Here and Now

Sometimes your sins find you out. Imagine my delight – not – when I found my entry into a sort of who-is-who in sf/f and it said something like “often uses the weather for effect and tone.” I knew IMMEDIATELY what they were talking about.

In my first published – I have mentioned that despite the fact I think it’s a fairly decent read, I was still struggling with plotting and making the plotting fit the story, right? – when I became stuck and needed to get myself moving again, I filled in with weather. It rained, it was sunny, it was hot, it... It probably is assigned as a read in meteorological schools the world over.

I feel vaguely guilty about that, because it was eliminated by book two of the series, and now I often go for pages and pages without mentioning a single cloud formation. Unless, of course, it is needed to complicate the characters’ lives – like at the beginning of Gentleman Takes A Chance. (But I guess an entry saying ‘often uses weather to torture characters’ would just make everyone go ‘duh!’)

This is a roundabout way to bring us to our setting, or the place where things take... er... place. I’m highly in favor of setting. It prevents your characters from floating around in ether sometimes – if you remember to give us expressions, say – as giant floating heads, or perhaps (I knew a beginning writer who was notorious for this) just giant floating expression-components (her eyes twinkled. Her mouth twitched. Her nose followed the scent – then realized it was lost and came back to hang out with the mouth and the eyes.) Seriously, if I had to list it from most important to least, my list of why you should spend some time thinking of your setting and making sure it feels “real” to us would go something like this:
1- It gives a sense of reality to the scene. No matter how important the argument or how hot the lovemaking, it rarely takes place in a void. (Unless the characters are aliens.) So give us how people around are looking at them as their voices rise, or perhaps the sound of birds stops overhead. Give us the sheet getting tangled around an ankle. Throw us a crumb so we remember your characters exist.
2 - Worldbuilding. You can bury any number of worldbuilding and even historical clues into setting. “They walked past the tower of Peace, which was built to commemorate the establishment of Peace III after Peace I and Peace II were bombed out of existence.” Or “He leapt from his flying car.” Or “She looked up towards the wizard’s castle” or... “He could smell the unicorn pens. Someone had forgotten to muck them out again.”
3 - Stage business. “Said” might be invisible and it’s certainly preferable to “interrupted”, “objected” or – shudder – “ejaculated” as a dialogue tag, but if you have a page of “he said” “she said” or worse, “he said,” “he said” it can get pretty tedious. Besides, the characters start to feel – to me at least – like they have no bodies and are just talking mouths. Stage business avoids the need to say “he said” like this: “No.” George ran his finger along the shelf and stared at the dust on the fingertip. “No, I don’t believe I found your cigarette case.” It also allows you to build on the character. For instance, perhaps George is an incurable toucher-of-things, not a nitt picky householder and perhaps we can show him touching and fidgeting with everything. (If this is a murder mystery, he probably absent-mindedly picked up that case and set it somewhere.
4- To emphasize moods or bridge an awkward spot. I.e., describing the space ship might just work to give a sense of distance from your last scene before you launch into the new one – because you want to give the idea a month has passed, and that’s hard to believe internally. To make your character seem depressed, you can have him notice peeling paint and dirty floors, for instance, as he goes into a new place.
5- Special effects. Movies pay tons for this. It took me until the year before I was first published to realize people like them, even when all you’re giving them is a description. If your character is in a magical glade, by all means, hit the reader with the eldritch.

A couple of caveats, (they took me long to learn, so I’m going to share them!) Try not to have similar scenes take place in similar places, because it will “feel” repetitive, even if it isn’t. So, don’t have your characters argue in the car twice. Move that second argument to the shopping mall. If you’re writing an historical, try to keep the setting as period as possible and use the opportunity to throw in those cool bits of research you can’t put anywhere else. (i.e., instead of infodumps that make the reader suffer for YOUR art.)
All this said, when I’m stuck for a story, I’ve found starting out in a diner (no, I don’t know why I’m fascinated with diners) usually invites a story to come along...
Do you have a go-to setting? What other ways have you found to use setting? (I’m
sure I missed half a dozen.) What’s your favorite way of making a setting feel real?

*the picture is my son's cartoonified version of me, as "super writer" in front of my favorite diner. Yeah, he DID "superhero" the body a bit.*

Also, for those who haven't checked it out yet, I have a new blog at http://accordingtohoyt.com I even manage to blog almost every day.

Getting Under the Skin

For once, the Kate feeelthy mind (tm) isn't involved in this topic... Well, mostly. I can't make guarantees.

Sarah talked yesterday about character and plotting that fails to deliver what it promises. In my not at all humble opinion, part of that failure is the inability of the author to get inside the head of the character. If you don't understand this person, sooner or later you'll write them doing something that's completely wrong for them because it makes perfect sense to you. This is why the best authors have a kind of self-induced multiple personality order (it can't be a disorder, it's more or less under control).

Sure, there are times and and places where it isn't necessary to be that close to your characters. I've yet to encounter one where your fiction isn't improved by that level of understanding. Even extremely formulaic fiction comes alive when the author knows and lives the characters.

Yes, lives. It's a weird state for me, where I'm aware of the real-world considerations around me, but my mind is in a different universe. Oh. Right. That's normal for me. It's when my mind is being a different person in a different universe that gets weirder than Kate-normal. I describe it as channeling that character, because the effect is precisely that. When it's working well, I'm simply the medium by which the character's actions, thoughts and feelings find their way onto the screen.

I know, intellectually, that it's a kind of self-hypnosis where I get myself into the right state and let my subconscious do the heavy lifting. It knows more than I do. My descriptions reflect the way I perceive what's happening.

So, after that lengthy introduction, how does one actually channel a character?

We all have tricks we use to get in the zone. 'Soundtracks' for a book, images that work for us, routines we use to settle our minds so we can focus. Getting inside a character's mind is, for me, a step or two deeper. If I'm working with a historical era - or a setting that closely parallels one - I read as much as I can about it, particularly things like the lives of people in the area and social class I'm looking at, the importance of religion, typical upbringing, and so forth. What I'm looking for here is the environment my character was raised in, because that shapes innate tendencies and governs acceptable actions. Quite simply, no matter who you are or how you were raised, some thoughts are literally unthinkable because the mental scaffolding they need simply doesn't exist. What those thoughts are depends entirely on the culture and language: culture by shaping what is considered 'good' and 'bad' (there are some human universals. There's also a lot of wiggle room), and language by building the scaffolding to frame thought. To take a really simplistic example, a couple of hundred years back, the Inuit probably had no way to think of a hot, arid environment. Neither their cultural experience nor their environment provided any kind of framework. On the other hand, they had any number of ways to think about cold and snow - leading to the old "twenty words for snow" meme. I'd be surprised if they had any cultural reference point for 'introvert' or 'loner', simply because an environment that harsh isn't survivable solo.

So... in a hypothetical historical, even an introverted loner Inuit character is going to be much more people-oriented than a modern introverted loner. He/she will also live within his/her tribe's views of the roles of men and women because moving outside that framework is literally unthinkable. As you learn more about the culture, you'll learn more about the beliefs that affect how your character views the world - how the arrival of a particular kind of wind signals that it's time to move south, the many layers of meaning surrounding every aspect of the tribe's world, the skills that are valued and those that aren't (it doesn't matter if you're the world's greatest mathematical genius when your people don't need to count past 'many' and you've got no access to anything else). Ultimately, the more you know about the world your character lives in, the more you know about how your character has been conditioned to respond to life.

That's when you, as the kind and caring author you are, turn your character's life inside out and upside down to start the story (okay, usually there'll be some kind of introductory stuff first, where your character is living his, her, or in some cases its normal life). At first, your character's going to respond to the new stuff by working with the closest match to 'normal', then there'll be a gradual change and growth. This is the easy part.

The difficult part is doing the same process when you're dealing with the villain. You can always tell someone who can't manage this - their villains are shadowy, offstage menaces that fall flat the instant you see them clearly. It's something of a given that it's a whole lot harder to write convincing evil as opposed to 'decent person who happens to be on the opposite side' or even 'misguided but well-intentioned' - the reason is pretty simple. Most of us can't imagine someone with absolutely no redeeming features at all. If you can't imagine it, you can't get inside and look through its eyes, and you sure as heck can't write it convincingly.

The same process applies, but if you can get inside an evil person's mind, it's... disturbing. One character I've written, after spending time in his point of view I wanted to scrub inside and out. Fortunately I haven't needed to write anyone like that in a while - but I can pretty much guarantee I will have to write evil again. The places my stories go pretty much guarantees it. I'm still not sure whether I was more disturbed because I could write him, or because he was one of the very few who actually is evil, knows it, and chooses to be that way.

More on that topic next week, unless I get derailed (this is quite likely). For this week, lets have some examples of books where the plot can't be separated from the characters and their environment. My pick (yes, I'm cheating and going for several in one) is the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch books by PTerry. It's impossible to separate what happens from Vimes and Carrot, and it's impossible to separate Vimes from Ankh-Morpork. He even manages to take the city with him (in a metaphorical sense) in The Fifth Elephant.

Who and what are your choices?

Assuming the Worldview

We've had some interesting posts this week about assumptions and world views and how we can absorb aspects of someone else's writing - which in a lot of ways encapsulates their assumptions and world views (usually not in the overtly lecturing sense, thank goodness, but in the sense that things strongly believed or part of the unquestioned assumptions that grow up with you from childhood have a tendency to 'leak' into your writing).

Of course, this meant that I, in my usual sideways fashion, ended up following the thread to somewhere completely different: how do you convincingly write a world view that is different, even alien to yours? When the base assumptions are totally different, how do you present it? And if the assumptions and world view are something that is repellent now, how do you present it in a way that is understandable and allows the character to be sympathetic?

That is, after all, what science fiction and fantasy is about. Well, kinda-sorta-maybe. Take some fundamental of our life, twist here, break there, and see what emerges.

Usually I go about it bass-ackwards because I almost always start with a story just sitting there insisting I write it. So I have to figure out what's driving the story. Okay, vampire king is killed, usurper is going to want king's heirs dead or firmly within his control. That's a pretty basic start. At this point the usurper's motives don't matter, since my characters are the king's son and his niece. So I ask myself what they're going to do. Then I ask myself why they'd do that, particularly. Bit by bit the world view and religous beliefs emerge, until I eventually know how their culture works - and that their base assumptions are very different from mine.

A quick check-point: all people are intrinsically equally valuable (Yes, it's a paraphrasing of the famous 'all men are created equal') - every person, adult, child, male, female is valuable for nothing more than the fact that they exist. I don't think too many readers here would disagree with me there. I'm not going into political arguments about anything beyond that: that's not where I'm going at the moment.

How universal is that belief?

You don't have to look far to realize that the answer is "not bloody much". The majority of humans today don't subscribe to it, and it's only very recent, historically speaking. At the time "We hold these truths to be self-evident" was written, some of the most civilized parts of the world included subscriptions to the divine right of kings (which itself started as a notion of responsibility towards those under one's protection, rather than 'oh good, let's oppress some peasants'). The idea that just by being born you had value was quite literally revolutionary.

Even now, in places where this notion has been around for generations, the tendency to slip into the more tribal view of "my kind is better than everyone else" is quite noticeable - although I'd hazard a guess that most of the readers here would still have far more respect for human life than... oh, pretty much anyone alive three hundred years ago - which of course makes their world-view and their basic assumptions pretty alien.

As for actual aliens... Well. Welcome to the House of Fun, my dear. Step inside, carefully now, and don't take anything for granted. You never know what you'll find...

Species with no concept of the individual, only the role one plays within the clan, species that make the individual-less society look comfortable and homey, spore-minds that regard all animal life as mobile incubators, cats...

How do you portray the other in an understandable way?

The Ancient Art of Kinging

or What did those nobles do all day, anyway?

When you read fantasy, particularly the medievalish fantasy that seems to be the 'default' setting, there's never anything in there about how those assorted nobles actually filled their days. Oh, you might get a bit about hunting - but they certainly weren't doing that all day every day, and the feasts and whatnot didn't take up that much time.

Besides, somewhere in there the actual nitty gritty work of managing a kingdom or an estate had to happen, and that involved things we'd normally associate with a business - if one with a somewhat atypical approach to personnel.

So what did they do all day? Monty Python aside, it usually wasn't oppressing the peasants, at least, not up close and personal. Nor did they spend all day hanging around brown-nosing the most important person. And since everything that needed to be recorded had to be recorded by hand, and usually done or at least personally overseen by the lord himself (the art of delegation was seriously hampered by the question of trust, which they usually didn't have much of), there was a lot of administrivia in the nobleman's day.

A typical nobleman needed to at minimum check his accounts regularly - they were hand-written by scribes (particularly since the lord probably didn't know how to read or write and needed his secretary - the parish priest for the smaller estates - to tell him what was in them - but you can guarantee he could figure and was very interested in the numbers being right), and often involved barter since taxes and fines were often collected in kind rather than money, so receiving 20 days of labor from landowner X, two head of cattle from herder Y, and so forth, had to be converted into something a little more helpful - preside over the courts, usually in person (which is probably where the modern connotation of royal/noble 'court' came from) and often serve as the final arbiter of justice.

Digression alert - justice varied hugely depending on the culture. England after the Magna Carta had the rudiments of the modern jury system in place and the requirement that no free man be held without accusation or trial. Other places used something based on the Roman model. Still others, anyone at all could apply directly to the lord for justice. In Scandinavian regions, the Viking model lasted for quite some time - and is still partially in use in Iceland and the Isle of Man.

Anyway, our generic lord also kept track of expenses, the storage of precious goods (including spices), ensured his direct dependents - his family and the people who worked full time for him - had enough to eat and decent clothing, managed his agents - part time in smaller, more peaceful kingdoms, but in places that had warring nations nearby or were subject to Viking, Moorish or other raiders the information from his agents was critical to his and his land's safety, and organized hunting partly to supplement the meat supplies (and eliminate dangerous animals), and partly as a diplomatic function not that unlike modern summits (similar to feasts, which had the added joy of demonstrating to his eminent visitors what a grand fellow he was because he could put on such a lavish show), arranging his and his children's marriages - which were very much political business (and for the girls he needed to have sizable dowries so he didn't have to give up land) - and that was just in peace time.

If there was a war - which for mainland Europe was the norm - the lord was expected to ride to battle and take part personally unless he was too old, too young, or crippled. He was also usually expected to lead his men (and provide his share of the army in the form of trained soldiers), although if he wasn't much of a warlord and he was thinking about it he'd find himself a good, reliable veteran and put him in charge of the actual military management. If he was a warlord, there's a good chance he was more or less at war anyway, whether with local bandits (who often proliferated during and after wars, when the nobles were preoccupied and not able to focus as much on keeping law and order at home) or the neighbors.

Exhausted yet? As well as all this, he needed to keep himself in shape, which meant weapons training, riding, war games - the origin of knightly jousts and tournaments - and make sure his people were also training for possible war service, if that was the law. England required all free men to train with longbows until - I think - Tudor times. Other places expected every free man to own and practice regularly with a sword (Switzerland comes to mind).

If he got it wrong, our generic noble could easily become an ex-noble (or ignoble?). Excommunication could happen for reasons we'd consider trivial - and left his lands up for grabs. If he didn't keep himself and his people fit for war, the next time trouble flared up he could be overrun. Then there was the method of replacement politely described in the history books as 'usurpation'. Usually that translated to dead men's boots, and while it wasn't common, it wasn't exactly rare, either. There's a reason food and drink tasters were often part of royal and noble households, and it isn't letting someone else find out the cook didn't keep a close enough eye on the spit-boys and the meat is half raw.

Sadly, although all of this could easily be woven into the background of fantasy novels, it rarely is. Instead we get nobles lazing around or oppressing the peasants - or if the book is sympathetic, said nobles are nobly leading their people to war, without much - if any - detail about what's involved in running a swords and arrows war (hint: it's messy).

Who bucks the trend and gives good background information in their fantasy books? I can't really count PTerry as an example, mostly because he spends most of his writing time outside the little box labeled 'typical' and when he does focus on it, he's looking at it from the kind of angle where none of my rant is relevant (but if you're looking for it, it's there. Just... well, PTerried).

The Fantasy Economy - What do you mean lifestyle matters?

And no, I don't mean the one politicians of all kinds are always making noises about.

What I'm talking about here is something that just about everyone gets wrong - usually because most of us are so used to the way things have worked since the Industrial Revolution that it's invisible. The changes the Industrial Revolution kicked into overdrive had already been happening, but in the space of fifty to a hundred years they went from upper class only to ubiquitous, and rearranged European society in the process. The other thing about the Industrial Revolution is that most of the changes were economic. The industry side was the means, not the end.

I'm going to start by reduction: it's easier to see the differences this way. Besides, we've all got a more or less reasonable idea of how "the economy" works nowadays. We know you earn money at a job or selling stuff and spend it on the things you need and want, hopefully in that approximate order.

The screamingly obvious first. Say goodbye to electricity, piped gas, and the car. For light, you're using either candles (expensive) or some form of oil/fat/grease light. More often than not, you're going to bed when it gets dark and getting up when it's light. Anything happening at night probably involves a full or at least three-quarter moon because that way there's a decent amount of light out. Cooking means a fire, which you've got to watch constantly and makes things miserable in summer. No cars means everything perishable is coming from close by, if you didn't grow it yourself. You're not going anywhere that's not in walking distance unless you can afford and have space for horses or there's a coach service. For most people, the effective 'range' is three to five miles for general errands, maybe ten miles if you're going somewhere and staying there, and if you've got access to good horses, fifty miles is a day's journey, more or less. Oh, and you're getting water from a well - yours if you're lucky, otherwise it's by bucket from a communal well, and the quality can be pretty iffy since there's no sewage system either. A bath means heating water bucket by bucket and pouring it into a tub as it boils. By the time you've filled the tub what you've got is - hopefully - warm water. If you're in a large family, everyone uses the tub water and the poor sod who goes last gets cold, dirty water to wash in.

Now get rid of mass-produced furniture and whatnot. Your dishes are probably wood, because for those all you have to do is cut down a tree and make it yourself. Nails are expensive because a blacksmith has to make them, individually. The old joke about granddad's axe isn't a joke any more - everything you own gets used, re-used and repaired endlessly. Your roof is probably shingle or thatch because you can do that yourself with local material, and you have to fix it constantly. Furniture-wise, you've got maybe a bed a table, and some stools or benches. Unless you're wealthy - which usually means you own a lot of land - you made it all yourself, or someone in your family did. If you're doing well, you've got some chickens and pigs, maybe even some cows or sheep. You don't usually see money at all: instead, you barter with whatever you have surplus or your skills. Money is for the wealthy. Even your taxes get paid in kind rather than in money. That's life for most people.

If you're one of the relative few who lives in the (rather small by our standards) cities, you probably still keep chickens and possibly pigs, and you might have a small garden that keeps you in vegetables. For flour, honey and such, you go to the markets. Also for cloth, since you haven't got space to grow flax or hemp or raise sheep. Cotton is rare and expensive because it's a sub-tropical crop and needs a lot of intensive labor. Mostly what you buy is some version of linen or hemp cloth or wool. There is no such thing as ready-made. You or your family make it yourself. You probably have two sets of clothing: one for everyday, and one for Sunday. Washing your clothes means dunking them in boiling water and beating the dirt out of them - soap hasn't been invented yet.

Trade means non-perishable goods - high quality fabrics, metals, gemstones, wood, dyes, spices (which are typically dried and will keep for a long time unless they get wet), lace (hand made by skilled artisans), and such. It's all expensive - your family might own one lace collar, which the lady of the house wears to church on Sundays and treats with extreme care. If you're a trader, chances are you live on the edge because travel any distance is dangerous and you could lose a fortune if your goods are stolen or the ship sinks. You probably specialize in one type of trade because of the specialized knowledge you need for it. If you're a skilled artisan, you're selling mostly to the relatively few wealthy people, or to traders, and you're probably fairly well off yourself (unless you're a blacksmith, in which case how wealthy you are depends a lot on where you're working and how specialized you are - a really good swordsmith or armorer makes a lot more than a village smith). Jobs as we understand them don't exist: most people are basically subsistence farmers or managing a little above that. People who are 'employed' are generally servants or slaves who live in their master's homes, or they're apprenticed to a merchant or artisan and learning their trade. There were a few 'open' trades - keeping an inn or tavern (which generally was done as an extra by someone who was a bit better off than his neighbors), prostitution, and hired muscle of all flavors. One of the things that kept this structure relatively static was a variety of laws that banned moving above the class you were born to.

All of this added up to a finely tuned economy that mostly excluded the majority of people. Farms and villages had their own micro-economies based on barter, with occasional luxuries like blankets being brought in by traveling peddlers and usually bartered. National economies relied heavily on how much precious metal could be mined or traded for, and on taxing trade (other taxes generally got paid in kind). Nations that were foolish enough to debase their coinage with base metals suffered inflation and lost trade. Standing armies were rare. More typically, a monarch had a small personal guard, and raised an army from the populace with promises of loot and easy victory. They only did this when they needed to - or thought they could win quickly or cheaply - because once they took people away from their normal livelihood they had to pay them. A long war could cripple a country's finances.

I'm not touching what magic does to this kind of system, because it depends on what kind of magic and what it can do. Similarly, I'm not getting specific anywhere - but pretty much all pre-Industrial cultures fit this general model, although late pre-Industrial you start having factory production and hugely uneven changes in social standing, wealth, and customs (which can and often did destabilize things). The assorted 'Daily Life in...' books offer a decent thumbnail guide to get started with. After that, I'd recommend good translations of material from, and preferably about, the period your setting is most like. Archaeological reproductions help too, as do re-enactor materials. The basic idea with this is to get the general feel of how things worked, dig out enough specifics that you can include the corroborating details (things like peeing in a bucket for your launderer tend to be more effective for Heinleining than things like the exotic carpet in Lord Sonso's manor because they illustrate the differences in everyday life).

Oh, and if you want a really good insight into war, politics (and underlying it, economics) read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, then the Discourses to get perspectives on absolute vs republican rule in ancient and medieval times, then move to the Art of War. For double bonus points, start estimating how familiar your favorite authors are with Machiavelli. Heck, for modern war all you really need to do with Machiavelli is update the weaponry.

It's Magic!

Thursday, Kate talked about world building and some of the issues it raises in science fiction and fantasy. Her post started me thinking about a question raised in my local critique group this past weekend. Specifically, a couple of the new writers in our group wanted to know how you make magic a part of your world and what I meant when I said it had to “follow the rules”.

We've all read books where everything is going along according to the rules set out by the author and then BAM the main character – or the bad guy – does something not only unexpected but distinctly against the rules as they've been established and the book goes flying across the room. Maybe your main character has no magic and then, just in the nick of time, he does and he manages to save the day – this usually happens with no foreshadowing that his powers are growing, etc. Just a form of deus ex machina in the shape of magic to solve a plot point the author couldn't or wouldn't take the time to solve by following the rules.

So, what are the rules, you ask? I wish I could tell you there is this magical little rule book that sets it all down for you. But there's not. The one rule I try to abide by is that it must follow the rules of your world, ie your worldbuilding. To do so, I ask myself the following questions:

• What is magic in my world? This seems simple enough, but think about it. There are still places in our world where technology seems like magic. So, do inventions such as steam-powered engines or electrical lights and telephone-like communications count as magic? Or is it more along the line of potions and rituals and spells? Maybe it's something else. It is up to you to decide.
• Where does magic come from? Simply put, are your characters born with magic, do they learn it or is it a "gift" from the gods?
• Who can perform magic in my world? Basically, does everyone have it or only some of the people.
• If only some of the people in your world have magic, how do those with magic look at those without it and vice versa?
• If you have a hybrid system of "natural" or god-given magic and "learned" magic, how do the practitioners of each view the others? Is there a hierarchical system involved?
• How does the magic manifest itself, ie what magical powers exist in your world? Remember, these powers have to fit the rules of your world, so you have to take into account religion, economic and social rules as well. Depending on the storyline, you also have to look at military and technological factors.
• What does it cost your characters to use magic? Magic has to cost the user in some form. In other words, there is a price to pay for it. Magic is energy – yes, there are a multitude of books out there where magic is a divine gift with no cost to use for the Hero. However, ask yourself if that really is no cost. There usually is, even if it isn't in the form of personal energy/health. The cost is in becoming a martyr or forever questing in the service of the god involved. Think about it this way -- how likely is it you can ride a horse at a gallop for hours on end without stopping? You can't without killing the horse. So if there is a cost for magic, you have to show it, whether it is by having your mage (or whatever you call him) be ravenously hungry or exhausted. It can even be something as simple as, to borrow from Stephen King, if you use your abilities too long and too frequently, you have nosebleeds and worse.
  
• So, how does the user power the magic?
• If by ritual, what is that ritual?
• Finally, and in many ways the most important, how does magic fit into your world? I asked earlier if everyone in your world has magic or just some of your characters. There is a corollary to that. If not everyone in your world has magic, do they know magic exists? If they do, what are their feelings about magic, notwithstanding what they think about the magic users.

There are any number of other questions that can be asked during the course of worldbuilding when using magic as part of your plot. There is, however, one rule that must be kept in mind -- well, two actually because you always need to remember the KISS rule (unless part of the plot is making the spells so intricate that your main character, sap that he is, can't remember all of them and is always screwing up) - keep to the rules you set. Don't have a firestarter suddenly able to call the wind to fan the flames of the fire he just started or rain to put it out. At least not if you haven't laid the groundwork for it all along the lines.

Here are a few links with more information on magic in worldbuilding:
http://querytracker.blogspot.com/2009/09/fantasy-world-building-magical-rules.html
http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions-magic-and-magicians/
http://www.squidoo.com/fantasyworldbuilding
http://www.web-writer.net/fantasy/

So, what questions do you ask yourself when you are writing magic? What pitfalls do you see and try to avoid?