A couple of weeks ago I wrote about miracles and magic and, in the process, I mentioned hard and soft magic systems. This is an aspect of storytelling that many writers have very strong opinions about. Having strong opinions about storytelling is fine! In fact, that is a big part of what we do here, on this particular corner of the Internet! As I stated before, the question of hard magic versus soft magic is a question of systems. Hard magic is very systematized, with rules, costs, predictable outcomes, and so forth where as soft magic works because it works, with no clear rational.

Each of these approaches to showing magic in your story has its pros and cons. There’s also no clear and obvious lines where one class of magic starts and the other ends, which we’re going to look at in more detail in a bit but before that we have to talk about why the divide exists in the first place.

Every story has a goal. Whether it’s to create a mood, recount events or help you get to know a cast of characters one of the most important things for a storyteller is to keep that goal in mind and choose the techniques that bring you closest to fulfilling that goal. Many people who write about minutia like hard or soft magic systems don’t consider goals when they do. They analyze magic as if it were a law of nature in and of itself rather than a technique used to leverage the audience further down the path towards your goal, a toolkit to achieve narrative ends.

So for starters, what is in the hard magic toolkit?

The first and biggest aspect is a sense of cause and effect for things that normally cannot happen in real life. All narrative is built on cause and effect. A thing happens, which causes another thing to happen, which causes a final thing to happen which forces a character to make a choice and do something which causes another thing to – well, you get the idea. When something that is impossible happens in your story you may wish to assign it a cause. When impossibilities and their causes start to link together in a system you have hard magic in a nutshell.

The second thing in the toolkit is a sense of stakes. Like a dwindling fuel supply or the bullets in a gun, knowing exactly how much longer a person can do magic before he’s out of gas makes each use of it more tense and more important to how likely that person is to succeed at what they’re trying. This works in many ways. If iron cancels out all magic and the audience knows the villain is hiding an iron knife in their pocket as the confront the hero then we know that the hero is in danger he cannot anticipate. In essence, the more concrete and predictable your magic system the bigger the part it can play in tension or suspense based narrative techniques.

Finally, a hard magic system allows for more creativity in how goals are accomplished. In many stories with a soft magic system a conflict with magic or the harnessing of magic to accomplish a task boils down to concentrating harder or reaching some kind of personal epiphany. Hard magic systems create opportunities for surprising uses of existing magical mechanisms or lateral thinking with simple abilities. These ‘a-ha!’ moments are a lot of fun for the reader. Predicting them ahead of time is very satisfying for the audience as well.

So at what cost do we bring these tools to bear?

Well, first there’s the issue of memory. When the reader has to learn a bunch of things about the way your world works it can be hard to keep track of it all. Especially because there’s never going to be a chance for the reader to apply what they learn. Knowledge that goes unused is the soonest forgotten. Second is the question of complexity. The more moving parts a story has going the more likely your audience is to misunderstand some part of it and loose track of what your story is about.

But the greatest issue might be the time taken in explaining a hard magic system. It’s not fun to stop in the middle of a thrilling car chase for a lecture on how the internal combustion engine works. By the same token, lectures on how magic functions aren’t the most thrilling fiction out there. Finding the best way to explain the details is one of the biggest hurdles to a hard magic system out there.

What is the soft magic tool kit?

It offers you the chance to do things way outside the normal human experience, just like hard magic does, but it also offers a sense of mystery or menace rooted in how little people can actually understand what is happening around them. Soft magic puts the focus on how characters react to the unexpected or supernatural. The demands put on people by circumstances outside of their control are totally different from the demands of controlling a situation by knowledge and skill.

In short, while hard magic is about ingenuity and circumstance soft magic is all about resilience and determination. Finding your way in a world of soft magic is more about you than about the magic. Instead, the magic highlights aspects of a character’s personality, usually in a poetic or ironic fashion. Alternatively it gives voice to an aspect of the world that normally wouldn’t be accessible to the human experience. Consider Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, for example. He’s certainly a magical creature and, as he himself says, he speaks for the trees. Without the soft magic of the Lorax, his eponymous story could not take place.

Now that I’ve laid out these two types of magic, let me ask you a question – what kind of magic do you think JRR Tolkien created for the world of Middle Earth?

If you’ve read deeply about the world and the man, you know this is a trick question. Tolkien doesn’t dive into the supernatural mechanics of his world in The Lord of the Rings and that would seem to indicate a soft magic system. Gandalf, Saruman and Sauron all have potent magical powers. However we rarely see them used and we have no idea how they work when we do see them. Very squishy stuff.

The problem is, Tolkien did have pretty clear mechanics for how all the magic in his world worked. There were rules he put on the system. And, in point of fact, he spent a lot of time making sure the magic and its functions were consistent from beginning to end. He just didn’t sit down and explain it all to the audience and by doing so he turned a hard magic into a soft magic.

All of this is context for understanding the question that I’m really interested in as I write this post. That question being, why make this change? Tolkien could have gone under the hood and explained the One Ring and how the principles under-girding it allowed Sauron to so easily subvert others. He could have explained Gandalf’s command of flames. After all, he understood these things in exhaustive detail, why not take us under the hood, so to speak, and show us the full breadth and potential of his world?

The short answer is he was not writing a story that needed to. Tolkien was a linguist – a philologist, to be exact – and his stories founded in a world that existed to explain languages. However not just any language, poetic language. The great poetic narratives like Beowulf were the focus of Tolkien’s study and were undoubtedly part of his inspiration as he started to craft Middle Earth. By that token, his story was about the great emotional and poetic elements of life. Getting into the nitty gritty of magic really doesn’t play well into the ideas at the heart of his narratives so he chose to ignore them to keep the focus on the sweeping strokes of the human experience.

So ultimately the thing that interests me about hard vs soft magic is less the mechanics of it, though I do think its a worthwhile distinction. What interests me is the why. Every step a writer takes should be made deliberately to help you tell your story or, if it’s not aimed directly at advancing your narrative, shoring up the world and themes of your story. It’s okay to have a hard magic system and know all the ins and outs of the paranormal. However if these details pull the focus away from what you set out to do you may find it’s better to do as Tolkien did and never show the mechanics under the hood.

Ultimately your magic system isn’t supposed to be the heart of your story. Like world building it exists to help your audience get into the story and hold their attention on the plot, characters and themes. Delve as deep into it as you need to in order to maximize those elements. Allowing the magic system to surpass them is going to decrease the impact of those central things substantially unless that system is purposefully designed to go along with those elements.

Just like the hard magic/soft magic scale, the under the hood scale has a lot of gradations. You may need to rewrite things substantially to find the write point in order to find that balance point. But spending the time to be as deliberate as possible in building your story will make it better and that’s worthwhile!