Babel Clash

My wife’s certainly suggested so in the past, through sniggers at one thing or another… But anyway, Joel’s issue with my kind of gods is the backstory and the mechanics of the world. I can certainly see his point, there’s a lot of work to be done there, but for me that simply adds an extra dimension to the world. I want to work out where the gods came from, the nature of spirits and daemons, the creation story etc etc – I want to fit all these elements together and construct a tapestry that both directly affects the characters and their actions, and creates a framework and context for it all.

The richness of a world’s history if vitally important for me, as are the folktales that act as the foundation of every day life. I’ve made some references to folktales I’ve not worked out fully, just certain comments designed to help the richness flower in the reader’s mind. It’s something that Susanna Clarke did beautifully in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – not to everyone’s tastes, but the little details and footnotes were what elevated the story for me and helped me ignore my concerns over the scale of power wielded my magicians. While I don’t go nearly so far I want the readers to be aware there is a world outside the story being told, that it’s not just window dressing for what I’m writing but there (and hopefully internally consistent) in its own right.

Joel’s comment about actually asking gods what they meant in scripture is a good one, but I think that depends on how patient one’s god is. Most of mine are squabbling brats with the attention span of a four year old and a similar tendency for tantrums. Ok, so they can think and act rationally, but especially when scripture/myth was recorded, they were younger and more aggressive so will have acted accordingly – there’s enough of an argument to be had over the contradictory actions and sayings to keep the most argumentative scholar happy, especially when the alternative is risking a good smiting for annoying the hell out of your god by pointing out the times they might have been wrong.

One additional plus to gods is the fact that they’re divine (stay with me here, I know some of you are think “the first rule of tautology club…”). Generally, I love working out a plot and fitting it into the world – that’s one of the fun parts of writing for me, but one really major annoyance with the medium I’ve chosen is how slowly people travel and communicate, travel in particular. My blood pressure increases every time I get an email from my editor saying ‘a horse can’t travel that distance in that time frame’ – she’s right; I know it, she knows it, and considering Joel’s comment right at the start of this, he’s bloody certain of it, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating.

Gods are one of the few entities that aren’t so constrained by physical limits; everyone else has got a three week boat trip plus a month on horseback. In a setting where there are a lot of constraints due to internal consistency, they’re an X-factor that can be a catalyst for something great or deus ex machine that ruins it for everyone.

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