Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (25 page)

The wonderful part about this limit is the chance for suspense. Will the sun rise (or set) in time for the character's power to kick in? Will she be able to remove the gag so she can sing? Will her outstretched fingers reach the sunbeam before the goons notice? This one is also less prone to creepage.

The character can only use a particular power a certain number of times. Or there's a time limit on the power — it'll only work for so long. After that, the power stops working for a specific amount of time, or even forever. Wishes work like this, oft en coming in sets of three. Other powers might just need to “recharge.”

The advantage of this one comes from added suspense similar to the previous “Only When” category, and from the author being able to force the character to operate
without
his supernatural power and find creative ways to resolve the conflict.

The character can't use her powers for certain actions, either due to a vow or because the source of the power won't allow it. A healer, for example, might have sworn to use her power to help, never to harm, or perhaps the source of her healing power has made it clear that if she ever
does
use her power to harm, she'll lose it or pay some other dreadful price. Or perhaps it's simply impossible to use the power for anything but its intended effect.

This can create a bit of wonderful conflict — if faced with an extreme situation, will the character break away from the requirements or stay true to it?

The more the character indulges in the power, the more it corrupts him. This problem tempts many vampires — drinking blood makes them powerful, but killing people weakens their connection to humanity. The same goes for characters who summon dark gods, demons, or other nether powers.

This limitation creates some powerful conflict, but it's hard to carry it past more than two or three books. A character can teeter on the edge of corruption only for so long. Then it gets repetitious.

The paranormal carries a price. The character might have to pay in blood every time she casts a spell, or kill something, or do a return favor for a higher (or lower) power, or anything else you can think of. The more power you want, the more you pay. Good guys pay the price themselves; bad guys make others pay for them.

This limitation, the notion of the sacrifice, flows through a lot of paranormal literature and is as old as human civilization. It works well — there's only so much one person can give, and the bad guys, who can make others pay, gain a nice advantage over the protagonist.

There's no quick magic. Everything requires long preparation and ritual, with exotic ingredients and much chanting in weird languages. Even a small interruption will ruin the spell, or cause a catastrophe.

This is a huge limit on power. Magic tends to be for special occasions. You can't have a supernatural face-off or do quick spells. On the other hand, you don't have to worry about cleaning up after people who can fling lightning bolts down Madison Avenue.

Mind powers or magic only work on people the character can touch. Forget long-distance telepathy. And the character will have to be creative in order to find ways to make physical contact with people he needs to “read.” Antagonists who are aware of this limitation will go out of their way to avoid touching people, making the protagonist's job even harder.

There are a number of variations on this. The power might work only as long as the “reader” is touching the other person (requiring him to think fast), or the character might need to touch the person once to establish contact and not need to do it again thereafter, or touching other people might send the reader an overload of information that's difficult to sort out, or the character reads other people
every
time he touches them, making some social situations (including sex) awkward, embarrassing, or painful.

This one's generally for supernatural mental powers: The character's abilities switch on unexpectedly, or are always working on some level. She's always reading the surface thoughts of the people around her, and it's driving her crazy.

This is a facet of the
Yikes!
category. The character may or may not learn to rein in her telepathy, but meanwhile she'll certainly have a difficult time of it.

Every power has its opposite. Every strength has its weakness. Your main character has developed a long-range telepathic link with her boyfriend? Big deal. Your antagonist has a way to block it, or temporarily sever the link, or — better still — has found a way to use the protagonist's new telepathy as a two-way street, attacking her through the link and bludgeoning her into unconsciousness. And that new insta-healing power? Turns out if you use it too often, it causes unexpected mutations. We can restore that severed arm, but it might turn out to be a little rubbery, with suckers on. So heal carefully.

The character's power works when only it wants to. There's no pattern to it, no rhyme, no reason. The character lives with an ability that shows itself at odd moments, oft en inconveniently.

This limitation is one to use sparingly, since it's obviously an author dodge. The power shows up whenever the writer wants it to, which removes suspense, and it can become a major cheat if it appears just in time to pull the character out of a difficult spot. The ability to see the future is usually coupled with limitation — someone with the power to control his precognition completely would ruin almost any story. Readers know that and are willing to accept it in this particular case, even though they know it's kind of a cheat.

The major advantage of writing a paranormal novel is the freedom it grants you. You're dealing with magic and the paranormal. Some of it — telepathy, psychokinesis, etc. — might technically be more science fictional, but for all intents and purposes it's still magic. This means you can do anything you want, and you have no special-effects budget. Create impossible monsters; have characters do impossible things. Tear a hole in the fabric of the universe, suck something through, and mend the rip, all in one scene.

But you still need to know how it all works.

The trouble with being able to do anything is that you can do anything. When something troubles your magician main character, why can't he just chant the right spell, reconfigure the nature of causality, and make everything The Way It Should Be? This gets back to the need for limitations, of course, but it also points out the need to have a system for magic.

Before you start writing the actual book, you need to know how magic works. Like science, it has to have rules, and those rules
must
remain consistent throughout the book — or books. If you decide that werewolves must remain human in sunlight during chapter one, you can't suddenly have William the Were shape-shift at noon in chapter ten to rescue his girlfriend. When unexpected magic saves the day instead of the character, the readers feel cheated.

The Greeks had a name for this:
deus ex machina
. It means “god out of the machine.” When ancient playwrights realized they'd written themselves into a corner and there was no way for the characters to resolve their various problems, some of them got out of it by lowering a god character on a pulley (the machine) onto the stage. The god would do some handwaving and poof! All problems vanished. Such endings were immensely unpopular with audiences back then, and they remain so today.

Keep in mind that your readers live in a world that works with logic and consistency. Your readers can't break the laws of physics or the laws of causality in the readers' world — levers and light switches always follow the rules, and a consequence can't precede its cause. (In other words, your car can't be crushed before the accident, and you can't fail a test before you take it.)

The same applies to rules of magic. Readers need logic and coherence in fantasy because their world also has logic and coherence. You can set up whatever rules you want, but once you've created them, you have to stick with them. When your magic works the same way all the time, it's called
internal consistency
. Maintaining internal consistency develops your world and makes it feel real. Internal consistency keeps up that illusion of reality I mentioned earlier.

You're already dealing with magic, a chaotic force in fiction that does what you, the author, tell it to. When you invite the reader into your paranormal story, you're also telling the reader to trust that your world will make a certain amount of sense. Violate that trust, and the reader walks away.

So let's look at ways to make some magic.

First, you need to know where magic power comes from. A number of alternatives present themselves. Magic could be intrinsic in living things — everything alive has a certain amount of magic power in it, and magicians can draw off that power. Maybe magic power can be recharged through rest or other means, or maybe the drain is permanent. Or magic could be associated with a place, with power piling up in some places and other places remaining virtually dead. The idea of ley lines puts magic into rivers flowing around the globe, and magicians tap into that power. The limitation is that a magician caught more than a few yards away from a ley line can't do much — no power.

You should also know if magic has a “flavor.” Is there good magic and evil magic, or is magic a neutral force like electricity? Or perhaps magicians are divided up by the elements, able to control air, or earth, or fire, or water, and they can't control any other substance. Or whatever else you want to come up with.

Divine and infernal sources are another place to get magic, though such effects are more properly called miracles. Angels and demons, of course, can perform a number of miracles, but often humans with sufficient faith can pull them off as well.

Sometimes magic leaks in from other worlds, with gates or rift s allowing power to stream through. Or it's all alchemy, with specially brewed potions and teas that give magical effects. Or all magic must come through supernatural objects that are fiendishly difficult to create. Or it's a combination of the above.

Your magic-wielding characters may not be aware of the exact source and nature of magic, but as the all-knowing author, you should be. Your knowledge will give the world that internal consistency we mentioned above.

You'll also need to know
who
can do magic. In a world of so-called “cookbook magic,” anyone can cast spells if he knows the right words and has the right ingredients, which makes books of magic very valuable indeed. Another way to go about it is to allow only certain people to cast spells, people born with a special spark or talent for magic. Or perhaps magic is restricted to members of a certain gender or certain family lines. Maybe this is further divided so certain families have access only to certain types of magic. Gender-based magic has been around for a long time as well, though the female healer/seer has been done an
awful
lot, so you'll have to work a lot harder to make that sort of character interesting, and you might be better off doing something else with her altogether.

There's also the question of
what
can do magic. In some settings, magic is restricted to magical beings. Only fairies, elves, demons, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and similar creatures have intrinsic magical powers. Humans can't cast spells — against the supernatural they have only folkloric weapons such as garlic and silver for defense. However, there's no reason not to have a world of magicians
and
magical creatures, if you want! As always, just make sure you have the rules laid out in advance so you can keep your magic consistent.

Magic rarely comes free. Otherwise magicians and magical creatures would rule the world. Be sure you've chosen appropriate, consistent limits, as we've discussed above.

One final consideration is the overall impact of magic. Sure, there might be (should be) a cost to the individual, but what about the impact on the big picture? If a magician uses a lot of magic in one place, can she drain the magic permanently? What will that do to future magicians who want to use that place? If these little “dead zones” don't heal themselves, what's the impact of thousands of years of magicians creating thousands of little dead spots all over the planet? Is there a supernatural version of global warming?

Are there long-term costs to the magician herself? Some paranormal stories give magicians longer — or shorter — lives. Other systems of magic give sorcerers physical effects, like odd hair color or cumulative skin markings or even animal like characteristics. Perhaps using a lot of magic attracts the attention of Other Powers, or lets other magicians track the position of the caster like a supernatural GPS, something you wouldn't want an enemy to be doing.

What about magical fallout? In a big battle, what happens to deflected power or failed spells? This could be the supernatural version of nuclear waste, creating unintended side effects ranging from small mutations in local plant life to accidental tears in the space—time continuum.

Taking a step back and looking at the overall impact of magic creates an opportunity to explore your world on a whole new level — and possibly create new story ideas.