I'm a level 8 Breton and i'm using magic. For some reason my spells don't do that much damage. I'm using the lightning spell (Duel wielded, with the perk that make it stronger if you duel wield it and the perk that makes shock spells stronger.), Yet for some reason a normal sword or bow does more damage. Am i doing something wrong?

Nope. Magic never scales in damage, only increases if you either wear certain enchantments only available if you give Bethesda 20 bucks, or using Alchemy. And the magicka cost is usually too high to be usable in longer fights, especially since your regen gets cuts down in combat.

Magic only seems viable after a lot of legwork and trying to get things like Enchantment up enough to clear out a single fort. Never was able to make a magic only solo character.

What difficulty are you playing on? I've played a few mages on default difficulty and never experienced a problem. But, then, I tend to augment Destruction spells with other schools.

I'm on default too. I'm doing the mage collage and just went through the dwemer ruin. I bearly made it. Then i made this thread after taking 15 sec. to kill a frostbite spider.

Make sure to pick up the highest spell for you destruction skill and use other schools to augment (conjuration, illusion, etc) destruction. Also...followers.

I'm currently playing a Destruction only character. Only leveling destruction (and speech selling stuff and lock picking because I can't help myself) and at level 13 my destruction is in the 60's so the spells seem powerful enough for my levelled enemies. It's my first time trying this but seems to work so far. Once I get over 75 destruction I will probably start leveling conjuration on the necromancy side to put my enemies corpses to good use.

But I agree that a pure mage has more challenge than hybrid or melee builds, but that makes it fun, at least for me.