One of the earliest installments in this series covered how to write about false religions, those that aren’t even real within your world. But today I want to cover the separate issue of how to write about religions that are designed to reflect the truth of who our God is within the context of a fictional world.
As always, this is intended to be food-for-thought, not the one proper Continue reading “How Should Christians Write About… Allegorical Religions?”
Defining the purpose of your fictional world is a foundational and yet often overlooked step of worldbuilding. Leaving your world’s purpose indefinite and vague opens the door wide to overwhelm, lack of direction, and frustration with the worldbuilding process. But defining a world’s purpose can feel limiting–and how do you effectively frame the purpose of a world, anyway? Hence often overlooking or ignoring this helpful step.
Today I want to look at how defining the purpose of your world will aid you in the worldbuilding process and how to frame your world’s purpose effectively.
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“Why do it? Won’t outlining my world’s purpose just limit my creativity and the scope of my world?”
Yes and no.
Defining your purpose with a world limits the scope of Continue reading “Defining the Purpose of a World”
The topic of hospitality is one I’ve wanted to touch on in a worldbuilding context for a while, and it seemed particularly appropriate to tackle now that I’m newly married with a home of my own that I’m able to invite guests into. So let’s look at homes, hospitality, and how Continue reading “Homes & Hospitality in Fantasy”
Worldbuilding can present a number of challenges—often different for each author—but one that seems to be a universal struggle is the challenge of knowing how much worldbuilding to do before you start a writing project. Whether you’re an author who gets sucked into the worldbuilding and has trouble getting into the actual writing process, or an author who leans into the writing process and finds later that their worlds don’t have as much depth as intended, hopefully this post will be a help and encouragement on the subject of worldbuilding for the sake of drafting.
You don’t need to know everything before you start writing.
Those of you who prefer to dive into Continue reading “Worldbuilding for a First Draft”
Magic can be a hot-button topic in Christian fantasy circles. Is magic ever okay? What is the difference between the magic in Lord of the Rings and the magic in Harry Potter? Should we just avoid it all? Does the faith of the author make a difference?
As with the other topics addressed in this series, magic in fiction is a matter of personal conviction and the intention of these posts is not to tell you what to think but rather to pose food for thought and my personal understanding of the topic based on what I see in Scripture.
To start with, I want to highlight a few different categories of “magic,” because I think a lot of conflict arises when we’re unclear about what we mean by “magic.”
I tend to see Continue reading “How Should Christians Write About… Magic?”