I have never written a story without gods.
How I write those greater than us in my works of fiction.
We make sense of the world through stories. Through fiction and tales of other worlds, we can understand our own world better.
The same has been said of religion. When people long ago looked out upon the sea or upon the cosmos—the things that were so vastly beyond comprehension—the only way they could understand them was to consider the possibility of greater beings.
In real life, I am religious. I am spiritual. So, it makes sense that my stories incorporate that. Yet, I have also realized that I have never written a story without gods. Without demons or angels.
The stories that captivate me most are human stories, but they always incorporate beings greater than humans. Whether in novels, television shows, or video games, I am taken with those that cannot be fully understood.
From eldritch gods, to holy angels, and Japanese demons, there is a plethora or beings to choose from when writing fantasy. Yet, I was a bit taken when I realized that I had never written a story without gods, and that wasn't a choice.
I didn't set out to write stories involving these beings, but they always crept into my writing. Whether they were the creators of the world or the source of the magic systems that flowed through my fantasy, they always had a significant impact.
Recently, when I looked at my two current projects, this realization hit me.
There Are Gods Everywhere
The first work is a fantasy series set in a mystical Japan. The spirits were formative in creating the land and the religions that exist among the people. Their remnants are also the source of all magic and technology in the world.
The second is a cyberpunk story. In the old world before the technological revolution, giant titans fought and chased humans to the skies. These titans were all powerful beings, toppled by the loss of magic and the rise of technology in the world.
By all accounts, these stories are very different from one another. One is an homage to Japanese folklore with a fantasy setting and world. The other, a cyberpunk saga inspired by William Gibson's works and CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077.
Yet, in the background of these stories, there are the gods. Without them, the worlds wouldn't exist. In my fantasy series, they are more than smudges in the background. They are key players in the narrative and appear many times throughout the story.
I asked myself why. To understand the world through story and religion is to understand the world through creation. It is to give deeper meaning to existence and to question the fundamentals of what we believe.
Pragmatically, omnipotent beings are convenient in a story. They can create needed systems, worlds, and origins within a work just because they have the inherent power to do so. I want to avoid shovelling gods into a story because they are convenient. But, in the real world, we believe in gods as creators.
Gods are something that normal human characters are not. Often in stories, our characters are reactors to the world around them. Even an active protagonist will react to things that happen in their world, pushing the plot along with them.
Gods do not have to follow this logic. They are the creators of the world around them. Gods can break stories, and it takes a skilled writer to try and weave that into a story without deus ex machina. Gods should never serve as a way to ease the tension of the protagonist.
The Rules of Gods
One way that I have found to do this, is to bind gods to some law or rule. I have used the terms gods and spirits interchangeably in this post, but perhaps it is important to differentiate what we might think of as gods, spirits, and God.
In my fiction, spirits are not necessarily gods. They are beings that exist in a different realm than humans, but they are completely bound by the rules of that realm. They may be present in the real world, but rarely have incredible power.
Gods are creators and all-powerful beings. Yet, they are not completely immortal or unbeatable. There may be rules or laws (often made by other gods or things in the godly realm) that bind them. They are not necessarily all knowing, but they have eons of knowledge and to beat them is a feat most humans could never even come close to accomplishing. These gods can be either evil or benevolent, vying for their own interests as well as those of humans.
Lastly, there is God. God is a completely omnipotent, omniscience, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent being. I rarely include God in my fantasy stories unless he will not interfere with character interactions. The possibility of deus ex machina is too high, and often too difficult to write around.
I have found the challenge of writing gods to be interesting. To give them human traits often seems derivative, but looking at most mythological stories, gods are very human. Within the tales of mythology are tales of love, loss, betrayal, and loyalty. Stories we think of as very human, yet they are tales of the beings greater than humans.
I know that I will continue to write about gods in my works of fiction, or at least incorporate them into my stories in some way. It is fascinating to me and adds layers and history to created worlds in different ways than political machinations or overt plot complexity. Rather than solve my characters problems, it adds depth to them and creates massive amounts of power in fantasy worlds, which can help to create even higher stakes.
There is a reason mythologies, religions, and stories that incorporate beings greater than ourselves captivate us. In our search for meaning, these stories and these figures, help to create it.
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