This week was spent a little in the craft of editting, reviewing, and polishing chapter and prose, but overall was in a different area that has some of the highest pay off without being seen. What I’m talking about is the systems and underlying architecture that any good story relies upon as a foundation but is never fully revealed but is felt in its core. In this case the work this week came because what I had put together I didn’t feel was fleshed out enough. It was the magic system that drives Heirs.
Now I don’t want to give away spoilers on how things work. That’s for a reader to try and figure out and enjoy the discovery. But the craft and effort that goes behind developing it, that is a joy I’m more than willing to share.
The rules came first
There’s always been magic in the book. It’s been on page since inception. I couldn’t have always told you why the rules held, but deep within I think I always knew. That’s something not everyone says. You write. The surface that is revealed to yourself and the reader comes. And then the foundation is engineered after. I wasn’t inventing the magic, I was formalizing it based on how it lives. The rules were always there, but formalizing it for consistency’s (and in my case my personal sanity’s) sake is necessary to make a story consistent and coherent.
It may seem somewhat backwards. Writing a system in use before its been formalized? But, for me at least, it’s what’s correct. The foundation doesn’t need to come first in this case, but it does need to fulfill its job. To keep the surface honest and consistent.
One idea instead of twenty
The work this week wasn’t trying to architect a monstrosity of a system that covered every edge case and potentiality. It was actually a work of reduction and simplification.
The real work was reduction. I’d accumulated a scattered pile of effects, costs, exceptions, special cases. The week went well at the exact moment I found the single principle the rest of it falls out of. Everything else stopped being a list I had to remember and became consequences I could derive.
That’s not elegance for its own sake. The payoff is that once the whole system descends from one idea, I can reason inside it instead of memorizing it. And a system you can reason in is a system you stop contradicting by accident three books later. Most continuity errors in fantasy magic are just the author forgetting their own house rules. The fewer rules there are to forget, the fewer you break.
I borrowed a grammar
To get that one principle to hold its weight, I leaned on a real, rigorous, much older body of knowledge and stole its grammar — not its content, its joinery. The shape of how the pieces relate to each other.
The point of borrowing structure isn’t flavor. It’s that a logic that’s already been stress-tested for a long time doesn’t cheat, and a magic system’s entire credibility rests on not cheating. The reader should never see the thing I borrowed. They should only come away feeling that the magic has rules it can’t wriggle out of when the plot would find it convenient.
The part no one reads
Here’s the strange center of the week: most of what I built, I built knowing it will never appear on the page. The deepest layers are hidden even from the most powerful people inside the story. My characters feel the magic the way you feel weather — as pressure, as cost, as intuition — not as a diagram. If I ever catch one of them lecturing the mechanics, I’ve failed.
So why build it at all? Because the iceberg works. Depth gets felt as confidence. Readers can tell, fast, whether the author knows what’s under the waterline, even when none of it surfaces — the consistency is the tell. I have a note to myself from this week that I’ll keep: names matter when you’re building something you can’t show anyone. You build it so the part that does show never wobbles.
The manuscript wins
One rule I wrote into the document in bold, for the benefit of future me: where the worldbuilding and an already-published page disagree, the page wins, and the document is what changes. The bible serves the book. Never the reverse.
That sounds obvious until you’re three layers deep in a system you’ve fallen a little in love with, and you start quietly wishing the story had happened differently so the system could be cleaner. That wish is the enemy. Tidy was never the goal. True to what’s already on the page is the goal.
Where I stopped
Every system spawns ten new questions, and the temptation is to chase all of them forever. Instead I parked a whole stack of them under the honest heading reserved — author’s call, later. Knowing which questions don’t need an answer yet turns out to be its own discipline, the same one as the editorial work: done beats finished.
A magic system doesn’t have to be complete. It has to be consistent as far down as the story has actually dug, and not one inch further.
Back to the page next week.