Faith in Fantasy

Religion is one inevitable aspect of world building that is perilously easy to get wrong. Readers are culturally and historically conditioned to expect that faith will play a significant role (implicitly if not explicitly) in any fantasy universe. This convention is no less true of science fiction, though it more often operates in the subtext.

I find that fantasy religions are most often mishandled when authors invoke the cliche of transporting primary world religions into their fictional settings with only minor linguistic and aesthetic tweaks. Unless logical reasons are given for how a belief system whose cult, code, and creed exactly mirrors that of a real-world faith developed, this approach strains suspension of disbelief.

Worse, the temptation to make a fictionalized version of an actual religion into a straw man embodying an author's pet grievances can be hard to resist. This offense is sometimes committed knowingly, but more often it results from a lack of diligent research.

Not that designing fantasy religions from whole cloth is the only--or even the best--way to create credible, organic-feeling faiths. Fabricating belief systems utterly alien to the reader's experience likewise inhibits immersion and suspension of disbelief. It's important to provide theological and cultural touchstones with which readers are familiar.

Therefore, the best advice I can give to writers crafting a fictional religion is to study primary world faiths. Choose your sources carefully. Avoid histories written by obvious detractors of a particular creed who likely have axes to grind. Give preference to primary sources within the faith's tradition written by members in good standing.

As for creating fantasy religions, a brief overview of the basic categories into which nearly all real-world creeds can be grouped should be helpful.

• Philosophical/Civil: straddling the line between religion as such and ethical and juridical systems, these traditions can be effectively agnostic while accruing ceremonial trappings. Examples include Confucianism, Taoism, and some Aristotelian and Platonic schools.
• Deist: deism acknowledges a creator, but one so transcendent as to rule out communion with humans. The Deist God is a "watchmaker" who sets creation in motion and walks away to let history play itself out. Many influential Enlightenment figures held this view.
• Pantheist: almost a negative image of deism. Pantheism denies God's transcendence, locating divinity in all things. In this view, The universe itself is the supreme being, and all its constituents share in the divine. The pantheist cannot truly speak of creation, since nothing exists that is not God. Pantheist thought can add an interesting angle to a story's morality since it sees good and evil as equally valid aspects of the same reality. Shinto and some aspects of Hinduism are pantheistic.
• Polytheist: though it also denies the transcendence of divinity, polytheism doesn't divinize the whole. Members of classical polytheistic pantheons are portrayed as the offspring of natural forces, so they aren't eternal and usually aren't said to have created the cosmos. Such gods differ from men in degree of perfection more than order of being. Polytheistic faiths are fantasy mainstays but require care to avoid being portrayed as caricatures.
• Dualist: dualism posits the existence of two supreme beings: almost always one good and one evil. Dualist theology usually develops as an attempt to address theodicy, or the problem of evil. In this case, all good things are credited to the benevolent God, while all evils are ascribed to the malevolent one. Manicheism is a notable dualistic faith. Dualism is also wildly popular in fantasy settings, e.g. George R. R. Martin's R'hllor/Great Other.
• Monotheist: the belief in one, eternal, transcendent, and immanent supreme being. Though deism professes a single Creator, it is a dependent offshoot of the Abrahamic faiths which view God as transcending creation while remaining active in it. Though often epitomizing evil in a Satan/Adversary, monotheism differs from dualism in that this evil agent is not a god, but a corrupted creature. Also common in fantasy settings, monotheistic faiths are especially at risk of distortion since their real world prominence leads some authors to take incomplete or false understandings of their creeds for granted.

Obstacles: Internal and External

I finally started listening to Writing Excuses. In season 1, episode 6 Brandon, Howard, and Dan discussed character flaws and handicaps. I loved the episode and thought of a few comments that I'd like to share here.

The hosts of Writing Excuses defined a flaw as an internal fault that a character must overcome. They cited Han Solo's initial greed and selfishness from Star Wars Episode IV. In contrast they defined a handicap as external circumstances that impede a character's progress, e.g. Luke Skywalker's overprotective uncle and remote desert upbringing.

I can't take issue with either definition, except for one host's assertion that handicaps can't be overcome by the character (Luke in fact does when he leaves Tattooine with Han, Chewie, and Ben). In fairness, I think he was trying to differentiate between the internal struggle involved in overcoming a flaw and the positive actions needed to remove a handicap.

One fascinating question that came up was how to balance character flaws and likability (i.e. how to give a character flaws without alienating readers). I agree that making the flawed character the protagonist wins half the reader sympathy battle. One powerful tool overlooked by Writing Excuses but recommended by my friend and fellow writer Nick Enlowe is remorse. A character earns a lot of points with readers by expressing sorrow for his sins. Striking the right balance of depravity and virtue is still delicate work (I'm grappling with this process in the book I'm writing now), but at the end of the day most readers want characters to have flaws and want them to overcome those flaws.

Who are your favorite flawed characters? Why do they resonate with you despite (or because of) their faults? What do you think is the ideal balance of virtue to vice?

Sex and Characterization

I realize that some readers may find the title of this post misleading. I am discussing sex, but in the broader sense of the term. My specific goal is addressing characters' sexes from a literary viewpoint.

First some clarification. Using the words "sex" and "gender" interchangeably is an increasingly common error. Properly understood, the former is a function of biology while the latter is a function of grammar. Living beings are male or female. Words (especially in Romance languages) can be masculine or feminine. Applied to characters, sex is intrinsic; gender is extrinsic (male and female people can have masculine and/or feminine qualities).

Besides the difference between "sex" and "gender", another key premise is the observation that men and women differ substantially in certain respects. Once considered a controversial stance, behavioral science now leaves little doubt that some psychological differences between the sexes are biologically derived.

What do these differences imply for writers? It depends on the literary field. Writing a female protagonist who exhibits traditionally masculine traits (or vice-versa) for the explicit purpose of challenging traditional gender roles works best in contemporary mainstream or revisionist historical fiction.

Unless one holds advanced degrees in women's studies, cultural anthropology, and/or medieval history, creating protagonists who defiantly transgress established gender roles is inadvisable in genre fiction. Only expert skill will prevent such stories from feeling heavy-handed and jarring.

Genre fiction (especially fantasy) largely relies on received understandings. Because fantastic tales draw much of their power from readers' vicarious experience of the story, it is helpful to make the main characters broadly relatable. Thus fantasy (and even science fiction) tends to invoke archetypes. Note that "archetypal" is not synonymous with "one-dimensional". The former concerns a character's cultural resonance, while complexity depends on the layering of internal conflict.

One may object that genre fiction deals in stereotypes. I respond, "Yeah. So what?" Stereotypes are simply preconceptions. They are morally neutral in and of themselves. It is only when they become prejudicial that stereotypes acquire negative moral value.

Some stereotypes are helpful. When I see someone in a blue uniform driving behind me in a car with sirens and flashing lights, I respond by pulling over. This is a stereotypical assumption since I don't know the vehicle's driver but rely on visual and audio cues that identify police officers. Stereotypes can likewise aid genre characterization by giving the reader subtle guides to character engagement.

That isn't to say that all male characters must be blood and lust-crazed brutes; or that all female characters must be shrinking violets. As always, strong characters should be people first and foremost. Avoid the twin excesses of treating men and women as identical or as wholly separate species. Sex shouldn't define a character, but it should have an obvious behavioral impact.

Readers should easily be able to tell a novel's characters apart. Sex is an important aspect of character differentiation. Whether or not one agrees that men and women bear certain fundamental differences, the fact is that a character's sex does affect the reader's reaction to him or her. The timeless themes and conflicts associated with motherhood and fatherhood cannot be overemphasized.

Now that we've seen the impact of sex on characterization, the question of how to put this theory into practice remains. I'll go into more detail later, but for now I advise against the following approach:

Writing Protagonists

I'd like to share a simple concept. If your protagonist sucks, your story will suck.

The engine that drives every story has three parts: a protagonist, something the protagonist wants, and an antagonist (human, environmental, psychological, etc.) who obstructs the protagonist's attainment of that goal. When you relate what the protagonist does to overcome the obstacles in his way, you are telling a story. Since so much rides on the protagonist, he'd better be interesting.

Here are a few tips for writing protagonists who engage and interest readers.

Goals: as I and writers far better than myself have said before, a protagonist must be properly motivated. There must be some goal that drives him through to the end of the story. Passive characters that events just happen to are dull.

Pseudorealism: note that I didn't say realism. That's because I write genre fiction. Fully realistic characters are preferred for interpretive fiction or nonfiction. For sci-fi and fantasy the idea is to give your characters (especially the protagonist) enough believable personality traits to balance the crazy make-believe elements.

Luke Skywalker is a space shaman prophesied to destroy an intergalactic empire. If someone approached you today and made the same claim, you'd rightly doubt his sanity. However, we suspend our disbelief in Luke's case because we also see that he's a working guy lamenting his frustrated dreams. That brings me to...

Relatability: a protagonist's mindset and motivations should be intelligible for the most part. This doesn't mean that you have to spell everything out. In fact, an touch of mystery is good for sci-fi stories. However, if your main character is inaccessible to common human experience, readers will have trouble vicariously inserting themselves into the tale through him. That in turn leads us to...

Sympathy; not Pity: the key to engaging readers is to ease their acceptance of the protagonist as a vehicle for their own vicarious experience. They must live the story through the main character. There is a spectrum of audience reaction to certain characters that runs from empathy to sympathy to pity.

Empathy means actually feeling what someone else feels. If your characters reach this stage (which I doubt is possible for fictional sub-creations), you've missed your exit and should turn back. If on the other hand the reader feels sorry for the protagonist with an undercurrent of contempt, you've engendered pity; not sympathy.

It's easier to describe what sympathetic characters are not instead of what they are. They don't have to be perfect. Protagonists can even have genuinely rotten flaws such as flagrant bigotry and past murder convictions. As long as the character has at least one redeeming virtue and expresses at least tacit remorse for past wrongdoing, he can earn our sympathy.

These are just a few qualities of effective protagonists. Can anybody think of more?