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!

Alchemists have been promising us they are on the verge of creating life from nothing, then granting mankind immortality since long before the word alchemy existed. Even today scientists, as we call modern alchemists, insist the Singularity is about to merge us all with the machine for the rest of eternity. Or perhaps we’ll clone ourselves into immortality. Perhaps no salvation will come to our generation but our children can be genehacked into perfection and all suffering on Earth after they take over will be averted.

Regardless of whether it’s the promise of immortality, the power to see the future or control over the forces of nature magic has always been the promise of control over things mankind previously thought we could not control. Miracles, in contrast, represent an intervention into the natural order by something transcendent. They are the opposite of magic in that they represent things moving even further out of control. The transcendent does not just move beyond the material it also surpasses human understanding and control, after all.

Thus these two forces, magic and miracles, often stand in stark contrast.

A brief aside. In fantasy fiction there is a spectrum known as the hard magic-soft magic spectrum, which is used to assess how well the audience understands the functioning of the supernatural power system in the fiction. Hard magic has clear rules. The characters and readers should understand what it can do, what it can’t and what it costs. Soft magic is mysterious. Its function is hard to understand and dealing with it is extremely dangerous in no small part because it is so poorly understood. It’s generally understood that hard magic exists to build stakes while soft magic exists to build wonder or fear.

For the purposes of our discussion this distinction is irrelevant. It is tempting to map miracles onto soft magic and magic as a source of control onto hard magic. However that ignores what I actually want to get at today.

As you may have already gathered from the opening paragraph, for the purposes of this discussion science counts as a kind of magic. Most scientific principles started as bits of occult knowledge. Chemistry? First it was alchemy. Medicine? Partly the herblore of witches and shaman, partly learned by heretics who cut up dead bodies.

Now it’s true that as the Church gathered the writings of the Greek philosophers many members of the clergy gained an interest in science and started discovering its principles themselves. Eventually the Church would conclude that nothing human reason discovered contradicted God’s ability to intervene in the world as He chose. However, be it the ordered realms of science or the wild fetishes of the witch doctor the tension is the same. Magic seeks to seize control of the world. Miracles take the control of the world away from mortals and places it in the hands of the transcendent.

Reconciling these two things is one of the roles of religious belief. Not every religion will reach the same balance point as Christians did and some will reject any compromise in favor of one extreme or the other. But sooner or later they will find some point of balance – that’s the point of systematic theology.

Thus, when writing a system of belief what is less important is the hard or soft nature of your magic system and more how a person of belief feels about the control magic seeks. Continuing with our starting metaphor, the religions of Star Trek, this is one area where they all seem to agree. Both the Vulcans and Klingons have a strong emphasis on wielding science as a way to gain the control needed to pursue their transcendent goals. The Bajorans largely accept science as a part of understanding the world. They often insist that the Prophets can work outside the bounds of science but very few Bajorans disregard science entirely. In fact, in doing research for this post, I could not find any reference to their rejecting science on religious grounds at all.

Granted, I did not have time to go back and rewatch Deep Space Nine while writing this post. Don’t consider this definitive.

The point is, by and large, there is little tension between the forces of magic and miracles in Bajoran thought. While the miracles the Prophets create, namely creating a wormhole and predicting the future, are interesting to the Federation rarely do people question their scientific interest in them. The Bajorans see the Prophets themselves as divine whether their gifts are understood or not.

I don’t have a personal problem with that perspective but I know there are many people who would and have very clear reasons for why they do. The notion that scientific understanding is a method for controlling our world that is granted to us by the divine order isn’t new. But it is very specific. A quick study of Greek myth, for example, shows us a strong belief in mankind’s actions being controlled by fate rather than by men. Those who challenge the Fates or the Gods suffer for it. Their efforts never see success. There are beings that use “magic” in their mythology but they descendants of gods, at the very least, and their powers are extensions of the divine and transcendent rather than magic for the purpose of this discussion.

In short, magic in Greek myth is transgressing on the divine and inviting punishment.

There’s a lot of middle ground between the Greek view of magic and the Star Trek view of magic. Some religions might see magic as valid in some areas and invalid in others. Many smaller religious sects in modern America reject medical intervention because they view it as an attempt to usurp the power to choose when people live and when they die. In more paganistic belief systems farming techniques might be seen in usurping the harvest.

So, for the storyteller the first real question of miracles and magic is, what can people do to take control of their circumstances without transgressing their beliefs?

One aspect of miracles and magic that the modern storyteller does do quiet well is grapple with people confronting the miraculous. Most horror stories have that element to them. A film like It Follows presents us with a force beyond human understanding that can’t be reasoned with, only appeased for a time. These chilling tales tackle the second question of miracles and magic. Namely, what will people do when confronting the transcendent tells them that they will never have control of some part of their lives?

Many tales that involve magic and religion often put these two forces at odds but few of these tales get down to the reasons that cause the division. Of course you can call many things “magic” or “religion” and create a coherent tale. But the separation we’ve put between the old ideas we called magic and the modern conception of science conceals many of the old threads that put religion and magic in tension. In fairness not every story needs to engage with the themes of control and transcendence. The thematic power is there, though, and I find the restriction of this idea to the horror genre a little sad. Hopefully we’ll see the rich vein of ideas come back into the limelight in the future.