I watched this today. It’s one of Sanderson’s lectures at BYU, where he goes into what he, tongue-in-cheek, calls Sanderson’s Laws of Magic.
They’re really guidelines for telling certain kinds of stories in a way that produces a particular effect, which he’s quite upfront about.
Sanderson’s Laws are:
1: An author’s ability to solve conflict in a satisfying way with [magic] is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said [magic].
(It’s also possible to have “soft” magic, which isn’t used to solve problems but may be used to create them, and which mostly creates a sense of wonder in the setting.)
2: What the [magic] can’t do is more interesting than what it can.
The limitations and flaws of the [magic] create an interesting place to explore, because that’s a place where problems are hard. The space where [magic] can solve problems is less interesting, because that’s a place where problems are easy, and there’s no tension. One way to develop your story, of course, is to show the characters finding clever and interesting ways to make the [magic] solve problems that it initially seemed like it couldn’t solve, because of its limitations and flaws.
The flaws also provide a cost to [magic], which both explains why it isn’t used all the time and also makes using it significant.
3: Go deeper before you go wider.
It’s more interesting if you thoroughly explore the implications of one or two elements and how they impact on everything else than if you superficially explore a whole lot of them (the same could be said of characters).
There’s also Law Zero:
0: Default to what is awesome.
Don’t lose sight of why we put [magic] in our stories in the first place: because it’s cool. You can break the other laws if it’s in the service of something awesome.
In all of the above, you can substitute other terms for “magic” (which is why I put it in square brackets).
What I realized, watching this, was that even though my novel City of Masks doesn’t have any magic in it, it has an element (the social convention of the masks) which behaves exactly like Sandersonian magic. It produces effects according to certain rules, and I set out these rules for the reader and then explore how they both cause, and can (and can’t) be used to solve, problems for the characters.
Because it’s a social convention, it exists only within the characters’ minds; it doesn’t change the laws of physics, as magic usually does. Nevertheless, in story terms, it works the same as magic does in a more conventional fantasy novel – or as technology does in many SF stories, or as real-world forces of various kinds, including social conventions and technology, work in books written in other genres.
It got me wondering how else one could do the same thing.
By the way, if you haven’t read City of Masks and you’d like to, I’m currently doing a giveaway of it for new signups to my mailing list:
Other examples:
– gender roles in Jane Austen
– gender itself in Ursula le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
– social class in most British literature, but especially Dickens
– wealth in The Great Gatsby
– race in Octavia Butler