It’s more like a seismograph for reality, and therein lies the key to Pratchett’s genius. The shamble itself isn’t magical, nor is it doing anything overtly supernatural. All these things make a kind of… of picture of the here-and-now when you move them right.” “The way you tie the knots, the way the string runs – the freshness of the egg, perhaps, and the moisture in the air – the tension of the twigs and the kind of things that you just happen to have in your pocket at that moment – even the way the wind is blowing. The witch Miss Level describes them like this:

Shambles are improvised tools used by witches and composed out of random bits of string and detritus. Witches watch the boundaries of the world, and perform magic that is much subtler-for example, a shamble. On the other hand, witches in the Discworld go out of their way not to perform magic-they stay conscious of how magic changes the balance of the world and use their knowledge of people’s natures to change events instead. Pratchett is generally irreverent when it comes to wizard magic, because it’s just a parody of what he might call EFP-Extruded Fantasy Product. Wizards in the Discworld are the stand-in for your run-of-the-mill, cliché-ridden fantasy: the magic they use is flashy (fireballs, enchantments, and big spells), beset by fantasy tropes (gotta have the wizard hat and staff), and similar to an occult form of science (they even try to isolate the smallest unit of magic, the thaum, like it’s an atom). Joking aside, that sort of thinking is the motor that has kept the Discworld series moving for twenty-two years.ĭespite building Discworld on a wink-and-nod approach to the fourth wall, Pratchett was aware of what makes an immersive, well-structured secondary world, and that becomes readily apparent when it comes to his magic-the very nature of magic in the Discworld illustrates the divide between conventional fantasy magic and magic done right. You are allowed to make pigs fly, but you must take into account the depredations on the local birdlife and the need for people in heavily over-flown areas to carry stout umbrellas at all time. If anything can happen, then there is no real suspense. Fantasy works best when you take it seriously…taking it seriously means that there must be rules. I know Terry Pratchett put out a lot of books, and they were pretty thick on British humor and silly footnotes, but that doesn’t change the fact that fantasy writers (and readers) can learn some goddamn important stuff from him.įirst off, let’s read a passage about worldbuilding and magic from his book of essays, A Slip of the Keyboard:Īpply logic in places where it wasn’t intended to exist…If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn’t everyone using it? What rules will you have to give it to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works.

The magic of terry pratchett