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Originally Posted by Hilarious Joke  Magic can not simply be an attempt to control supernatural forces. I just made an attempt to will the rain away. That attempt isn't magic, its an attempt at magic. The rain remains. Damn rain. |
But the rain is a natural force, Hilarious Joke, so simply attempting to will it to stop is not magic. It's only when you try to bring in supernatural forces to aid you in stopping the rain that you start using magic.
Whether you succeed or fail is quite beside the point. A child brushes paint on a piece of paper. Whether or not he actually produces the picture that he is trying to transfer from his mind to the paper, he's still painting. It's the same with magic, because it's the act itself, not the result. What distinguishes fantasy from real life is that the accomplishment almost always follows the act -- when even among the people throughout history who have believed in magic and who have practiced magic, they never imagined it was that dependable.
But, be honest, you weren't really trying to make the rain go away, were you? I suspect that what you were
really doing was trying to prove that it
couldn't be done that way. Remember, I said it's the attempt to call on supernatural forces -- not just pretending to try, when you actually want to do something else, but really making the effort.
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I always thought that magic was an entity in its own right. In Cecelia Dart-Thornton's Bitterbynde, magic is infused in seelie and unseelie wights. In Hobbs' assassin books, magic seems to be a heriditary trait (I'm talking about the Skill) passed through generations.
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In all these examples you are describing some element of the supernatural that the characters are using or calling forth through magic.