Timewaster's Guide Archive

Tjaeden,

You seem to be implicitly assuming that art and science are mutually exclusive, and that beauty and understanding are inversely related. Just saying, is all.

---

Matt,

Another possibility is that if Iridescence is the word of choice, then adjust the magic to play down the saturation aspect and instead make those people with many Breaths appear more iridescent and/or make them experience the colors of what they see as changing and shimmering rather than static-but-saturated.

This doesn't really address your point, but--
I think the word "iridescence" technically refers to a surface creating a diffraction or rainbow effect, like the rainbow pattern you see on the shiny side of a compact disk, by reflecting different colors most strongly at different angles. (There doesn't have to be any "changing" or "shimmering" at all.) So the God King's rainbow effect might actually be iridescence, and it's vaguely possible that iridescence plays a role in an awakener's ability to more accurately distinguish different colors, since some light sensors use diffraction to do exactly that.

I like your idea of replacing both "biochroma" and "breath" with a single term. It's tricky, though, because it kind of makes sense to say that each person has one indivisible biochromatic breath, but if you changed the term to, say, mana or energy, then it would be much more difficult. The word "soul" would work nicely, except for the pesky connotation of housing a person's self-ness.

Heh. I just looked up "soul" in a thesaurus. Esprit, vim, zest...maybe we should just call it "soap".

---

Vadia,

There are some good points in your post, but I have to disagree with you about having a different font or style for Nightblade. I think in general that books which have different fonts for different characters, or set off certain characters' text ~(~like this~)~ tend to look a little gimmicky. Also, I think it's important to explain the way Vasher's awakened rope works; maybe it would work better for you if that paragraph were simply a little shorter?

He was rough.  He was brutal.  He had a terrible temper.  But, he was a good man.  And, walking beside him, she felt safe for the first time in weeks.

She felt safe -- for about five seconds, until she figured out that Vasher could be using his newly-revealed mind control powers to make her feel that way.

Obviously, Vasher needed the girl's cooperation to make her forget things, but getting her -- and the dogs -- to calm down was something he could do on his own.

Seriously, it looks like Vivenna is once again going to need to reexamine whether or not she thinks Vasher is manipulating her. He doesn't need to be charming to be a manipulator, if he's got magic powers. Oh, and didn't he say he didn't have powerful friends like Denth did...and then turned out to be buddies with a priest?

Also, if Vasher had this ability, why hasn't he used it before? Like,

• On Vivenna, the first time he kidnapped her.
• On that guy in the prologue.
• On the guards, before he attacked them, in order to slow their reaction time.
• On the Idrian people they were trying to convince not to annoy the Halladrens (especially in that one scene right before Vivenna stepped in and pleaded with them).
• On other priests and powerful people -- Vasher could use his powers to get them to listen to him, even if he doesn't know them.
• Et cetera.

Ookla:

Thank you, yes, that's precisely what I meant. I did say that they were "heretofore unsuspected" powers.

Matt:

As I read it, your main point seems to be that Sanderson's First Law only applies to magic systems. In particular, you're saying that it doesn't apply to Spiderman. You might also be saying that it doesn't apply to the prologue of Warbreaker (but I'm not sure whether that's what you mean).

Obviously, I disagree. I think that Sanderson's First Law applies separately to any particular spell, item, ability, or magical phenomenon that an author uses to resolve a conflict. It's entirely possible that we're both wrong.

I don't think we're going to get any further by arguing about it more. I vote we let Brandon field this one, if he wants to.

---

Edit:

Now, your second point was that it's sometimes okay to commit deus ex machina (now that we've agreed by Ookla's definition that when an author introduces a new power out of the blue to resolve a conflict, it's deus ex machina) in order to resolve minor conflicts; in fact, you're saying that this is often a good way to introduce a character's powers.

I believe, in contrast, that it is always better not to commit deus ex machina, no matter how minor the conflict is.

To support your point, you're saying that Spiderman, X-Men,  and Warbreaker all use conflict to introduce their main characters' powers. But I don't think this is true.

As I pointed out above, in Warbreaker, Brandon goes to some pains to make sure we know Vasher has magic powers that will let him escape from the prison. So the powers were introduced before they were used to resolve the conflict, the conflict just shows you some of the details. (In the context of Sanderson's First Law, we would say that the reader has some understanding -- but not a full understanding -- of Vasher's powers before they're used to resolve the conflict, so the author has some ability to use those powers to resolve conflict. In the context of my earlier post, we would say that this is a type 2.5 situation, where the reader can guess -- ie. might expect -- what Vasher is going to do.) My point is, it's the fact that Brandon (at least partly) introduced Vasher's powers before the conflict, and not the idea that the conflict is "minor" that lets him use the powers to resolve it.

Spiderman does the same thing. (At least the movie does; I've never read Issue 1 of the comic book.) Spiderman first discovers his powers by looking into a mirror and discovering he doesn't need glasses. Then he runs on the wall of his house on the way to breakfast. We watch him practice jumping on rooftops and shooting webs. By the time he gets to school and fights the bully, we already know he's got "incredible powers" and it's no surprise that he can use them to beat the bully.

And, of course, X-Men also does this. The movie points out at the beginning that mutants have incredible powers. And we know that Wolverine is a mutant who is good at fighting before he gets into the bar fight ("No man takes a beating like that without a mark to show for it"). So while the details -- his claws -- are new, the idea that he can use his powers to beat the guys in the bar is not.

If you're right, then Sanderson's First Law of Magics should definitely not be renamed Sanderson's First Law of Magic Systems. According to you, Spiderman doesn't have a "magic system", yet we've already discussed in this thread how Sanderson's First Law applies to Spiderman (and Brandon referred to his abilities as "extremely hard magic".)

Also, when I described magic as a "character's abilities", I was speaking a little loosely too. I wanted to emphasize that, for example, knowing what everyone else in the Marvel Universe is capable of has no bearing on whether it's deus ex machina when Spiderman uses his abilities to get out of trouble; all that matters is that the reader know what Spiderman can do. Likewise in Harry Potter, we really have no idea what Dumbledore or Voldemort is capable of, but when Harry magics himself out of trouble, all that really matters (in terms of whether or not it's deus ex machina) is that we know what Harry can do.

But, to use your example of stories where magic events happen to ordinary people:

• If the magic is never used to solve conflict, Sanderson's First Law doesn't apply, because the law is about "an author’s ability to solve conflict with magic".
• If something magic just randomly happens that gets the characters out of trouble, that's pretty much the definition of deus ex machina.
• If the character does something to make the magic happen, then in terms of this discussion, that counts as one of  the character's abilities.
• If the character can predict that the magic is going to happen, and uses that to his advantage, then that also counts as one of the character's abilities, because it's what I described earlier as a type 2 situation: one where the reader could figure out that the character could do what he actually did. I admit that this is stretching the idea of a "character's abilities" pretty far, but I can't figure out a better phrase to describe what I mean.

I agree that Brandon likes to create "magic systems" by your definition. But I don't think that that's what this Law is about, or at least, not what it's only about.

---

Regarding conflict....

Suppose that in the next Warbreaker chapter (49, as of this post) Vivenna and Vasher had a conflict because each of them wanted the other to eat the last piece of squid. This is the most minor conflict possible by my definition, because who gets the piece of squid obviously has no impact on the plot. Surely any rational person would agree that this conflict is more minor than Vasher getting out of prison in the prologue. Yet if Vasher used his heretofore unsuspected mind control powers to make Vivenna eat the squid, this  would (I contend) be deus ex machina.

Clearly, then, there is something else about the prologue scene that makes it not deus ex machina, besides the simple (and debatable) fact that the conflict is "minor". I indicated that this "something else" could be the fact that the reader and/or the character knows beforehand that Vasher is going to use magic to escape from the prison. There might be other factors as well. But it's not just that it's a "minor conflict".

Authors who think it's okay to use deus ex machina to solve minor conflicts tend to develop "load-bearing boss syndrome", where all of the subplots neatly and artificially wrap themselves up once the main conflict is solved. In the movie version of The Lord of the Rings, all of the bad guys immediately fall over dead the moment the ring hits the volcano. And of course, who could forget the eagles?

---

Edit: I think maybe I can improve on the "character's abilities" thing (and summarize some of this discussion) by restating Sanderson's First Law as follows:

An author’s ability(1) to solve conflicts by using a particular form(2) of magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands(3) that form of magic.

(1) An author is said to be "able" to solve a conflict with a particular form of magic, if and only if he can do so without committing deus ex machina.
(2) A "form of magic" might be a particular spell, item, ability, or magical phenomenon.
(3) A reader is said to "understand" a form of magic, if she knows what that magic can do, and if applicable, what the characters need to do in order to get the magic to work, and what its costs are. Notably, the reader does not need to have any idea of the mechanism by which the magic works in order to "understand" it.

The other thing I would suggest about the essay is that in addition to defining magic, you should define whether in your idea you're speaking of magic or magic systems.

I don't really understand what you mean by the distinction between "magic" and "magic systems". But I think that Sanderson's First Law uses the word "magic" loosely, to refer to any unusual abilities that your characters have. If your character can play a song perfectly after hearing it just once, for example, then that would count as "magic", even though there are actually people who can do that.

It seems to me that minor conflict is in fact an ideal way to introduce and show the rules of a magic system -- because it best allows you to show the rules and their consequences, rather than merely telling of them in an abstract or trivial way.  This use of conflict to explain happens in most books, but to pick a familiar one: consider the prelude to Warbreaker, where Vasher's escape from prison is resolved by our introduction to many of the rules of Breath magic and by our introduction to Nightblood's magic.  Consider how the attack of the Lifeless on Vivenna and Denth is used to further develop the system, showing how Lifeless retain something of their former selves.  In contrast, if you don't use conflict to introduce the rules of a magic system, more often than not you end up with boring infodumps that steal pace and attention from the drama of the story.

That's a very good point.

I'm not sure if I'd count that as a "conflict", though, since there was never any doubt that Vasher could escape from the prison. In fact, Brandon went to great lengths before Vasher started using any magic, to indicate to the reader that Vasher had magic powers that he was going to use to escape.

If Brandon had instead focused on how dangerous Vasher's situation was, and how he might die in that prison, then he would have risked deus ex machina when Vasher used his powers to escape.

I guess you could define a "minor conflict" as a conflict that the reader is sure the characters can overcome; then you'd be right to say that you can avoid deus ex machina by only inventing new magic powers for minor conflicts. (In contrast, though, I would usually define a "minor conflict" to be a conflict whose resolution doesn't much affect the overall plot of the book -- come to think of it, that definition makes Vasher's escape a major event.)

Thanks for the quick response! I think I get it now....

My mistake was in assuming that if a character solves a problem using a magic ability, and the reader didn't know and couldn't figure out beforehand that the character has that ability, then it's automatically deus ex machina. This is wrong; there's another common possibility:

• 2.5) If the reader doesn't know and can't figure out that the character has that ability, but can reasonably guess, then the author might or might not have committed deus ex machina.

For example, if Gandalf Jr. levitated an dog in chapter one, and then in chapter ten gets away from a rampaging elephant by levitating it, this might or might not be deus ex machina, because the reader only knew he could levitate dogs, but some readers might assume that that meant he could levitate elephants as well, while others might assume that elephants would be too heavy for him to levitate.

In this case, Sanderson’s First Law of Magics applies and can be restated as: The more completely the reader understands what a character is capable of doing, the less likely the author is to commit deus ex machina when that character uses his abilities to get out of trouble.

I initially assumed (as Matt apparently did) that Brandon was saying we should be creating natural sciences of imaginary worlds if we wanted to use magic a lot. But this completely misses the point. If Q hands James Bond a watch and says that pushing the button on the watch will let Bond becomes invisible for up to thirty seconds, then in terms of this discussion, we would say that the reader now completely understands the magic, even though there's no explanation of how the watch makes Bond invisible.

By the way, regarding whether it matters how minor the conflict is, we're looking at this from different viewpoints again. I agree that if you use deus ex machina to save the dog, you're likely to end up with a better book than if you used deus ex machina to save the child. What I meant was, the fact that the dog isn't very important doesn't by itself somehow make it not deus ex machina to invent a new ability in order for your character to save it.

My quick response to this chapter:

The first five paragraphs or so seemed a bit cloying, especially the line "A God of color and beauty, his body as perfectly sculpted a statue." It may be literally true in this case, but it sounds awfully...cliche-romance-novel. And, of course, there's the obvious grammatical error.

When Siri says, "I’ll sit with Lightsong, and plead for his help," it should be made clear whether she means that she's going to meet him today, or that she's not going to do anything until the general meeting (which would be kind of stupid, considering that if Lightsong doesn't cooperate with her at the general meeting, it'd be a little late to come up with a backup plan.)

That meeting will decided wither or not we march on Idris contains another obvious grammatical error.

Other than that, there doesn't seem to be much to say about this chapter...it does its job without being too flashy, so I guess that's good.

I don't think there is conservation of energy when Awakening and Commanding, however....

But wouldn't it be fun if there was?

Warbreaker physics test: Let's suppose that the energy Awakened objects use to move comes from breath. Then, (in order to estimate how much energy is in each breath), let's suppose that when a Lifeless wears out (say, after 80 years at most) it's because its one breath has run out of energy. With these assumptions, how many breaths would you have to put into the head of a pin (with a diameter of 1 mm) in order to make a black hole?

(My answer: 1.2*10^29. If every star in the known universe had a planet with the population of Earth, then there might be just enough breath in the universe for this. --EDIT: Whoops, no, there'd be enough to do this a thousand times over. Logically, 1 sextillion ought to be 1000^6, but no, it's 1000^7. Go figure.)