Mayhaps: Familiar Sights – Incorporate Familiar Elements in Your Fantasy Worlds

I’m introducing a new form of post on The Paladin Author. Most of the time, I have a nice complete idea that I can explain from A to B to C and wrap it up like a tidy squire’s academy essay. But that doesn’t always completely play out so solidly. Sometimes my blogs are just me musing along, posing questions and points of discussion to stir up brainstorming more than anything else. So I decided to establish a new category on this blog called Mayhaps, as in the old word meaning “maybe,” “perhaps,” “possibly,” or “perchance.” These will cover my disorganized ramblings that ask a question more than making a statement. Might make for good discourse in the comments! Now on to business…

Immersion is a tricky thing. Writer’s jargon aside, it’s the ability to create an atmosphere through the way you describe the fictional reality of your book. Can we imagine it easily, see the sights, catch the smells, taste the food our heroes eat? If we feel “transported”, or if it is easy to imagine ourselves in the same situation as the characters, you have done a significant good for your book.

The real trouble, though, comes when we are trying to ground our readers in the world we are creating. I always wonder how much is too much, how little is too little. For my current science-fantasy world, I’ve been debating with myself as to how different my world should be to our real world. Too much and the readers might get lost in jargon and new vocabulary, too little and it might feel shallow and commonplace. And so I thought that what might help is to not only establish what is different about the world, but also set down what is the same about this world. Like points on a compass, as long as we have a something familiar by which we can orient ourselves, readers may be able to feel free to explore what is new without being completely lost.

In my case, I’m setting down three things in my current manuscript as being familiar sights in this world are, for example:

1. Human beings, physically
2. Animals
3. The basics of food

Now all of these, I’m leaving open to myself to play with when it comes to how culture and location and story changes and creates variety in these, but I believe adding a foundation of the familiar helps readers focus on the story and characters rather than have to stop and decipher the author’s worldbuilding. I hope this approach will lead to more natural flow. If this helps, I encourage you to pick your three “familiars.”

Until next time, Godspeed and Peace be with ya!

“But for the Grace of God” – A Helpful Perspective Tip When Writing Flawed Heroes and Villains

“I’m only human” is a well known saying to remind ourselves and others that we are imperfect. We’re bound to make mistakes, and it is unfortunately a reality that we will at some point make willful wrong choices. Yes, I mean the ones we make on purpose. We’re also used to hearing “I’m only human” as if to say “don’t expect anything different.” As in many things, there’s a good way and a bad way to do things based on the same idea.

And then I realize there’s an element of that in how the same principle is applied in writing. We want our characters to feel real, and a huge part of that is how we integrate character flaws and faults into our heroes and villains. After all, heroes with next to no flaws start to turn into monsters in of themselves, becoming walking plot points more than anything resembling an actual person. But when we go to the opposite extreme, we create a character who is such a dysfunctional mess that we begin to wonder how they can function with other people in normal life. It definitely doesn’t result in making an admirable character. In both cases, we run the risk of making an unrelatable, unlikable character. So how do we write our characters to avoid this deadlock?

Well, in this case, art will imitate life and vice versa. A lot of old wise sayings have been passed down, but one might be more common among Christians than outside. It is commonly attributed to English reformer and martyr John Bradford who saw several prisoners being led to execution and is reported to have said “There but for the grace of God, goes [I].” What this means is “if it weren’t for God’s grace, that could easily be me.” He was probably quoting the Apostle Paul who was writing about his seeming unsuitability to be a prominent Christian considering he caused such pain to the Christians before; despite this, God saw fit to make him part of spreading the Gospel, writing ‘But by the grace of God, I am what I am'” (1 Cor. 15:8-10).

So here we have our nice central idea: “But for the Grace of God go I.” And this can be applied very nicely to both how to write a protagonist hero and the antagonistic villain. One of the unifying ideas in most fiction is the idea that anyone could be either a hero or villain, and it’s up to the choices one makes that decides that. It makes the hero that much more admirable, and simultaneously makes villains more sympathetic and removes most excuses from their behavior. Heroes and villains have been orphaned, heroes and villains have been wronged, heroes and villains both experience hardship and tragedy, but what separates them is their response to it. And this simple idea allows us to write both with a good amount of depth and perspective that keeps both from becoming flat and unnuanced.

Protagonists who are written with Grace in mind will have character flaws very closely related to their strengths, sometimes even as a result of their strengths, and will likely be the faults they have to deal with most. They won’t just be faults that can be ignored most of the time, but be a consistent “thorn in their side” that they have to deal with. They will be faults that any one of us could identify with, and seeing them consistently wrestle with it will encourage us to – if we fall – fall forward, towards Christ rather than away. Like C.S. Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters, “As long as the will to walk towards Him is there, He is pleased even with our stumbles.” Likewise, your readers will relate with and cheer for your hero even in their stumbles, because if the hero can overcome their shortcomings and do the right things in spite of them, so can they.

As for writing Villains with Grace in mind, Grace allows us to depict evil acts as actually evil without turning the character into a cheap two-dimensional cardboard cutout of evil. By showing the reality of free will in every character, it allows us to create powerful and realistic characters without dipping into subjectivism on morality. The villain will feel like an actual person who made bad decisions rather than a wind-up robot who just does it by design. The hero will also be able to relate to the villain, and both hero and reader can say alike “but for the Grace of God go I.”

These stories will encourage us to create better characters, that touch people more deeply, and encourage us to look at the people around us with the same ability to show Grace while not compromising what we know to be True.

With that in mind, Godspeed and Peace be with ya!