Okay. Are you trying to portray magic realistically? Or just differently from other fiction?
If you can spend the time, I'd advise doing some anthropological study of both modern/western interpretations of magic and modern and ancient non-western interpretations of magic, and identifying certain commonalities as well as drawing your own conclusions. Frazer's Golden Bough is an undesirable shortcut; avoid it.
If you haven't the time, or are so specifically focused on magic in a modern/western setting that it doesn't seem worth it, I actually rather liked what Katherine Kurtz did with Lammas Night, and Mercedes Lackey's guardian series -- i forget what she called it, but there was this big uproar among people who were doing something very similar to what she described and wrote her to tell her so, and she thought they were all whacked out of their gourds. I don't blame her; some of them were. But not all.
But neither of these books go far enough, because magic is really the focal point and what makes it exciting. Your idea-- realist fiction where one or two characters just happen to practice magic-- sounds like a very good one. I'd love to read it, myself.
The Mage roleplaying game from White Wolf Studios could also be a good introduction, if you can find some people to play with. First and foremost, it's a game, so they have to integrate things like the ability to blow your enemies to smithereens with fireballs. But otherwise, certain of the concepts struck me as right on:
1) Magic works as a result of belief.
2) The overwhelming belief in "reality" by the masses keeps things functioning more or less the way they are, most of the time. That's what keeps people from "believing" they can fly without assistance, or that they can turn into a dragon, and having it just work.
3) The more "coincidentally" you work your magic, the more likely it is to work. Striking someone down with lightning from a clear sky goes so directly against the consensual reality beliefs that it's well-nigh impossible for most, but arranging matters so te gets zapped every time te uses anything remotely electrical might be quite easy (don't know, never tried).
4) There are many different levels to existence, and there are some things, creatures, or people which exist on a less-physical basis. I call them Non-Corporeal Persons, or NCP's when I'm feeling flip. In Mage, they're perfectly real, they just exist in a world which overlaps this one in a way our minds can't really conceptualize very well.
5) Magic works differently depending on how the practitioner, and the surrounding culture, believes it works. If you're writing about magic, the less you dictate as an omniscient narrator about how and why it works, and the more (up to a point) you have the characters discuss their different views about it, the better-- in my opinion, anyway. A person who believes the way to get magic to work is by convincing the spirits to do things for you is just as right as a person who believes the way to do magic is to decide on the result you want, then transfer your consciousness through Hilbert space until you get to a world where what you want is reality. Person A, however, might have trouble working magic in a strange place where te is unfamiliar with the local spirits, at least until te's satisfied te's made a bargain with them.
I could say more, but that's five so I'll shut up now. |
