Life & Wisdom Quote by Laurell K. Hamilton

Hamilton is defending the writer’s oldest con: don’t show the wires. “Never explain” isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s pro-enchantment. She frames storytelling as stagecraft, where the audience arrives wanting to be fooled in a specific, pleasurable way. Exposition is the hand that reaches into the hat and lifts it up to prove there’s no rabbit. Technically honest, emotionally catastrophic.

The magician analogy also signals a power dynamic. The writer controls attention, pacing, and revelation; the reader agrees to be led. Explanation breaks that pact by shifting the relationship from seduction to instruction. It turns the narrative into a lecture with characters as examples. Hamilton’s phrasing is blunt because the danger is blunt: once you over-clarify motive, mechanics, or mythology, the story stops feeling inevitable and starts feeling engineered.

Context matters: Hamilton built a long-running urban fantasy franchise where rules-of-the-world could easily metastasize into footnotes. In genre fiction especially, fans ask for “the system,” the lore bible, the clean logic. Her rule pushes back against that consumer impulse. She’s arguing that coherence should be felt, not diagrammed; that ambiguity can be a feature, not a flaw.

Subtext: trust your reader, and trust the scene. Let consequences explain. Let desire and fear do the work that a paragraph of rationale wants to do. The deeper claim is aesthetic, not procedural: mystery isn’t a puzzle to be solved, it’s an atmosphere to be maintained. Once the spell is analyzed, it’s still clever, but it’s no longer alive.