What’s up, storytellers?
What’s up, storyteller? I’m Clark Rowenson, the Magic Engineer, and it’s time to talk about magic. Today we’re examining Sanderson’s first law of magic. Author Brandon Sanderson has three laws of magic. These are rules that he follows in his writing that help him with his stories, and a lot of authors find value in them.
We’re going to take a deep dive into what the First Law of Magic is according to Brandon Sanderson, and how to properly use Sanderson’s First Law in your storytelling.
What is Sanderson’s First Law of Magic?
Sanderson’s first law states:
An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
– Brandon Sanderson
Sanderson also wrote an entire essay on his first law of magic that you can go read.
This subject is actually where a lot of the conversation about hard and soft magic comes from. From there, he goes on to talk about how hard magic systems are more well known. You may have heard me discuss this in the past as well.
But the truth behind Sanderson’s First Law of Magic isn’t as obvious as it seems…
What the First Law of Magic Really Means
Let’s talk about the truth of Sanderson’s first law of magic.
The real truth about the law is that it’s not actually a law of magic as much as it’s a law of foreshadowing and a law of implications. When it comes down to it, it’s a law of storytelling, one that we’re already fairly familiar with.
Chekhov’s Gun
For example, take a look at the trope Chekhov’s gun. This trope essentially means that if a gun is hanging on the wall in Act 1, it absolutely must be fired in Act 3, if it’s a three-act structure. It’s more or less saying that if you’re going to have a thing come to bear at the end of your story, you need to display it early. And, if you spend a lot of time displaying something early, then you want it to be valid and useful by the end.
That’s why I say that Sanderson’s first law isn’t about magic, but about foreshadowing. If you’re going to have magic to solve a problem, then you need to show that solution before you use it as a solution. That’s storytelling 101.
“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
– Anton Chekhov
The Power of Foreshadowing
A lot of people get really focused on the magic and it’s a more general rule about foreshadowing and presentation in general. If you do those things wrong in a mystery novel, for example, even if you don’t have magic, the conclusion isn’t going to be satisfying. This applies everywhere.
Sherlock Holmes: An Example of Foreshadowing
The Sherlock Holmes movies with Robert Downey Jr. are amazing. However, if we didn’t see Sherlock’s cognitive powers throughout the story and then, at the end, he just unveiled everything about how Blackwood did all of it, it would be out of nowhere. It wouldn’t make any sense. It would be frustrating and unsatisfying.
When I see people talk about the first law of magic, I think this principle gets overlooked a lot. In addition, there are a lot of misconceptions that go along with Sanderson’s first law. The biggest misconception is that people take that law and the essay discussing that law and take it to mean that if you want to solve problems, you have to have a hard, rational magic system, and you don’t. We’ll talk more about that when we discuss using magic to solve plot problems.
The important thing to remember is that you don’t need to have a hard, rational magic system. You just need to explain and foreshadow the solution in advance. That’s it. You don’t have to go into great detail explaining the entire magic system, just to have the magic solve a plot problem. You can do this with soft systems, you can do this with irrational systems. It’s really just about homing in on how you’re going to use it and making sure you are laying the groundwork for using it in that fashion.
Some people think that soft, irrational magic systems can’t solve plot problems at all. People will turn to Lord of the Rings and say, “Oh, that’s soft irrational. That’s why Gandalf couldn’t solve the problem with the eagles,” and so on and so forth. And that’s not really true.
I do have a number of examples that I want to look through to show where the explanation was done poorly or done well.
Foreshadowing with Soft or Irrational Magic Systems
The important thing to remember is that you don’t need to have a hard, rational magic system. You just need to explain and foreshadow the solution in advance. That’s it. You don’t have to go into great detail explaining the entire magic system, just to have the magic solve a plot problem. You can do this with soft systems, you can do this with irrational systems. It’s really just about homing in on how you’re going to use it and making sure you are laying the groundwork for using it in that fashion.
Some people think that soft, irrational magic systems can’t solve plot problems at all. People will turn to Lord of the Rings and say, “Oh, that’s soft irrational. That’s why Gandalf couldn’t solve the problem with the eagles,” and so on and so forth. And that’s not really true.
I do have a number of examples that I want to look through to show where the explanation was done poorly or done well.
Examining Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn
We’re going to start with some of Brandon’s work to illustrate his first law of magic in action. First, we’ll take a look at the very first Mistborn novel, The Final Empire. In my opinion, I think he fumbled that one a little bit.
In this book, they’re trying to deal with the God Emperor. They’re trying to depose him and, let’s be honest, kill him and end his rule. The problem is that he’s immortal, incredibly powerful, and they don’t know how to deal with that.
Through the entire book they deal with this rumored metal that they think is going to be the weakness of the Lord Ruler and help them overcome him. And, what ends up happening, is that it doesn’t work right away. It doesn’t really do anything. It does give Vin, the main protagonist, a tiny piece of information that she needs to figure out who the Lord Ruler really is, which then leads her to a logical conclusion of what she might do to try and defeat him. All of that is great. All of that was laid down over the course of the story. When we get there, the solution makes sense.
It turns out that he was actually a Feruchemist and an Allomancer, a bit of both. That was from the logic of, “Oh, this isn’t who we thought it was. This is a person, and his people were Feruchemists. Therefore, he has metalminds and I need to strip him of his metalminds if I’m going to defeat him.”
Does the Setup Support the Solution?
Vin does manage to strip away the metalminds, and then there’s a rapid deterioration of the Lord Ruler. I was very confused when I first read it because you can store health inside gold so you’re able to regenerate and heal yourself as a Feruchemist. So, I thought that it was going to be that he can’t heal himself anymore. Therefore, if she manages to deal enough damage, he will stay down. But that’s not what happened. He rapidly started aging and deteriorating right before her eyes.
I didn’t think that was explained well enough. It made sense why the metalminds needed to be pulled away, but then that was super effective. It solved the problem in a way that wasn’t as satisfying for me. Everything else worked really well. I love that story. However, that was one thing that confused me.
Additional Sanderson Examples
Examples where Brandon really pulled his first law of magic off phenomenally are in Warbreaker and Emperor’s Soul. Those are two fantastic novellas. They’re really good examples of a very concise solution using magic. He does a great job of laying the foundation for the solution well in advance so that we know enough of how it works. Then, when it comes into play, it all makes sense.
Stories That Don't Follow the First Law of Magic
With a better understanding of what Sanderson’s First Law of Magic really means, you’ll start to see good and bad examples in literature, television, and movies. Pay attention to how you feel about the solutions played out. Did the creator do enough groundwork to create a satisfying conclusion, or did they miss the mark?
If you watch old-school Star Trek, you’ll likely come across a few examples. They will often run into a problem and then somebody just randomly has an ability that we’ve never seen or heard about before, and it just solves the problem so the episode can end.
Let’s walk through some other examples that don’t utilize the first law of magic and have unsatisfying conclusions.
School Spirits and Stephen King's IT
In a more recent example, my wife and I were watching School Spirits on Netflix. We really, really liked it until the last 15 minutes of the last episode. Maddie, a character, has gone missing and her ghost is now in the school. So, we think she’s dead. She’s there with the other ghosts. There are some weird things and they’re trying to figure out who killed Maddie. Maddie is trying to figure out who killed Maddie. It’s very interesting, very cool.
And then, at the end, there’s just this random twist that they not only did not lay the foundation for, it kind of flies in the face of some of the things that they were saying and relies heavily on some assumptions that we normally have about ghosts. But they spent the entire season talking about how our assumptions about ghosts don’t work the way we think we do. So, that one was super frustrating and very disappointing and not satisfying at all.
In this example, magic wasn’t being used as a solution for the problem. It was being used to create additional problems. That’s usually okay to use magic to create problems without explaining the magic and without the readers understanding the magic. The problem there is that they used it as a twist and as a ‘gotcha’ kind of answer to the question without giving us any knowledge of that.
Another example we can look at is It by Stephen King, especially if you’ve seen the old mini-series with Tim Curry as Pennywise. I find that, with a lot of Stephen King stuff, the solution at the end just kind of appears and then happens because it works. This was especially prevalent in It, which was very frustrating to me. In the end, they defeat the creature with silver because they think silver will work. That’s basically it. They’ve done a bunch of other stuff that hasn’t worked, and then they think, “We just have to believe hard enough.” Then they believe and it works. It’s very unsatisfying.
The First Law of Magic in Softer Magic Systems
While some people might argue that these examples are softer magic systems where this doesn’t work – that’s not always the case. There were a couple of books that I read that really led me down the process of thinking about these problems.
I read Uprooted by Naomi Novick and The Black Company by Glenn Cook. In both of those, the magic was used to randomly solve problems without really explaining how the magic solved the problem. It just did. And it was still satisfying. It was still okay. It didn’t ruin anything for me. That’s the cornerstone of what we’re going to lead into when we’re talking about plot problems.
In Uprooted and in The Black Company, magic didn’t solve a plot problem. Therefore, it didn’t create any sense of dissatisfaction. Whereas the problem with School Spirits is that they tried to use a twist or quirk in the magic system to answer a big plot problem and question.
Closing
I have my own version of Sanderson’s First Law of Magic, which will hopefully make more sense. The way I think about it is pretty much all the same, just with one minor change.
An author’s ability to satisfactorily solve plot problems with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
That covers what I wanted to talk about regarding Sanderson’s First Law, the real truth about the law, and what I think it’s really getting at. I hope you can use this information to help craft your stories. As always, keep writing, and stay awesome.
