Ways of explaining Fantasy without a lecture

Question

a question just to get some feedback and knowledge from you all.

In a High Fantasy setting i work with, the Hard system for magic is defined as being a skill that anybody can learn. Anybody can get "in touch" with magic in a way or another. so it's commonplace. It's not meant to be "special" that magic exists, but it's meant to be a clear big gap between someone that in their daily life can apply a little magic to help heat their bath water, and someone that can toss a fireball. It's all about skill and training, if you practice and learn, you can get good at it.

The whole system is based on capturing magic from the world around you, using your body to "channel" that energy and generate an effect. This is also meant to be a soft cap on magic. An example i give is that, healing magic exists but if you were trying to heal a deathly wound the large amount of energy passing fast through your body would harm you as it heals another. Or someone trying to create a fireball would have to sustain concentration the longer the hold the spell and the more energy they gather, as to avoid setting themselves on fire.

So i wanted to incorporate the nature of magic into world building, as a cultural trait. How different cultures deal and relate to magic.

For example, the Elven people are very in tune with the natural presence of magic in the world. So it's very easy for them to create effects faster and more intense. But because magic is so natural to them, most effects are "blunt" and unrefined. And a Trainned spell caster becomes much more dangerous. For example, an Elf with very little trainning would be able to freeze a mug of water with very little effort.

Human kind in general also has regional culture, so most common folk would learn to channel energy in and out but creating only short burst effects, cause of human's overall shorter life span than most magical beings, they simply do not have decades to fine tune their skills and become more practical casters with low variety, most humans only learn one or two ''kinds'' of spells. As an example, City guards are trained to infuse leather strips with magic that make them curl and bind with metal-like resistance. I took the idea of a snap bracelet to make magic handcuffs.

Another group of humans in another region of the same setting are all monk-based in culture design. So they train their bodies in order to retain more energy for longer, and as such, use those same magical effects to ''enhance'' their bodies and a Martial Arts with Spell infusion way. For example, infusing the body itself with heat to increase blood flow, estimulate the body, reduce pain and increase physical power.

These all feel organic to me, logical. And im embracing a "show dont tell" approach, having these different groups simply do what they do. As in a world where those skills are commonplace, nobody would be stopping to explain "why" someone does this common thing in their unique way.

As i write more and more though, i dont wont to trap myself under jargon or obtuse descriptions. So i wanted to see if i could get a few tips or ideas on how i can keep the reader aware of the mechanic of the system without lecturing the reader.

thank you

Answer 1

Keep the secrets secret

You’ve already got a really nice way of handling this, so I wouldn’t recommend you change much at all.

You know the rules, and that’s all that matters for writing a story that obeys its internal logic. As long as you stick to those rules, you don’t have to reveal them at all. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that “showing the art” like that would weaken the realism of the world, because it risks creating a situation where people have knowledge they could never have obtained by living in the conditions of the world you created.

How does fire work, anyway?

Lets look at a more commonplace kind of “magic”: Fire. Humans had used fire for countless millennia before anyone understood why things burn, or what chemical reduction and oxidation reactions were. There were plenty of theories, all wrong, until eventually scientific knowledge caught up with common sense.

You could apply to same to magic. It is a real thing in your world, but that does not mean that people know how it actually works. Even experienced users will have an incomplete understanding of the true rules of the process. People can be very good at using a tool without any intellectual understanding of its basic principles; others can have a good grounding of principle, but be unable to achieve anything [I present this author’s embarrassing experiences with all forms of ball sports as supporting evidence].

If knowledge of the mechanics of magic that you have invented is relevant to the plot, you should still be able to make that work without having to explain all of the underlying rules. If you cannot make the plot work without giving somebody unrealistic, implausible knowledge, though, then you may have to find a different thing to hang your plot on.

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology

How many people understand how their mobile phone works? If you asked someone to reason it out, they’d come up with something that’s probably a little right, but mostly wrong, but it’d be plausible.

There’s nothing wrong with characters having plausible knowledge, even if it’s wrong. You can give a character just enough knowledge, from their observed experience, to come up with a reasonable explanation of how things work, but don’t be tempted to feed them knowledge that they wouldn’t have. An answer that works for them doesn’t have to be the real truth.

You have already explored the idea that different creatures handle magic differently, but rather than just explaining why this is in a lecture, you can have your characters recount their experiences and ask those questions, then give two characters different theories and have them argue. That’s a much more realistic situation.

The most important thing about magic for most of your characters shouldn’t be how it works, but that it does.

How does a P-N junction work, anyway?

If you think this kind of “never mind how it works, just use it” philosophy is a thing of the distant past, it may surprise you to know that for about twenty years or so after the invention of the transistor, nobody knew for sure how a transistor actually worked. It was only with better understanding of quantum mechanics that the processes that allow this devices to operate were fully understood. That lack of understanding didn’t stop people landing people on the moon using computers based on transistors: we knew what they did, how to make them, and how we could use them, and that was enough.

Answer 2

i dont wont to trap myself under jargon or obtuse descriptions. ... how i can keep the reader aware of the mechanic of the system without lecturing the reader.

Trust the reader

Forgive me for saying this but no one will be confused by generic fantasy. This is your first novel, but I guarantee it is not the reader's first.

These all feel organic to me, logical.

If you think about it, magic can't be 'organic' or 'logical', it is a fantastical thing that doesn't exist in the real world. What you are describing is familiar, as in: a familiar part of the stories you enjoy.

Tropes like these are not challenging the status quo. Magic just 'is', it's on tap and everywhere, also there are no ethics or dimensionality to it. Readers will also find it 'familiar'. Generic magic without origin or limitation is a stock element of Fantasy genre. You don't need to explain it.

Subtext

Things you want the reader to know that you don't (or can't) say in words, is handled with subtext.

Subtext IS text, so it needs to be supported by the story. If you want me to know how the magic works, construct situations, and characters that allow me to witness the consequences of your world's rules.

Think of subtext as something between worldbuilding and show-don't-tell. A character who is bad at magic would be bad at other things (assuming, from your statements anyone CAN do it given time and intelligence). I can't help but associate this person's generally bad traits with their approach to magic.

Likewise, someone who isn't booksmart can have a greenthumb and intuition with animals. I can infer that magic has a nature aspect.

I don't need a lore dump if the rules are everywhere and playing out in front of me.

Don't break your own rules

That said, please don't create a chosen one who exists to break the physics of your own universe. I feel no stakes for your rules. If you break them, they weren't real rules. Maybe they were prejudices that hold your MC down, but rules that exist just to be defeated by the MC are strawmen.

Making the extraordinary mundane

As a frame challenge, be aware the narrative problem of robbing your story's wonder.

Magic's an element like fire, even a moron can work a lighter. The 'problem' is like fire it can burn, but that sounds like their own fault? I mean, if I burn myself on the stove, I don't blame the stove, and I don't stop using it.

The problem of making magic an everyday technology is it potentially becomes boring and necessary. If I get in a car accident, I'm still going to ride in cars. There is no innate conflict here, nothing to drive a character, no moral conundrum.

You have a world where everyone is a superhero, now what?