McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Are Readers Growing Tired of New Urban Fantasy?
LizW65:
--- Quote ---A writer who seems to be flourishing in this new category is Sarah Addison Allen. The one I read was Garden Spells. I don't even know where it's classed in the book stores. I guess it's Charmed without the demons and world threatening plot lines
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Meg: have you read anything by Caroline Stevermer? She's been around since the 80's and definitely falls into the "soft magic" category; she's been described as "Jane Austen with magic". The supernatural elements in her books tend to be very subtle and based around ordinary household objects as magical foci. I've never heard of Sarah Addison, but it sounds as though her work may be similar.
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Madd:
--- Quote from: LizW65 on April 22, 2012, 03:15:04 PM ---.
Meg: have you read anything by Caroline Stevermer? She's been around since the 80's and definitely falls into the "soft magic" category; she's been described as "Jane Austen with magic". The supernatural elements in her books tend to be very subtle and based around ordinary household objects as magical foci. I've never heard of Sarah Addison, but it sounds as though her work may be similar.
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Perhaps this has been covered before, but what exactly is "soft" magic? Is that magic with poorly defined rules? Maybe poorly isn't the right word. The magic is more qualitative and less quantitative.
LizW65:
Well, Google doesn't turn up anything relevant, but I was interpreting "soft magic" as "cozy" rather than "hard-boiled", to put it into mystery writing terms.
Rather than walking the mean streets and beating the crap out of bad guys magically, the protagonist might turn someone into a rosebush, or enchant them so they can only speak in rhymed couplets, for example. (I could be completely misinterpreting the term, however, so someone feel free to correct me.)
ETA: I hadn't considered the question in terms of rules at all; the kind of magic I was thinking of has very clearly defined rules indeed, it's just the style that is noticably different.
trboturtle:
Brandon Sanderson defines Soft magic as magic that is just there, with no major explinations about it. He says in a blog post of his:
--- Quote ---On one side of the continuum, we have books where the magic is included in order to establish a sense of wonder and give the setting a fantastical feel. Books that focus on this use of magic tend to want to indicate that men are a small, small part of the eternal and mystical workings of the universe. This gives the reader a sense of tension as they're never certain what dangersor wondersthe characters will encounter. Indeed, the characters themselves never truly know what can happen and what can't.
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He also says:
--- Quote ---The really good writers of soft magic systems very, very rarely use their magic to solve problems in their books.
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OTOH, Hard magic he describes as this:
--- Quote ---This is the side where the authors explicitly describes the rules of magic. This is done so that the reader can have the fun of feeling like they themselves are part of the magic, and so that the author can show clever twists and turns in the way the magic works. The magic itself is a character, and by showing off its laws and rules, the author is able to provide twists, worldbuilding, and characterization.
If the reader understands how the magic works, then you can use the magic (or, rather, the characters using the magic) to solve problems. In this case, it's not the magic mystically making everything better. Instead, it's the characters' wit and experience that solves the problems. Magic becomes another tooland, like any other tool, its careful application can enhance the character and the plot.
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It's clear to me that my urban fantasy novel(s) are hard magic....
Craig
asetti:
I think the problem is you have so many writers moving into UF who are not good story tellers. The market gets flooded with bad stories books and then you hear UF is overdone and so over. A good story with engaging characters is always a good read regardless of genre. There are some Romance series that are GREAT reads because of this and frankly the Romance genre has been "overdone" for years.
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