Question by Taleweaver: How do you keep magic mysterious while still revealing a lot about how it works to the reader?
I heard that the book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell did this quite well, though it was ridiculously fat and boring and I gave up about 1/10 of the way into it (which was aproximately 10 million pages).
So yeah, how do you keep magic mysterious but understandable?
Best answer:
Answer by -take yer own advice-
Just keep it like a 10,000 year old legend would be told. Don’t go into its sciences and weird terms to describe exactly how it works, because nobody is ‘certain’.
You could have a wise person in the book tell the story of how magic came to be, who did it first, what happened to him, how he kept it alive within other people before he died… And then kind of say that the story was told thousands of times…
And just say that “she muttered unintelligible words and cast a freeze spell, and she ran away while she had the chance”, etc.
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!
These aims are somewhat contradictory. It partly depends whether any of your point-of-view characters can use magic, or whether they just see other people using it. One aspect of your magic could be understandable while another is mysterious. The usual option is that your wizards know the “how” of magic but don’t know the “why”.
They might know that if they make a particular hand gesture and shout “;zdfioghaerp!” a bouquet of flowers appears in their other hand. Whereas if they make the same gesture and shout “;zdfiogthaerp!” a lightning bolt shoots from their fingers. But they might not know where the magic comes from, or why that gesture does something and a similar gesture does nothing. They might not have much or any understanding of the underlying theory – assuming there is a theory. Could they say what would happen if you shout “zdfioghaerp!” (omitting the initial semicolon, which is next-to-impossible to pronounce) without actually trying it? Could they think of a result they want a spell to have, and then reason backwards to work out what they’d have to do to make it happen?
Another option is to make the magic unpredictable or difficult to control. Maybe when you make that gesture and shout “;zdfioghaerp!” usually you get a bouquet of flowers, but sometimes you get an apple, or a mouse, or a big rock lands on you and crushes you. Maybe it’s just random, or maybe there’s some hidden factor that the wizards haven’t figured out yet. Maybe it only works properly if your feet are less than twelve inches apart, or it goes wrong if a black cat crossed your path yesterday.