Religion and World-building

When you're creating characters of a different religious philosophy than your own, my best advice is to avoid stereotypes like the Contagion.  And yes, you'll have to read Ashes of Silver to understand that reference.

Here are some examples to illustrate what I'm talking about.  The Believer Who Never Asks Questions.  The "Believer" Who Grasps for Power.  The Ultra-skeptical Non-believer.  The Non-believer Hero Because Heroes Aren't Stupid Enough to Believe.

You may notice that there are people in this life who absolutely fit into the schema presented by those stereotypes.  I don't care.  Reality holds more straw men than fiction is permitted.  I'm also not saying that you can't have a believer with a strong faith or a non-believer who feels strongly about his unbelief.  It's just that you need to be very careful when deciding what a character believes or you can end up with a flat, uninteresting character really fast.

Here's something I've observed.  You can call Boopy Shenanigans if you want, but here it is:  readers get bored really fast with characters who one-note on the opposite line of what they believe.  For atheists/agnostics, that means characters who grapple with real faith issues can get dull because they perceive these struggles as a meaningless facade, and vice versa for people who are (relatively) sure of what they believe.  It's even possible for people in the middle (not willing to discount the supernatural, but not willing to jump off the fence) to lose interest in anything not thoroughly steeped in gray.

Like I said, I could be wrong about this observation.  It also makes writing really difficult, because I would like for my audience to be a bit more general than "Christians interested in reading Christian fantasy fiction."  Because that means the only people who read my books will be the ones who specifically go looking for them, because the books sure as Tartarus won't be found in a secular book store like Barnes and Noble.  At least not in the same section as all the other fantasy.

Another reason I don't want to go down that road is because not everything I write is going to have overtly Christian subject matter.  For example, Ashes of Silver's universe doesn't necessarily have a God (at least not one that the people of Hearthstead are aware of) so the subject of service to Him is kind of a non-issue.  That could be an issue if I let it be, but the world of Hearthstead wasn't exactly set up to tackle those sorts of questions.  My cousin and I have always been a little too light-hearted about Hearthstead to delve into a theological mire in a world created originally as a stick-figure comic.

I want as many people as possible to read my work.  Honestly, the money that would come from that is secondary or tertiary for me.  What I want is the discussions.  The "that was awesome!" and "this made me sad."  I want to see people invested in the stories I tell.  So that may be why I hesitate to launch into heavily theological themes in my writing.  I want to be able to handle it in a way that keeps even staunch atheists invested in the story.

You may have noticed by now that I want to be able to have my cake and eat it too, then maybe have some pie afterwards.  I certainly don't make things easy on myself.

So you can ignore my advice about the religiosity of your characters if you want.  I think I originally intended it for a different purpose.  Namely, that if you are an atheist you shouldn't make believer-characters in such a way as to make them easy targets for an agenda, and the same goes for believers and characters who don't believe the same.  In my own writing life that means I tend to leave atheist characters less explored than I might, because I want to avoid characterizing them in a way that's inaccurate and two-dimensional.

When you're creating a world, it's also important to keep matters of theology in mind, even if that's to explicitly exclude an all-powerful deity from having created the universe.  It's fiction, and you can do that.  Especially if it's fantasy, because then you can explore what a world would really be like without God or followers of Him.  You can also leave the question as open-ended as it is in reality, with great debates going about it.  You can skip out on the wars.  That would be nice, but unlikely if your people are anything remotely like humans.  Then there will be war, whether it's over God or cheese.  Sorry, but that's the cold hard truth.

The more time you invest into the metaphysical makeup of your fictional world, the better-sorted those issues are likely to be.  That's a prediction, not a fact, by the way.  But it stands to reason that since preparation rules in the rest of world-building, it should here too.

Well, that's all I've got this morning.  I've been typing without contacts in long enough, and there's only so much of that to be stomached before I start punching faces that aren't my own.

Ciao.