How and why

I've talked before about how part of the reason that I prefer fantasy over science fiction, at least from a writing perspective, is that there is significantly less need for explanation of what's going on. If you want something to happen, the vast majority of the time you can get away with explaining it away as magic. Scifi, on the other hand, needs in depth explanations for nearly everything - thus the science part of the title.

But that doesn't mean that you're not going to explain anything in fantasy writing. In fact, in a way, it makes the explaining that you do do that much more important. Much of the mystery in a fantasy story is based around the lack of explanation, and I need to find it. Where does the magic come from, and why is it bestowed upon who it is, and how does one control it? These are the questions that are the basis for your entire world, and if you don't have an answer for those questions, you're going to find yourself facing a massive problem.

Which is one of the problems I have been facing with the novel I wrote for Nano. I mean, it's not like I've just been blissfully ignoring the question of magic, and why it is, and how it is. It's a huge focus of the story, the main character trying to understand her own magic, and how she inherited it, and how she controls it. Her character growth is directly tied to her understanding of her magic. The problem is that when I tried to make that explanation, I just wasn't happy with what I ended up with. And while I have ideas for how I want to go forward from where I stopped, I'm not happy with how I stopped.

I don't have a problem with being cliche, up to a point. But when you're writing everything very quickly and on a time limit, you start to cut some corners and lose track of what you're doing. And when you look back on what exactly you're doing, you come to realize that you're not happy with what you did. But trying to come up with a better solution after you've already written the one can be incredibly difficult, which is why you need outside help. But when you don't like something that intensely...

Such a simple question. How? Why? You wouldn't think just by looking at it how heavily it can affect what you're writing or doing. But the more you think about it, the more important it becomes, and the more difficult it becomes to answer. And the longer you delay the answer, the harder it becomes to make that answer. But you can't just throw it out at the beginning, because the more you write, the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more you realize that some of the assumptions you made at the very beginning simply aren't true.