marycatelli | Entries tagged with world-building: magic (plot device)

When revising a Gamelit outline to ensure that the characters run low on spells, it's not so wise to add encounters, but to ramp up the use of spells in the existing ones.

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Crossposts: https://marycatelli.livejournal.com/1122214.html

If you're sick of prophecies, consider a curse!

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Crossposts: https://marycatelli.livejournal.com/933146.html

Ah, the perils of a fantasy bildungsroman. Here's our heroine. She can turn into a dove. She has classmates who can turn into swans, and one into a peahen.

And they are all growing up.
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Crossposts: https://marycatelli.livejournal.com/914558.html

I mentioned earlier that you can find such a character by being a woman who lost her husband to magic and going on a quest for him. Though it's not reliable. You might meet the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars instead.
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It's kind of annoying to find a writer who talks of the importance of doing your research and then pulls an awful research blooper.

In fairy tales, all witches are evil, and all wizards good. sigh

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The fun of world-building is that probably no one starts with it.

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Ah, characters!

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I think I'm going to have to deal with the languages. . . .

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I'm going to have to watch very closely the next few days -- hoping there isn't clouds. 'cause, at this time of year, I get up just at the sun is rising. . . .

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thought up a new in-universe motive for the masquerade where the mundanes are unaware they are surrounded by magic.

The mundanes dun it.

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So, should the world-building of this story include the use of wands in magic?

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sometimes ideas take a long time to develop because it takes a long time to file off the numbers.

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Thought of a new (in-universe!) motive for the masquerade.

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Was pondering things about Harry Potter and noticed one particularly glaring one.

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Some superheroes are more random than others. Not in the sense that their origins are more off the wall. In the sense that the powers fell to them by accident or chance, and they could have been anyone. The difference between intensive study of magic and being the victim of an accident in a lab with solar power superscience.

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I have a clever plan!

I think. I hope it works.

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Literature, like any form of art, exists in minute particulars. Not that that always persuades the muse. Who is now sitting and admiring the gleaming gemstones she has arrange on the shelves in the hidden cave. All of which are magic. And a villainess of the piece, trying to persuade the heroine, tells her what some of them do in hopes of persuaded her to an alliance
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I think my heroine needs two solutions to her problem.

Two solutions in theory, to be sure. She does not have to apply both to solve the problem. I even know what the solutions are, in the vaguest possible terms: she has a cursed and evil magic item, which was once a beneficient one, but was stolen (because such evil doing adds to the evil magic), and turned from gold to lead, which means she can find a way either to turn it from lead into gold, or to reverse the earlier transformation. . . .

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A story never gets written if you never sit down and write it. On the other hand, sometimes you can't force it. It has to slowly simmer not just while waiting for revision, but before even starting.
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Some things in a story ought not to be too obvious. Even above and beyond the usual fuzziness need to make things realistic.

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Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

being chiefly about the written word

Entries tagged with world-building: magic (plot device)

spells and story structure

consider a curse

bildungsroman for the birds

how to find a good witch in a fairy tale

witches and wizards and fairy tales

the ways of world-building

backstory and magic

tongues and languages

dawn of day

motivating the masquerade

whether to use wands

serial numbers

motive for the masquerade

plot hole

randomness and superheroes

a clever plan

the stones' strengths

a two-solution story

noodling with notions

translucence in fiction