Looking for the Magic

Ever get to that point in a story and go: But where's the magic? In a fantasy, this should come early. In others, it may come late. Yet that question should always be there. If you can immediately tell where the magic is, good. Keep going. If you've got to do so digging, or some adding, then you had better get to it.

Please understand I don't mean magic just in the terms of magic systems or flying horses or sentient cutlery. I mean, the draw, what gets your reader in the door, plops them down in the chair, and makes the hours whisk by. Every story has it in there somewhere. By all rights, it ought to be waving its hat at hello on page one, but sometimes you need a little more set up to get it off the ground. Whatever you do, you should never have a story with NO magic. Godawful waste of time that.

If you're a writer, heaven hopes you are also a reader which should be where you get your first taste of this amazing craft. As a younger, I enjoyed Anne McCaffrey's Pern and the worlds of David Eddings. Later, I would cut my teeth in horror with Clive Barker and Stephen King, who remains perhaps my undisputed favorite author of all time. In some of these cases, the magic was magic and the possibility that anything might happen. If you don't know, Pern starts out as Science Fiction and breeding dragons in laboratories. (I am and perhaps will always be a lover of dragons. I liken it to the childish love of horses, magnificent, majestic animals.)

So where's the magic in your story? it can sometimes be boiled down to a question; the central question that keeps your reader reading. In Blades of Fate I posit what would happen if you had waited forever for someone only to find out when they returned they were nothing like you remembered. This is a slightly different question from Chains of Fate the first book in the set which asks, what would you do in order to bring back the one you loved? Or the question behind Dark King Rising, When your imagination creates the greatest evil what will you do?

Each of these asks a question and the text offers an answer by the time you get to the climax. Therein lies the magic of the text, the draw, the beauty. All that makes it amazing.


Happy Holidays to All. I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season. The paperback of Dark King Rising is available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The Kindle/Epub edition comes out this coming Friday, so make sure you get yours!