Forging a Universe: Worldbuilding Religion (A Guest Post by Melinda Moore)

While I'm out of town, toiling away at Odyssey Writing Workshop, I've decided to open up the blog to guest posts. Author Melinda Moore is kind enough to stop by today and contribute an entry to my worldbuilding series. When I'm back and defragged, I'll pick up where I left off in the series. Thanks very much, Melinda!

~  J.W.

World Building Religion

by Melinda Moore

Over a decade ago I played in a Dungeons and Dragons game run by my husband using a pantheon that he had created. Most of the players understood and embraced the variations from real world religions, but one player could never quite get it. He played a cleric of a goddess who raised education above all else, but every time the player filled us in on what the character was doing during his down time, the character would be polishing candlesticks or reciting something similar to hail marys--- something from the real world Catholic church. It never occurred to him maybe his goddess would want him copying texts or tutoring orphans. He could not or would not buy in to this different religion created for the game.

When writing, reader's buy in is essential. How do you get them to accept a different religion for the time it takes to read your story? Start with the idea that gods are people too. They need to have their own motivations and histories. The Greek and Nordic gods are wonderful examples. They have alliances, enemies, petty brawling and humans caught in the middle. In the fantasy world I'm currently writing I have my gods united in the same end goal, but they all have different ways of getting there. One reveres education, one reveres sorcery, and one reveres strife.

Which brings me to my next point: the people should reflect the desires of the gods. The people in the country of the goddess who upholds education are governed by women, teaching is a prestigious occupation and science is far more important than magic. Their next door neighbor worships the god who holds magic above all else. They mostly are governed by men, but a woman sorceress isn't that unusual. But on the other side is chaos because their god holds up strife as the essential ingredient to the progression of the soul.

The trickle down from gods to people ends in the details. What are the religious leaders called? What do the structures look like where they worship? Do the gods intervene regularly? For my world, I've tried to find neutral words that people can still connect to. I use “mystic” for the religious leaders though for a long time I was using “sage.” I think both those words have real world religious neutrality but still imply spirituality. The structures for the goddess look a lot like Greek temples because the ancient Greeks had a love for knowledge and I'm hoping that will subconsciously work its way to the reader. It's been much harder figuring out the structures for the god of strife. For now I've settled on the very back of the cavern the people dwell in as opposed to making a special structure out in the open. The darkness seems to fit better.

But what about stories set in an alternate universe of our own? I think in that case continuity and balance are essential. I know everybody loves Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that world seems really off balance to me. The demons and vampires had structure and hierarchy, whereas “The Powers that Be” for the good just seemed to cross their fingers and close their eyes and hope that Buffy and Angel would save the day again. It never rang true to me that Buffy would never seek out any of the real world religions available to her. A better example for writers to follow is Xena. While it's ridiculous to think about the amount of miles Xena and Gabrielle walked in the short amount of time they had, at least they made the effort to seek out help from gods outside of Greece. They covered India, Israel and China and a bit of Amazon religions thrown in for good measure.

Outside of good/evil balance, when writing stories about religions in our own world where the gods make material gestures seen or felt by the human characters, realistic reactions are important. In my novella “A Sunset Finish” being published by JupiterGardens Press, my protagonist perceives the Tao or the Watercourse way inside herself while her love interest has lived all his life seeing the Sunset People--- guides to the afterlife for his pueblo. The protagonist always feels like she's drowning in the Tao and is constantly on the verge of suicide, making a rocky journey with her love interest who's been taught by the Sunset People the sanctity of life. The push and pull of their religious experiences provides part of the tension of the story. I think one of the reasons it got accepted for publication is the believable reactions to each other and the religious experiences.

So don't shy away from religion when world building. Embrace it. For three hundred pages make your reader a believer in Xanton God of Treasure of Kyra Goddess of Light. Just remember: Gods are people too.

Thanks to J.W. Alden for allowing me to guest blog here while he's away at Odyssey. If you enjoyed my post please visit enchantedspark.com. I talk about what inspires stories and host a monthly writing contest for a $30 prize.

Adventures in Serialized Fiction Writing (A Guest Post by Zachary Bonelli)

While I'm out of town, toiling away at Odyssey Writing Workshop, I've decided to open up the blog to guest posts. Today's entry comes from author Zachary Bonelli. I'd like to send a big thanks his way for offering some insight into the world of serialized fiction, a form that seems to be making a comeback these days. If you like what you read, consider supporting his endeavors!

~  J.W.

Adventures in Serialized Fiction Writing

by Zachary Bonelli

In 2000, I sat down to write a novel. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure I had the concept of ‘novel’ in my head. I think I sat down to write whatever happened to flow out of my mind and onto the page. Anyway, I started writing about this guy who was travelling between alternate reality versions of Earth. What started out as random vignettes turned into a fully realized novel.

I struggled for many years to complete that novel to no avail. I straggled behind and slacked, focusing on other areas of my life for many years. The ideas piled up, and I wrote them down as notes, occasionally as small vignettes, and the “novel” remained stalled.

Last year, when I began working anew, I came to a very important realization. My novel was not a novel, at least not in the traditional sense, but a sequence of short stories, internally consistent and coherent individually, but which tell a bigger, more epic story when you add them all up together.

This was not a traditional novel, or even a trilogy of novels, but a series. The short stories I had come up with were not chapters, but episodes. Those names are not arbitrary. Episodes of a serial have important distinguishing features from chapters of novel.

Chapters & Episodes: Distinguishing Characteristics

1. Completeness

In a novel, a chapter does not necessarily tell a complete story. An episode does. An episode has a rising arc of action, conflict of some sort, and a resolution. Chapters may accomplish these too, but they don’t have to. A chapter usually only produces momentum toward one of them, and it doesn’t have to even do that.

2. Marketing

Chapters are never marketed to readers individually, only as part of a complete story. Episodes are sold individually, and may be collected up into groups, though it’s not necessity.

3. Length

Since episodes tell a complete story, it’s difficult for an episode to be as short as a chapter. Depending on your style, a chapter can be as short as a couple hundred words. Even expert writers will have a hard time telling a complete story at that length, and since episodes are marketed individually, they will need to be at a length that will be palatable to readers. At the time of this writing, the minimum price for an ebook on many vendors, most importantly Amazon, is $0.99 USD. At this price, I recommend your episodes be at least 4,000 words long (that’s about 15 pages) at minimum. Optimally, I would recommend an episode be about 8,000.

4. Time

It is unusual for each chapter in a story to be separated by an enormous section of “missing” time. Perhaps the author skips over a couple of hours of the characters’ lives that would be uninteresting to the reader, or occasionally a couple of days of time, but temporality remains largely consistent (unless the whole point is that it doesn’t, ala The Time Traveler’s Wife).

In serials, each episode of the adventure can begin presuming that any number of major events occurred since we saw that character last. The scene movements and transitions inside the episode follow the rules of chapters in a book, telling a coherent story by leaving out only uninteresting bits of time. But episodes themselves have the potential to be more “distinct” and “separate” from one another than chapters in a book are from one another.

Many serials utilize this technique, but many others don’t. Nonetheless, it’s a technique that’s very difficult to do with chapters of a novel.

~

It took a lot of energy for me to realize that I was writing a serial at all. However, recent technological advances have made production in the serialized format more practical than ever, and we are poised for a resurgence of this style of narrative.

Now is a great time to experiment with the format, come up with something new and original, and discover what style works best for you.

~

Zachary Bonelli is the author of the ongoing Voyage Along the Catastrophe of Notions series. It is currently in the middle of its first sequence, Embarkation. He is active on the Google+ Science Fiction Writers community, and muses about serialized fiction, and randomly as well, on his blog.

Insomnium, Zachary’s second serial, is due out this October. He is currently attempting to raise money for the series’ cover art on Kickstarter.

IWSG: Dream, Doubt, Determination (A Guest Post by Henry J. Olsen)

I'm just a few days away from my trip to Odyssey Writing Workshop, which unfortunately means I won't be able to visit any other IWSG blogs today as I make my final preparations. I have, however, opened the blog to guest posts while I'm away, and author Henry J. Olsen was gracious enough to write an inspirational piece for the Insecure Writer's Support Group on my behalf. If you like what you read, consider checking out his website for more. Better yet, buy his book!

~  J.W.

Dream, Doubt, Determination

by Henry J. Olsen

There is no single blueprint one can follow in his or her quest toward becoming a secure, confident writer. Yet for many, there are three phases in the journey: the dream, the doubt, and the determination, as I've laid out below.

The Dream

For most of us writing begins as a dream, in which we envision ourselves churning out page after page of gripping, tension-filled literary drama. We imagine that the stories inside of our heads will flow out from our brains, through our hands, and into our notebooks or computers in a smooth and seamless fashion, requiring only a bare minimum of rewriting and editing.


Many people never venture beyond the dream, and thus their desire to write remains forever an unblemished fantasy. And perhaps that's just as well, for as with most dreams, the dream of being a writer is far more idyllic than the reality. Those who proceed forward may be surprised at what awaits.

The Doubt

One day, you take a leap of faith and begin to write. Suddenly, the dream becomes reality, but not in the way that you'd expected. Though you do in fact type page after page of text, you quickly realize that your work is nowhere near as intriguing as it seemed while the ideas were still brewing in your head. You reread your sophomoric prose and wonder how real writers craft sentences that are concise yet full of vivid imagery. You begin to wonder why you ever chose to write at all, and worry that perhaps never will you create a story that you, much less anyone else, will enjoy and appreciate.

What's worse is that you often can't keep your doubts to yourself. When friends and family ask what you're writing about, you struggle to describe your story in a way that piques their interest. When new acquaintances ask you what you do, you meekly tell them that you're a writer, finding the look of doubt in their eyes regardless of whether it truly exists or not.

What you don't yet realize is that the doubt you see in others is merely a reflection of the unease within yourself. No writer can exist in this state forever, yet how best can you escape it? One option is to give up. Few will fault you if you do. The other option is to push through the doubt, accepting that you may never escape it completely, and to write and create with a renewed determination.

The Determination

The determination isn't a thing you discover overnight. Rather, it's a feeling that grows as you push through your doubts and continue to write, eventually finding that despite your doubts, you do possess a certain pride in your abilities as a writer. It's the belief that with effort you can improve, and that it is possible to blossom into the writer that you've always dreamed of becoming.

Each day you come closer to understanding what it truly means to be a writer and not merely a doubt-filled impostor, frantically pounding away at the keyboard. With each chapter written you come a little closer to realizing that your voice as a writer isn't something you find, but rather a property that you develop over time. And finally, you come to see that if in your interpersonal interactions you express yourself with confidence, the people you describe your work to are often legitimately curious as to what you're writing about.

Determination can't completely replace doubt, yet in my experience I've found that adopting the right mindset is 90% of the battle against insecurity.

How do I know this? I know because my name is Henry J. Olsen, and I too am an insecure writer. Yet as of today, June 5th, I am not just a writer — I am also a freshly minted indie author. And though my book, The Northland Chronicles: A Stranger North, isn't likely to be mentioned alongside The Caves of Steel or Stranger in a Strange Land anytime soon, I'm still extremely proud of it, and I'd love if you could join me for a post-apocalyptic romp through the Northwoods.

In closing, I'd like to extend a big thanks to J.W. for allowing me the opportunity to share my thoughts with you

Keep writing,

-Henry J. Olsen

simplyunbound.com