddenly remembered where he'd put the coal shed key last winter, I decided to start the story with a really hard bang on the head.
I mean, fictionally. I'm not hitting mine again. Not on purpose, anyway.
Also a good hard crack on the head means that we're not sure whether the strange things that happen next are really happening. And neither is our character. Like!
I love how in fairy tales it always works out that if you get something very cool, you'll end up paying for it later. You can make promises now to get out of a situation, but later on you'll have to pay up, and you really might not like what you have to pay.
So I'm looking at those laws that govern physics and all that in order to figure out what laws govern this world. Is there an exchange rate? Can you actually buy power? Or is it always intrinsic and earned? What if buying power twists it somehow? What if there's something like blood money, power that you wouldn't actually want? Can you cut a deal with any of this stuff or is it fixed and immutable? How does your essence change when you mess with this kind of thing? Can too much magic give you cancer (or cure cancer) or does it function entirely on some other level besides the physical?
I like thinking about it in terms of how it functions in the world, though that might be kind of like thinking, "How do Matchbox cars function in the world? How do jukeboxes function in the world?" Or is it more like, "What does the lymphatic system do and how can we learn to use it better?" Or whatever. I actually have no idea what the lymphatic system does except make glands in my neck swell up when I get allergic to things. Like after kayaking two days ago. Why? I DO NOT KNOW.
There are so many lazy ways of writing magic, but I think that tracks back to a fundamental failure to understand how things work--or to believe that the systems behind the workings of all things are comprehensible deep down. You trust your car even though you may not grasp how the internal combustion engine works. (Oh please learn. It is not hard. If I learn what the lymphatic system does, will you learn the basics of internal combustion? It's a deal.)
People who don't believe that physical processes they use every day are comprehensible terrify me. And write really, really bad magic. They write magic like it's a bill no one has to pay. Or like it's some kind of inexhaustible natural resource, whereas we know none of them are. It's careless and irresponsible and ultimately doesn't work because it's so very sloppy and lazy. Things cost. Causes have effects. There are ramifications to everything.
I think magic is more like giving blood. You can lose a pint with no harm done but you should wait the appropriate amount of time before doing it again, or you're going to get anemic and weak and sick. I think anyone just learning how to use it or control it is going to get mistaken for a drug user, with the crazy highs and lows she's going to go through--which comes with another whole set of problems.
I know the usual metaphors for learning to use magic are drugs and puberty and learning a musical instrument, but surely there are more? More interesting ones?
I've put my girl trying frantically to keep a sinking ship afloat (not literally) and given her a severe bang on the head and a lymphatic system that leaks green from the scab. Oh and a whole story that's screaming to get written so I should shut up and go do that right now.
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