Magic and Magical Users

Ch. 1: Starting off

AN - * = Further explanation in later chapters
    Over the last few years I have been on and off again writing and reading many types of Fantasy and Science Fiction genre books all of them have magic involved in the novels. With so many types of magic in the books and so many ways of calling upon and casting magic it gets very confusing to keep them all straight when you start a new novel. As a writer it is even harder when you want to write a book and put magic inside the book with all the conflicting existing systems of magic in novels, web novels, comics, manga, TV, movies, anime, etc. For the last few years I've been doing in depth and extensive research in the many forms of magic, how to cast it, how to categorize it, what type of source is used to preform the magic. Over the course of my research I have never stopped reading, watching, and writing fiction works that almost always involve magic. After all this time I have been looking but have never found a book or a guide to describe types of magic. A few on how to create your own but not a descriptive or comprehensive guide on how to write about magic. I may not be the best writer and need constant re-editing to be able to write well but I'll give it my best shot.

    The first thing that I've learned in my research on magic, wether your the reader or the writer, is that all types of magic have rules and regulations. The rules and regulations exists for several reasons, the first is that when there are established rules even if those rules are not explained to the reader when the writer knows of them it makes it more seem less when the writer explains his or her magic. Another major reason for there to be rules to magic in a story is due to the believe ability of the magic. What would happen if you read a novel with a world of magic users and everyone can only use fire magic, that is the only kind of magic. The main character was an average user of fire and one day a genius of fire magic tries to kill the main character all of a sudden casts water magic to disable the fire then earth magic to disable the caster. With no explanation before or after, not even a little bit of foreshadowing before hand. All of a sudden using two unknown forms of magic and wins against an insane villain. Right there you have lost your readers. Every time a character casts a spell or uses magic things must be accomplished to be able to use the magic. This is why rules and regulations exist to be able to let your readers follow along and intrigue them in the story.

    The easiest way to understand the rules and regulations before hand with out having to come up with anything extensive is to known the umbrella terms. For every type of magic or magic-like existence in stories has at least one umbrella term if not more that controls the regulations of that type of magic. With the knowledge of umbrella terms you have the ability to understand a new form of magic very fast or even create one from scratch in as little as a few minutes. All you have to known is what you want the magic to do and have knowledge of the umbrella terms and the rules that go with them that will govern your magic. Before I explain umbrella terms I need you to read one thing, I found this quote in a autobiography about seven or eight years ago and reading all the time has more than verified this quote. "If you are trying to write something in this day and age, I want you to know that nothing is original. Wether you subconsciously or actively take from someone else's writing, from a movie, or something someone who just passed you on the street said. If you're a writer you pull from everything around you, you crave fresh ideas and the world around you has plenty of those. Nothing is original the names are just changed again and again, the ideas and plot get tweaked a little bit more with every person that uses the plot, this is how sub-genres get created. The sooner that you realize that nothing is fully original anymore the faster you can write and not worry about plagiarizing other peoples ideas and plots, just try to change it enough so that it is not overly obvious so that in case the person your taking from doesn't decide to sue you for copyright." Unknown.

    Okay so Umbrella Terms, the definition of this is "an umbrella term is a word or phrase that covers a wide or narrow range of items or symbolic things". A basic explanation of umbrella terms would be "A genre such as fantasy is an umbrella term, this is a wide range umbrella term. You can go further and use the sub-genre RPGLit, this is a narrow range umbrella term. Using Fantasy and RPGLit in conjunction gives you good idea of what your about to read, same if you use Science Fiction and Space Odyssey in conjunction gives you an idea of what your about to read."  Alright to start with explaining magic the first two terms that you should learn before others are Active and Passive Magic. In my opinion these are the building blocks of all magic, you have to have one of these two to be able to use magic in stories.

    Active Magic*: Active magic applies to all types of magic or spells that have to be invoked or casted to use. The majority of magic that you are used to and know of falls under this umbrella. Active magic is the easiest to defined because this is what most writers use in their stories. But also because this is the overly used type of magic, there are tons of rules and restrictions on active magic.
Ex. Spells, Magic Wand, etc.

     Passive Magic*: Passive magic is the type of magic that happens automatically or is always active. Passive magic is generally controlled by the subconscious and is a form of magic that is natural and someone is usually born with it. For someone to have Passive magic that generally have been born on a magic governed world. Also those who have passive magic can not necessarily use magic.
Ex. An innate immunity to fire, innate monstrous strength greater then other men, etc.