Wizards and magic.

A wizard is unlike most stories told. For example; Wizards are seldom attractive. They rarely have good if any people skills and they are often overweight.
Wizards often refer to themselves as the most didicated users of magic. This is because they have to spend years studying. Now please understand me when I say years for I do not mean three or four. The average scholarship of a wizard is roughly one hundred and twenty years. This length of life is possible because the repetitious use of magic will extend the life of the practitioner (this is not done by some mystical means of soul leaking or energy enhancing. Magic has the same effect on humans as vinegar does on fresh goods. In other words. Magic will pickle its user.).
Wizards only gain power through study. This makes it possible for anyone who has always been exceptional in educational endaevors to become a wizard. The longer you study, the more powerful you become. The most powerful wizard in history was spent over seven hundred years in study, dying just before he finished another book. It is believed that he never used any of his magic for practical purposes but simply kept studying.
Wizards are known as non-naturals to magic as they cannot do it from birth as sorcerors can. This makes them clumsy. The leaning tower of Pisa is a perfect example of wizardry gone awry. The leaning tower was opened and shortly afterwards a young wizard of only eighty years was trying to impress a girl. In his attempts (all of which failed) he made the effort to affect gravity enough to enable him to walk up the side of the then not-leaning tower. Unfortunately his spell not only encompass him but also the general mass of the object he stood on. Thankfully the spell was a weak one and incapable of moving hundreds of tons in a perpandicular direction to natural gravity so it broke after a few milliseconds. This still left the tower on a lean, the young wizardling with a broken arm and the girl unimpressed.
Magic is in essance a study of everything. You want to be able to walk on walls? You have to study physics. You want to subvert another's mind to your point of view? You have to study psychology to ensure that you don't turn harmless yet cute girl in harmful cute psychopath. And possibly the best example is if you want to turn someone into a toad.
Turning someone into a toad is easy. Ensuring they survive is hard. The first step is the transmogrofication. You subvert every cell in the body of an individual to that of a toad's DNA. This required anotomical education beyond that of a brain surgeon. You then need to be able to calculate the mass and energy levels of a target (physics). After figuring the mass out you need to convert the mass down to a smaller degree (more physics) whilst enchanting the mass to have the same energy levels to keep the individuals mind and idnetity in tact. You must of course adjust the vocal chords and mouth structure to enable human speech and alter the brain to be capable of performin at human levels without exploding due to energy combustion. The final trick which is often overlooked is to create a small protective shield around the target at the exact instant the change occurs to stop the inrush of air into the vaccuum previously inhabited by the previously large being from pulverising the poor, newly amphibious person.
As a common misconception, it is believed witches turn people into toads.
This is wrong. Men do it. Women are to smart to study for two hundred years and hence they just kill the target and put a frog in it's place.
It was once said by Feygrim the Academic (fifth level wizard) that studying magic is akin to studying philosophy. Whe you have finished studying, you realise you didn't learn how to do it. You learn how it was done and how hard it was. You also only end up hanging around juveniles but that is a whole different box of potatoes.
:D