First of all- no need to adjust your set; it is, in fact, Friday, not Wednesday. I’ll be taking over the second and fourth Friday slot for a little while.

Let’s talk about luck in storytelling. More specifically, the luck of a particular character, and more broadly, their luck, talent, magic, handwavium- basically, anything that sets them apart from others and they don’t have to work for. Intelligence and physical beauty can also fall into this category. The basic storytelling rule on the subject is that you, the author, can get away with giving a lot more luck/talent/magic to your favorite character if it produces negative results. Allowing magic or innate talent to pull your character’s butt out of the fire is a tool to be used very sparingly.

This is a hard concept to grasp if, like me, you get a bad case of secondhand embarrassment every time you put your characters through the mill. It’s tempting to pull the strings and make everything fall into place, and, if you have a long running story, expand your character’s initial talent or magic to encompass every conflict they encounter.

Resist the temptation. Something about the human brain insists that reading about a put-on-the-spot character who takes a few pratfalls is more narratively satisfying than reading about them dancing gracefully across the stage on the first try (the most satisfying narrative is to have the character take a few pratfalls, learn from the experience, and dance gracefully by the end of the story). There’s probably some weird psychological explanation to the effect of, ‘we like to see other people struggle because it mirrors our own experience and makes us feel better about not being perfect,’ or more pithily, ‘perfect is boring,’ but however you explain it, the rule is the same; characters can have magic or innate talents, but you have to show the negative side as much or more than the positive side.

I played with this in the Garia Cycle- I’ll finish it someday; I promise- where, as a function of being acclaimed king of his country, King Lazlo has ‘magic’ that lets him know what’s going on within his borders; when something requires his attention, he’s drawn in that direction. Sounds pretty cool, but there have to be some drawbacks to satisfy the readers’ sensibilities, and there are.

First of all, Garia is a huge country, with medieval tech. So a king who needs to suddenly and abruptly be on the other side of his kingdom is going to spend a lot of time on horseback or aboard a ship. Not a problem when he’s twenty; when he’s in his forties, it gets a whole lot harder.

Second, the ‘magic’ doesn’t tell him what he’s going to find at the end of the road, only that he needs to be there. Could be an invasion by his neighbors, lords plotting against him, his wife about to have a baby earlier than either of them expected, et cetera. There’s also nothing saying he’ll get there in time to have any effect on events, only that he might.

This combination of circumstances produces a character who’s nomadic even by nomad’s standards, to the eventual detriment of his mortal coil; and prepared to the point of paranoia, having been caught off guard a few times. The magic doesn’t tell him when there’s a blizzard blowing up in his path, or that the river crossing is flooded. Or in one notable case when he’s very young, that the magic is sending him to look at an out-of-control wildfire set by his enemies. Better hope the wind’s right and you’ve got a fast horse under you, your grace, or you’ll be toast.

There are more sophisticated ways to show the negative consequences of luck; I created the Garia universe when I was very young and didn’t have a clue. But it illustrates the basic point: your characters have to work for what they have. If they’re given a cool trait, through whatever means- genetics, author intervention, fairy godmother casting a spell on her charge, it can’t be an unmitigated good.

Sometimes the balance of negative and positive consequences is world-building based, like the rules of a magic system. The Garia system is a slightly clunky example of that; it works a little better in-story than summarized here. You can also create the needed balance through the plot and characters- having bad things happen to a character because they exercised their talent at the wrong time or place or in front of the wrong audience.

You can also alter the balance based on the character’s exact situation at that time. Consider the Harry Potter universe, where most of the characters have magic- an innate talent. When Harry is shown with his non-magical relatives, he has to struggle and his magic has to produce negative consequences for the narrative to be satisfying. This talent, which sets him apart from other characters in that setting, would be less interesting to the reader if it produced mostly positive consequences. When Harry is at school, completely surrounded by wizards, it’s narratively safe to show that he’s decent at magic; the talent doesn’t set him apart, so the positive consequences of magic can be shown without boring the reader, and Harry gets to struggle with other things, like, which teacher is going to murder him that year.

Those are some basic examples. When have you, as a writer, given magic, good luck, or another kind of handwavium to a character, and how did you show the negative and positive consequences of that trait?