Most informative! Your explanations are clear and extremely well-supported by examples.
I've not read Sanderson on this subject, but I've heard a lot of debate on it over the years. I used to argue with one of my editors about magic because he had the presupposition that "magic always comes at a cost." But there are other ways to limit magic. In my books, the consequences tend to be more practical than arcane--the difficulty of living a normal life, for example. There's also a considerable risk factor, even if one is skillful, that the magic might somehow go wrong. And the more potent one's magic is, the more one tends to become a target for more powerful supernatural forces.
Anyway, I imagine the discussion of how to implement believable and easily understandable restrictions into magic will always be a popular subject. It is certainly critical to willing suspension of disbelief.
Thanks, Bill. That dynamic of “I’ve heard the debate but haven’t read Sanderson” is precisely why I wanted to root it back to narrative principles. It’s such a worthwhile subject to explore but I think the discourse is missing the forest for the trees.
On actual preference, I’m like you. I think I generally prefer the softer edges of magic than the harder limits.
Your elucidation on Sanderson's "laws" as actually referring to narrative and not worldbuilding is really good, but the conversation I'd like to have is the irreparable damage Sanderson's "laws" have had in terms of restricting and muddling magic aesthetics, presentation, and concept. The far-reaching notion, partly from wide misreading, and partly from poor communication on the author's behalf, that hard=science and soft=magic, that there must be cost, numbers, and so on. His "laws" may be good guides for narrative use, but as worldbuilding advice for those who simply enjoy the art of fleshing out a setting, I think they're atrocious.
I personally like to measure things by a Magic/Science metric to better describe authorial intent, presentation, and aesthetics. Magic, after all, is a word with a meaning.
If you ask me, his first law is by far the most useful. I think the second of his laws—limits are more interesting than powers—is based more on opinion on what he finds interesting than on fact, though again it has use for exposition and for shedding more light on the first law.
Anyway, I obviously agree that people have taken the spectrum too far or treat the categories too rigidly. And most of all they treat it as worldbuilding fact that harder magic is better and therefore everything becomes rigid and rules based. That’s precisely the kind of assumption I want to dispel.
And I hope to write a longer defense of soft magic systems. My own tastes lean that direction. Like you said, magic should be, you know, MAGIC.
Couldn't agree more about the second "law"! One of the best arguments I know against it is "The Face in the Frost" by John Bellairs from 1969. By pure vibes alone, the book gives a great sense of what the extent of the characters are capable of without spending any time whatsoever on mechanical exposition. It's fascinating because it's written almost with the structure of a horror story (it partly is one, which helps), with well-defined escalation of events and powers. You just get it.
I'd very much like to read a defense of "soft" magic in all its meanings if you do it!
Glad I'm not alone! Be it worldbuilding-wise or narrative-wise, I still think he's wrong, Eric's good article explaining what Sanderson couldn't aside. If you've ever read "The Face in the Frost" by John Bellairs, it makes for a good argument over smart writing being able to deliver implications of limits and mechanics through vibes than overt exposition.
Very nice breakdown of the distinction. I liked how you applied it to Dune - I love Dune but I personally had issues with the second book due to the powers becoming a bit TOO soft. Like, the more Frank writes about spice the more I began to suspect that spice just does whatever the author wants it to do at any given moment. Prescience? Psychic gestalt? Prolong your life (but only when the author remembers)? Accelerating a twin pregnancy to days/weeks? Seeing out of your infant son's eyes?!
It gets really wacky really quickly, whereas the first book is a lot more grounded in terms of politics, logistics and military history. Also, in the first book there was more of an effort to establish that powers did have 'costs' and limitations, e.g. Paul is so exceptional due to a whole 90 generations of selective breeding, and being a mentat is also somewhat genetic (Paul's supposed to get that potential from Leto) and requires intense training from very early on.
It's one of those things where I THINK I prefer soft magic in stories, but then I think about stuff like this and it's like, well actually maybe not. Also, you've reminded me I really need to write more about Dune...
I think we all have a natural tendency to tidy up and classify things in an attempt to better understand how to tell stories.
But where these tools like Sandersons rules may be used to find logical inconsistencies that may be confusing, they can also be taken out of context and misused.
For every person it helps, it stiffles someone else's creativity who takes it too literally, or worse, someone else judges it based on those strict criteria.
I think your interpretation is far more accurate, it is all a narrative tool in service of the reader, and it goes well beyond magic systems, it applies to how information is shared and ultimately, paid off, like cool medieval combat tactics.
Very good read! Thank you for putting it together.
Also, this happens all the time in Painting. Someone came up with the rule of thirds to aid composition, and I've heard people mindlessly parrot that someone elses painting had wrong composition because it did not follow that rule. That is worse than being ignorant if you ask me.
So true, Marco. The whole idea of narrative “rules” is that they are tools for post-creation analysis not pre-creation formulation. They can act as guideposts and can be extremely helpful in crafting a narrative—and I use the term “crafting” deliberately, in that it takes work and practice rather than just inspiration and emotion—but these rules are also insufficient as goals in themselves. The minute things like this become goals then they are essentially removed from their context, like you say. The rule of thirds is an excellent example.
Good article, Eric. I actually struggle with Sanderson because I find his writing too formulaic to the point where his magic systems feel too forced to me. So you could say I prefer soft magic and finding other ways to level the playing field.
This was a great explanation though, and a(nother) useful signpost that foreshadowing (which is effectively how I read this) is so important.
Thanks, AJ. That’s certainly a common critique of Sanderson and a valid one I think—even if some of it boils down to taste. I likewise prefer softer magic.
Foreshadowing is a great way to look at it. Now that you mention it I’m surprised that word didn’t make it into the post haha 😅
This is a good explanation! I had it professionally explained to me in a college course and I still don't see anything you left out.
What I really like about Sanderson's style is that shift you talk about. The rules APPEAR to change, but we actually just didn't have the full picture, solidifying your point about the storytelling being the emphasis. This is what I see missing in a lot of new writers' work—a lot of my classmates in particular would focus so much on developing the system that they'd forget that it's meant to serve the story, not the other way around. One of my writing teachers actually banned fantasy and sci-fi from her class for that exact reason. (And my fantasy writing benefited from her lessons anyway.)
My world would be difficult to label as hard or soft magic I think, because there are detailed explanations for how things are supposed to work, but part of the point of the story is that the magic doesn't always work the way it's "supposed to" according to the characters. For example, everyone in the world has a spark that gives them one particular ability that they must spend years training to unlock. But among the main trio, one doesn't have a spark, one has two sparks, and one is already powerful without training. (In my notes I have explanations for most of it, but I don't want to reveal everything right away. 😉)
Interesting. I wasn’t aware of the terms Hard and Soft when used specifically to describe Magic systems, but it makes a good deal of sense now that I am.
"The storyteller must exposit the tools before the characters can use them in satisfying ways"
This is literary gold and genre agnostic as well. Slightly changing the terminology to something like rules or guidelines and everything works from a science fiction perspective as well.
Exactly! All the commentary about magic this and magic that… it really just stems from solid narrative principles. When you keep that in mind, the framework expands significantly beyond the genre
This was definitely an eye opener and very helpful. You have a good explanation style and even though the article is in depth, it didn't feel very long.
When you defined hard magic, I immediately thought of FMA and The Last Airbender. Get out of my head, bro.
But seriously, this post was very helpful in understanding one of my stories. I still don't know exactly where it falls, but based off of this post the concepts leans more magical, in my opinion.
Haha! Well FMA and ATLA are very common hard magic examples for a reason. They’re clearly understood and widely known.
Happy to hear this was helpful to you. Remember, it’s not about finding exactly where you might line up and more about getting the right balance of exposition in the narrative—and that exposition will flow from how central magic use is to the story’s major plot points.
As an avid video game player and who LOVES and has played through most of Square's Final Fantasy series of games (My top two favorites are Ff 6 and 12), this applies to fantasy video games very well.
It does! I couldn’t find the right place to highlight that but I’m glad you noticed it. The worldbuilding aspects of video game magic might be unexplained but the rules and limits of magic have to be very well explained in video games or else there’s no gameplay! That’s why the hardest magic in fantasy often reads like a video game in book format.
The LitRPG subgenre often is a video game in book format! There's a decent amount of range in the genre, though: some will track stats and whatnot, but the magic is very soft; others make central plot points out of characters crunching numbers to "break the game/system", and the hardness of the magic is the central part of the fantasy.
That said, as a subgenre, it is the poster child for sacrificing quality of writing on the altar of self-insert power fantasy in a hard magic system.
This is a nicely-written summary, but I challenge the main point of both yours and Sanderson's essays.
My view is that "hard" and "soft" magic systems are a redundant cargo-cult. They are shallow post-factum definitions that do not, in fact, give any useful guidance to the author.
First, let's get to your example. You distinguish between "soft" case—deus ex machina fireball—and "hard" case—long-studied, hard-trained fireball. And the claim is that one "saps all the tension" and the other is "a delightful surprise full of triumph and emotion". I strongly disagree.
In most real-world books, both of these would be boring drivel. Fully unexpected and fully expected resolutions are both, in the majority of cases, bad, formulaic writing. The "sweet spot" is always in between, in the unexpected yet expected outcome. We expected that Frodo would destroy the Ring, but didn't expect that it would be through Gollum. On the other hand, a talented writer could make both of the fringe cases work, if they would wish so. There is absolutely no correlation between the "hardness/softness" of the magic system of this world in this example and the quality of the outcome.
Now, to "Sanderson's law": "An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic".
Again, I find it redundant and useless.
First, on the most general level, if "the author's ability to solve conflict" (=the author's skill) is directly proportional to "how well the reader understands said magic" (=exposition), it's basically saying that skillful authors should write good exposition, and that is obvious and does not require extra definitions. As a practical advice, it's therefore useless.
On a lower level, if we talk specifically about magic systems, this dychotomy is also not helpful. You yourself say that it's a spectrum, but the word "spectrum" implies a single axis of rigidity. But the actual situation is much more complicated: there is more than a single axis involved (for instance: "true rigidity of the system", "characters' knowledge of the system", "reader's knowledge of the system", "overall rationality", "effect of randomness", "seriousness" etc.). Therefore, one described magic system may be more rigid on one axis and less rigid on another axis, so even a "spectrum" metaphor is not helpful. For instance, Harry Potter's magic system, compared to Lord of the Rings one, seems more rigid in terms of reader's knowledge (we know much more details about it), but less rigid in terms of logic and seriousness (you can have "silly" and "nonsense" spells, whereas the LotR system is based on mythological worldbuilding and allows for much less tomfoolery). Therefore, simplification of that complex structure to terms "hard" and "soft" is not helpful at all.
On an even lower level, the hard-soft system even as described is pointless. The claim is that "rule-based magic will need exposition or else the story falls apart. And by nature of that exposition, it’s a hard magic system.". But this is absolutely true for non-rules-based magic as well: you give LotR and A Song of Ice and Fire as examples of "soft" magic systems but they need (and have!) incredible amounts of exposition, including that related to magic. Their exposition is not the rules of magic, in this case, but the facts and examples of the magic being mysterious, lost mythological arts with unknown limits. This is exposition in itself, and it is as crucial for the narrative as rationalistic rules in other books are. If so, there just is a need for exposition for any story, "soft" or "hard" notwithstanding, which, again, makes these definitions useless.
Let's throw away the hard-soft nonsense and the sandersonian empty "wrapping" and say: No matter what your magic system is, you need to explain it to the reader in a way that does not prohibit him from understanding what is going on. Or, even more concisely: Write good exposition. This is not Sanderson's first law, and even not Asimonov's first law: this is just a general (and obvious to the level of uselessness) advice for good writing, and to me, the attempts of Sanderson to pin his name on it are kinda in bad taste.
I’m publishing my own fantasy novel here on Substack and your descriptions ring true and do help me to clarify why I’m saying what I’m saying and how I’m saying it. I’m not changing anything (yet) but my decisions on what to say will now be more informed and deliberate. Thank you. Should you want to see my world it is The Cycle of Reversion, published Saturday and Wednesday mornings.
Really good stuff here, Eric. Love the emphasis on bringing everything back to the narrative. I think there’s room for deus ex machina use of magic but more so in literary fantasy where character development is focused on. I really like those moments when a character is about to be overwhelmed and someone comes out of nowhere to save them. It doesn’t cheapen the story because it’s not about the plot. I think LOTR has a lot of little moments like this. Like in the movies when Arwen shows up in Fellowship to help. It emphasizes how small the hobbits are in the world but also how many powerful friends they have. I think Gandalf’s resurrection is like that. He is DEM’d by some power we don’t understand fully but that’s not the point. I think the little people watching big things happen around them feels true to life as long as it doesn’t go too far. Thank you very much for writing this!
Most informative! Your explanations are clear and extremely well-supported by examples.
I've not read Sanderson on this subject, but I've heard a lot of debate on it over the years. I used to argue with one of my editors about magic because he had the presupposition that "magic always comes at a cost." But there are other ways to limit magic. In my books, the consequences tend to be more practical than arcane--the difficulty of living a normal life, for example. There's also a considerable risk factor, even if one is skillful, that the magic might somehow go wrong. And the more potent one's magic is, the more one tends to become a target for more powerful supernatural forces.
Anyway, I imagine the discussion of how to implement believable and easily understandable restrictions into magic will always be a popular subject. It is certainly critical to willing suspension of disbelief.
Thanks, Bill. That dynamic of “I’ve heard the debate but haven’t read Sanderson” is precisely why I wanted to root it back to narrative principles. It’s such a worthwhile subject to explore but I think the discourse is missing the forest for the trees.
On actual preference, I’m like you. I think I generally prefer the softer edges of magic than the harder limits.
Your elucidation on Sanderson's "laws" as actually referring to narrative and not worldbuilding is really good, but the conversation I'd like to have is the irreparable damage Sanderson's "laws" have had in terms of restricting and muddling magic aesthetics, presentation, and concept. The far-reaching notion, partly from wide misreading, and partly from poor communication on the author's behalf, that hard=science and soft=magic, that there must be cost, numbers, and so on. His "laws" may be good guides for narrative use, but as worldbuilding advice for those who simply enjoy the art of fleshing out a setting, I think they're atrocious.
I personally like to measure things by a Magic/Science metric to better describe authorial intent, presentation, and aesthetics. Magic, after all, is a word with a meaning.
If you ask me, his first law is by far the most useful. I think the second of his laws—limits are more interesting than powers—is based more on opinion on what he finds interesting than on fact, though again it has use for exposition and for shedding more light on the first law.
Anyway, I obviously agree that people have taken the spectrum too far or treat the categories too rigidly. And most of all they treat it as worldbuilding fact that harder magic is better and therefore everything becomes rigid and rules based. That’s precisely the kind of assumption I want to dispel.
And I hope to write a longer defense of soft magic systems. My own tastes lean that direction. Like you said, magic should be, you know, MAGIC.
Couldn't agree more about the second "law"! One of the best arguments I know against it is "The Face in the Frost" by John Bellairs from 1969. By pure vibes alone, the book gives a great sense of what the extent of the characters are capable of without spending any time whatsoever on mechanical exposition. It's fascinating because it's written almost with the structure of a horror story (it partly is one, which helps), with well-defined escalation of events and powers. You just get it.
I'd very much like to read a defense of "soft" magic in all its meanings if you do it!
When you mentioned the damage Sanderson has done to the genre I gasped and slammed that <3 so hard.
His thoughts on magic are great on the surface, especially for new writers but they can be easily misunderstood
Glad I'm not alone! Be it worldbuilding-wise or narrative-wise, I still think he's wrong, Eric's good article explaining what Sanderson couldn't aside. If you've ever read "The Face in the Frost" by John Bellairs, it makes for a good argument over smart writing being able to deliver implications of limits and mechanics through vibes than overt exposition.
Very nice breakdown of the distinction. I liked how you applied it to Dune - I love Dune but I personally had issues with the second book due to the powers becoming a bit TOO soft. Like, the more Frank writes about spice the more I began to suspect that spice just does whatever the author wants it to do at any given moment. Prescience? Psychic gestalt? Prolong your life (but only when the author remembers)? Accelerating a twin pregnancy to days/weeks? Seeing out of your infant son's eyes?!
It gets really wacky really quickly, whereas the first book is a lot more grounded in terms of politics, logistics and military history. Also, in the first book there was more of an effort to establish that powers did have 'costs' and limitations, e.g. Paul is so exceptional due to a whole 90 generations of selective breeding, and being a mentat is also somewhat genetic (Paul's supposed to get that potential from Leto) and requires intense training from very early on.
It's one of those things where I THINK I prefer soft magic in stories, but then I think about stuff like this and it's like, well actually maybe not. Also, you've reminded me I really need to write more about Dune...
I think we all have a natural tendency to tidy up and classify things in an attempt to better understand how to tell stories.
But where these tools like Sandersons rules may be used to find logical inconsistencies that may be confusing, they can also be taken out of context and misused.
For every person it helps, it stiffles someone else's creativity who takes it too literally, or worse, someone else judges it based on those strict criteria.
I think your interpretation is far more accurate, it is all a narrative tool in service of the reader, and it goes well beyond magic systems, it applies to how information is shared and ultimately, paid off, like cool medieval combat tactics.
Very good read! Thank you for putting it together.
Also, this happens all the time in Painting. Someone came up with the rule of thirds to aid composition, and I've heard people mindlessly parrot that someone elses painting had wrong composition because it did not follow that rule. That is worse than being ignorant if you ask me.
So true, Marco. The whole idea of narrative “rules” is that they are tools for post-creation analysis not pre-creation formulation. They can act as guideposts and can be extremely helpful in crafting a narrative—and I use the term “crafting” deliberately, in that it takes work and practice rather than just inspiration and emotion—but these rules are also insufficient as goals in themselves. The minute things like this become goals then they are essentially removed from their context, like you say. The rule of thirds is an excellent example.
I enjoy these analyses so much that one day I might even write some fantasy!
I thought of you, Beth, when I was thinking about this around more spec-fic sci fi tech :)
Excellent article. I think you fully explain what many get wrong about Sanderson’s rules.
Thanks, JJ!
Good article, Eric. I actually struggle with Sanderson because I find his writing too formulaic to the point where his magic systems feel too forced to me. So you could say I prefer soft magic and finding other ways to level the playing field.
This was a great explanation though, and a(nother) useful signpost that foreshadowing (which is effectively how I read this) is so important.
Keep these coming.
Thanks, AJ. That’s certainly a common critique of Sanderson and a valid one I think—even if some of it boils down to taste. I likewise prefer softer magic.
Foreshadowing is a great way to look at it. Now that you mention it I’m surprised that word didn’t make it into the post haha 😅
This is a good explanation! I had it professionally explained to me in a college course and I still don't see anything you left out.
What I really like about Sanderson's style is that shift you talk about. The rules APPEAR to change, but we actually just didn't have the full picture, solidifying your point about the storytelling being the emphasis. This is what I see missing in a lot of new writers' work—a lot of my classmates in particular would focus so much on developing the system that they'd forget that it's meant to serve the story, not the other way around. One of my writing teachers actually banned fantasy and sci-fi from her class for that exact reason. (And my fantasy writing benefited from her lessons anyway.)
My world would be difficult to label as hard or soft magic I think, because there are detailed explanations for how things are supposed to work, but part of the point of the story is that the magic doesn't always work the way it's "supposed to" according to the characters. For example, everyone in the world has a spark that gives them one particular ability that they must spend years training to unlock. But among the main trio, one doesn't have a spark, one has two sparks, and one is already powerful without training. (In my notes I have explanations for most of it, but I don't want to reveal everything right away. 😉)
Thanks for taking the time to write this out!
Interesting. I wasn’t aware of the terms Hard and Soft when used specifically to describe Magic systems, but it makes a good deal of sense now that I am.
Glad to hear it! Thanks for reading
"The storyteller must exposit the tools before the characters can use them in satisfying ways"
This is literary gold and genre agnostic as well. Slightly changing the terminology to something like rules or guidelines and everything works from a science fiction perspective as well.
Exactly! All the commentary about magic this and magic that… it really just stems from solid narrative principles. When you keep that in mind, the framework expands significantly beyond the genre
This was definitely an eye opener and very helpful. You have a good explanation style and even though the article is in depth, it didn't feel very long.
A true compliment! Thanks! Happy to help. I love getting explain things like this
When you defined hard magic, I immediately thought of FMA and The Last Airbender. Get out of my head, bro.
But seriously, this post was very helpful in understanding one of my stories. I still don't know exactly where it falls, but based off of this post the concepts leans more magical, in my opinion.
Thank you for your thoughts!
Haha! Well FMA and ATLA are very common hard magic examples for a reason. They’re clearly understood and widely known.
Happy to hear this was helpful to you. Remember, it’s not about finding exactly where you might line up and more about getting the right balance of exposition in the narrative—and that exposition will flow from how central magic use is to the story’s major plot points.
As an avid video game player and who LOVES and has played through most of Square's Final Fantasy series of games (My top two favorites are Ff 6 and 12), this applies to fantasy video games very well.
It does! I couldn’t find the right place to highlight that but I’m glad you noticed it. The worldbuilding aspects of video game magic might be unexplained but the rules and limits of magic have to be very well explained in video games or else there’s no gameplay! That’s why the hardest magic in fantasy often reads like a video game in book format.
The LitRPG subgenre often is a video game in book format! There's a decent amount of range in the genre, though: some will track stats and whatnot, but the magic is very soft; others make central plot points out of characters crunching numbers to "break the game/system", and the hardness of the magic is the central part of the fantasy.
That said, as a subgenre, it is the poster child for sacrificing quality of writing on the altar of self-insert power fantasy in a hard magic system.
Huh. So THATs what LitRPG means. What you say about the spectrum of magic in those conventions makes a lot of sense…
Well, not strictly. It's any gameified fiction, typically in the fantasy/science fiction genres.
This is a nicely-written summary, but I challenge the main point of both yours and Sanderson's essays.
My view is that "hard" and "soft" magic systems are a redundant cargo-cult. They are shallow post-factum definitions that do not, in fact, give any useful guidance to the author.
First, let's get to your example. You distinguish between "soft" case—deus ex machina fireball—and "hard" case—long-studied, hard-trained fireball. And the claim is that one "saps all the tension" and the other is "a delightful surprise full of triumph and emotion". I strongly disagree.
In most real-world books, both of these would be boring drivel. Fully unexpected and fully expected resolutions are both, in the majority of cases, bad, formulaic writing. The "sweet spot" is always in between, in the unexpected yet expected outcome. We expected that Frodo would destroy the Ring, but didn't expect that it would be through Gollum. On the other hand, a talented writer could make both of the fringe cases work, if they would wish so. There is absolutely no correlation between the "hardness/softness" of the magic system of this world in this example and the quality of the outcome.
Now, to "Sanderson's law": "An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic".
Again, I find it redundant and useless.
First, on the most general level, if "the author's ability to solve conflict" (=the author's skill) is directly proportional to "how well the reader understands said magic" (=exposition), it's basically saying that skillful authors should write good exposition, and that is obvious and does not require extra definitions. As a practical advice, it's therefore useless.
On a lower level, if we talk specifically about magic systems, this dychotomy is also not helpful. You yourself say that it's a spectrum, but the word "spectrum" implies a single axis of rigidity. But the actual situation is much more complicated: there is more than a single axis involved (for instance: "true rigidity of the system", "characters' knowledge of the system", "reader's knowledge of the system", "overall rationality", "effect of randomness", "seriousness" etc.). Therefore, one described magic system may be more rigid on one axis and less rigid on another axis, so even a "spectrum" metaphor is not helpful. For instance, Harry Potter's magic system, compared to Lord of the Rings one, seems more rigid in terms of reader's knowledge (we know much more details about it), but less rigid in terms of logic and seriousness (you can have "silly" and "nonsense" spells, whereas the LotR system is based on mythological worldbuilding and allows for much less tomfoolery). Therefore, simplification of that complex structure to terms "hard" and "soft" is not helpful at all.
On an even lower level, the hard-soft system even as described is pointless. The claim is that "rule-based magic will need exposition or else the story falls apart. And by nature of that exposition, it’s a hard magic system.". But this is absolutely true for non-rules-based magic as well: you give LotR and A Song of Ice and Fire as examples of "soft" magic systems but they need (and have!) incredible amounts of exposition, including that related to magic. Their exposition is not the rules of magic, in this case, but the facts and examples of the magic being mysterious, lost mythological arts with unknown limits. This is exposition in itself, and it is as crucial for the narrative as rationalistic rules in other books are. If so, there just is a need for exposition for any story, "soft" or "hard" notwithstanding, which, again, makes these definitions useless.
Let's throw away the hard-soft nonsense and the sandersonian empty "wrapping" and say: No matter what your magic system is, you need to explain it to the reader in a way that does not prohibit him from understanding what is going on. Or, even more concisely: Write good exposition. This is not Sanderson's first law, and even not Asimonov's first law: this is just a general (and obvious to the level of uselessness) advice for good writing, and to me, the attempts of Sanderson to pin his name on it are kinda in bad taste.
End of vent.
I’m publishing my own fantasy novel here on Substack and your descriptions ring true and do help me to clarify why I’m saying what I’m saying and how I’m saying it. I’m not changing anything (yet) but my decisions on what to say will now be more informed and deliberate. Thank you. Should you want to see my world it is The Cycle of Reversion, published Saturday and Wednesday mornings.
Really good stuff here, Eric. Love the emphasis on bringing everything back to the narrative. I think there’s room for deus ex machina use of magic but more so in literary fantasy where character development is focused on. I really like those moments when a character is about to be overwhelmed and someone comes out of nowhere to save them. It doesn’t cheapen the story because it’s not about the plot. I think LOTR has a lot of little moments like this. Like in the movies when Arwen shows up in Fellowship to help. It emphasizes how small the hobbits are in the world but also how many powerful friends they have. I think Gandalf’s resurrection is like that. He is DEM’d by some power we don’t understand fully but that’s not the point. I think the little people watching big things happen around them feels true to life as long as it doesn’t go too far. Thank you very much for writing this!
Perfect timing to find this for me. This is gonna be so useful to consider during the developmental edits in the book I’m writing.