Here's what's annoying about fiction dealing with magic: if it's not laid out with proper rules, or the rules aren't followed, it's nothing more than nonstop narrative cheating.
I read a trilogy lately in which magic played a small then larger then important part, and each book got less satisfying as the role of magic grew. Why? Because it could have been anything at all. The more the plot depends on some arbitrary performance of some arcane ritual never mentioned or described or costing anything, the less the success means. It robbed the payoff of any weight.
The same goes with the time pressure writers like to put on magic, too. Someone must perform some long and complex ritual! How long does it take? Just a little bit longer than we'd like, but it gets done just in time to save the day! Well, that's awfully convenient.
Sci-fi does exactly the same thing with technology, obviously. It's broken, we need a widget, just a few more minutes---aaaaah! So you can take bad magic to apply to that, too.
I've been thinking and thinking about why this is so annoying and I decided it's because the authors haven't picked a good analogy. There are lots to choose from. In Harry Potter the magic is like school, which is one of the reasons the books work so well: magic is like school, in that some people have natural talent, but you need to study how to do it, you need to learn which stuff to use when, you need to memorize formulas AND you need to practice, practice, practice.
At no time in any book should magic be any less rigorous than a recipe. You need these items, you need to do this to them in this order with these tools, then you need to apply POWER at this rate for this amount of time.
1. raw materials
2. skill
3. procedure
4. power (and therefore cost)
5. control
Obviously it doesn't need to be exactly like that. I decided to write my most recent book using the analogy of music for magic. You're born with the talent, but you have to practice and study and you learn new spells with specific applications the way you would learn a piece of flute music. And after a performance, you're wiped out. Some people can't do it at all. Some have enormous talent, but some only have a little. If you work together, you can do amazing things, but it has to be coordinated or all you get is cacophony.
Seriously, take the recipe analogy further. You can order a cake and have it delivered, but it will cost more than making it at home. You pay either in time and effort or in money that pays for someone else's time and effort. A cake always costs. If someone gives you a cake, that person paid for it in time and effort or money.
So that trilogy drove me crazy because the power came from nowhere and there's no cost, which breaks rule #4. Honestly, that's the worst violation for me. It has to cost you something. If playing a flute concerto costs you something (and believe me, it does) and lifting a heavy box costs you something, then performing magic has to cost you something. I think it should cost you a lot. It's MAGIC. Jeez!
I've never seen any thought or order given to the materials in fictional magic, either. I mean, take five seconds and make up some rules. How about, you need an earth element, a water element, a fire element, and an air element? Just for basics. And each of those elements need to contribute logically to the results you're trying to achieve. (For crying out loud, POTTING SOIL follows more logical rules than magical ingredients in books.) And your own power has to be needed to make it all happen, just like the cake ingredients are not going to become a cake unless you get the oven hot. Somebody is paying that electric bill.
That right there, that paragraph I just made up on the spot, makes fictional magic infinitely more sensible than ANY I have ever read in any book, except for our friends the Harry Potter books, and even they are arbitrary and absurd about ingredients instead of having any order to it.
And what about magic words? No no no no no. You can't just run around with pages of spells that anyone can read and stuff will happen, though I do love the performativity of that--the idea that running words through a person somehow activates them. There are not very many performative sentences in the world, have you noticed? Things that happen because you say them. I'm hard put to think of more than the whole "With this ring I thee wed" group. "I promise," "I swear," "I insist," "I vow," and so on.
I could be okay with using words as a conduit for power in that performative way, as long as you take into account that the power is there in the person in the first place. Someone is still paying the electric bill if you turn on the lights using The Clapper, though. And to make your voice-activated elevator work, there has to be voice-activation software in place. Someone's paying that bill, too.
Latin. Brrrr. Harry Potter makes Latinists like me crazy because the Latin is truly horrible, even for faux corrupt medieval-ish Latin. I've studied medieval Latin extensively and that is not it. Anyway, why should one language be more powerful than another? Remember A Wizard of Earthsea, where if you say "tolk" the pebble knows that's its true name? I can accept that in those books because it's a language people don't speak. In fact I love a language of power that isn't in daily use because it's far too powerful. Sure! But Latin isn't it.
We have this silly mystical thing about Latin (due entirely to the decisions of the Fourth Lateran Council to put the Mass into local languages, but that's another story that should stay in my dissertation, and Craig's movie) where it seems like our secret arcane language, but it's just not. Neither is Greek or Hebrew or Cherokee. Sorry. People order pizza in Hebrew. People read Meg Cabot books in Hebrew. It's just not mystical. I burst out laughing when people intone things in Latin and what they're saying is, "The wolf is great." Um. You guys. If I just stand here and say, "The wolf is great," does that strike terror into your heart? Exactly.
So if you're going to use some kind of language of power, MAKE IT UP. And you'd better be careful if you do, because it had better hang together. We linguists are out there watching you.
Anyway don't, because saying things doesn't make it so, unless you have the power to back it up. Here, I can say, "No governmental power in the United States of America shall ever exact capital punishment again," but does that make it so? I would have to have the power to make that happen in order for saying it to make it happen. So if the power is there, then the words can be plain old normal boring English. With the power vested in me, see? Exactly. Always back to the power.
Things. Things! I love magical things. Magical things seem to me like batteries. You can store power (again with the power) in them. Maybe it's an iPod of magic and if you press the button you can make it play the Brandenburgs. I have no problem at all with magical items as long as--you know where this is going--someone puts the magic there, it costs them to put it there (iTunes isn't free) and it has limitations, even if that's just the need to get recharged every thousand songs.
Where I do have a problem with magical items is when they start acting like they have access to some kind of Deeper Truth. Like when they get all judgy. This chair! It knows if you're honest! This knife will only cut the food of the pure at heart. I could accept if this magical Toyota only operates if you are the person who holds the key, or if you've been drinking (they have the technology) but not if the magical Toyota somehow has the power to know whether or not you have cheated on your spouse. How can it possibly know?
Go with it. Maybe it can sense elevated blood pressure and sweat and the presence of the body chemistry of someone who is not your spouse. But how can it tell whether you just played a vigorous tennis match and then hugged goodbye? If an exceedingly advanced imaginary robot can't do it, then magic can't do it.
If you get to the point where you're saying, "It just knows, back up and figure out another way, because that it cheating, cheating, cheating.
Basically everything about bad magic has to do with cheating. Make the rules and by golly, stick to them, because otherwise your payoffs will not pay off. Deus ex machina is an ugly accusation but it's totally true if you run around making up the magic to fit the needs of the story on the fly.
Maybe think of it with more of a D&D sensibility. Go into things with a specific number and type of flute pieces learned, with this much power on your iPod or cell phone, with only so much energy in your personal storage bank. Say Maryanne starts out with 98 points in her power bank at the beginning. If she burns up 80 of them playing that massive flute concerto that saves the city from flooding, she's going to be TIRED. She's going to need to recharge somehow. I recommend Power Bars. Or sleep. Or sucking someone else's power out through their skull. Or whatever. (I imagine power-sucking also takes energy, however.)
If that means you back up and write in a scene in chapter seventeen where our heroine is stuck in traffic on a Greyhound with some old weirdo who insists on teaching her songs from his harmonica to pass the time, then do that, because it will make things PAY OFF LATER.
Otherwise it's like you're driving along and your cell phone rings and oh no, you have to perform many complex typing activities to make it work! Type type type! Sweat of your brow! Time pressure! And then you can answer and it's someone you've never heard of, calling from Mars! Okay! And then you use the cell phone to transfer power to your carburetor and run the car! And then you need to put a peppermint teabag, a hair scrunchie, two cat whiskers, and a small ball of blue yarn into a hat and squinch up your eyes reeeeeeaaaaaally tight and say the Pledge of Allegiance and lo! The day, it is saved! And you can still call your mom.
That is exactly how 99% of magic (and I really do mean technology in sci-fi too, I promise) is written in fiction. STOP THAT RIGHT NOW. It's why people don't respect sci-fi and fantasy, that right there. The cheating. Especially oh my goodness when the PLOT is resting on that. It might be okay if it's some background kind of thing but when the spotlight is on it, that is just the worst.
Systems are logical. We use the electricity, we get the power bill, we pay the power bill. Sure, you can get away with just making up any old thing, and people will swallow it because they're used to swallowing any old claptrap but it's cheap and weak and shoddy and there's no reason to write crappy magic/tech when doing it well is just a matter of putting together a clear, logical system that costs and spends and pays.
