The Write Thing

Using the ideas of prophecy and fate in Fantasy creates serious problems. Despite these flaws, authors continue to use an out-of-date and over-used trope, often to the detriment of their writings. Let’s have a look at the big issues with using prophecy in Fantasy.

For the balance of the article, I’m going to use ‘prophecy’ to describe any future visions, observations by mystical elders, village shamen, mutterings of the Gods, assignations of Fate or good ol’ Oracular divinations. Feel free to mentally replace ‘prophecies’ with ‘fate’, ‘doom’, ‘god-given quest’, ’geas’, ‘narrative imperative’ or other synonym of your own choosing.

Why Generic Prophecies are Boring Rubbish.
Let’s start with a few definitions. I’m almost-certain that, in your miscellaneous readings, you’ll have stumbled across a suitably clichéd Heroic Fantasy Prophecy before. They’re about as reliable as a plucky dog in a using-the-power-of-friendship-to-outsmart-some-Nazis Enid Blyton book. The story goes like this:

• -Hero(/ine, but that’s less common in these tacky novels) is born / comes into the world.
• We, the omnipresent Reader, are given a flashback / abbreviated summary / infodump by a Wise Elder archetype letting us know of this Hero’s Prophecy / Fate.
• This infodump takes the place of a movie trailer – a quick thirty-second ‘highlights reel’ of everything that’s going to have to happen to bring the story to a satisfying conclusion.
• Hero may very well rail against his / her fate, or get distracted a little along the way, but eventually…
• Fate / Prophecy fulfilled. Hurrahs all around, apart from the Bad Guy, who is dispatched forcefully.
• Fade to Black.

Now, John Howard may have had a field day with this particular process. In fact, half of most of the Conan stories were telling you about what was going to happen in the second half. That didn’t detract from the cheesy, hack-and-slashesque appeal of his stories.

If that’s what you’re after – an enjoyable, literary romp for your readers, with no introspection, surprises, significant tension or deep character development, then stop reading now. The above list can act as an outline for the body of your work. Go get stuck in writing!

Prophecies sabotage your plot with lazy construction.
For the rest of us, we feel the need for a bit more depth to our stories. When you look at the example and strip your own prophetic writings down to their minimum, you might notice some similarities. Even without the sarcasm infused battery I’ve dished out above, you might find yourself feeling a bit foolish.

That’s OK. It happens to all of us at one time or another. It’s quite easy to fall into familiar patterns, especially when you’re caught up in the glee of creating stories. Let’s slow-motion analyse how these problems arise. Does the following sound familiar?

When you’re throwing around ideas on how to put your story together, you might start with a disjointed series of Really Cool Things you want to write about. A dragon. Some awesome weaponry. Hot, sexy Elves. Incompetent Kings.

Then you start to lay things together. Perhaps you get a rough outline of how you want all your narrative events to join up. But where’s the driving, motive force behind it all? Why will this band of pipe-smoking shorties team up with a totally kick-ass wizard and Orlando Bloom to set off across the world?

Frustrated in your sudden whirling-together of ideas, your brain scans its mental repositories for suggestions. Then it hits you…
“Ah-ha!”, you cry. “A Prophecy! A Fate Decreed By The Goddes! This cures all my plot-based ills!”

From there, it all falls into place. Someone’s dying, and there is a prediction that the heir will be found at N Remote Fishing Village, and will need to claim their rightful throne at O to overthrow the machinations of Evil Regent V. With the idea of prophecy as a framework, it’s often but a moment’s work to backfill all the motives for your major characters, and you can happily bundle yourself off to start writing.

Uh-oh. You’re headed into a dangerous place here. So let’s put this hastily-notioned adventure on hold for a moment.

Now, let’s have a think about what having prophecies and fate-related decrees is going to mean for your story. You’ll find out that it has serious, and potentially negative, connotations for both you and your readers.

Prophecies weaken your plot.
Invariably, the revealing of a prophecy takes place around the start of a story. Perhaps even as a prologue. By the time we’re getting used to our protagonist/s, we’ll often have a pretty strong idea of how the story’s going to turn out. Having a prophecy at the start of your story reduces the rest of the adventure to a binary equation: either the prophecy will be met, or it won’t.

Now our Hero/ines have been railroaded. They head out to start their journey. Along the way, they’re going to encounter some setbacks. Yet, somehow, they simply aren’t exciting, or fulfilling, to us as readers. Why not?

Because the antagonists of the story have been foreshadowed. We know their basic motive: they’re the ones who, for whatever reason, don’t want this particular prophecy to be fulfilled in some way. They don’t even need to be aware of it. Maybe the protagonist’s fate is to destroy them or overthrow their Tyrannic Empire or similar. In gaming parlance, we know at the start of the story who the End Boss is going to be, the monster lurking at the end of the dungeon.

Yawn. How predictable. How much more interesting would it be for the evildoers to actually evolve as we progress through the story? If we had characters making their own way in the world, with the reader not knowing what to expect next? Without any foreshadowing of epic events to come, battles as yet unfought, monsters unvanquished?

The use of prophecy spoils all these things, because the major happenings of the story need to be outlined. There’s no point in sending a Hero on a Quest for the Sword of a Thousand Truths unless the audience knows it’s going to be needed at some point.

This problem makes it harder for you to create interesting challenges for your characters. Anything that doesn’t fit within the realms of the prophecy can be ignored as a sideline, a filling-in of time until the next big Plot Device.

Let’s think some more about what having clearly defined end Bosses in terms of reader experience. You know there’s a bad guy waiting in the wings. There isn’t any suspense when you discover low-level goons and underlings, because you know that the protagonist’s going to off them with relative ease.

You know that their ultimate clashing is going to be the peaking point of the book, and once the major impediment to the Hero’s task has been removed, we’re setting ourselves up for a happy ending.

Compare this to an open-ended adventure. We don’t know whether our characters are going to get to overcome the antagonist. Well, OK, we’re pretty sure the story will turn out well for them, but we don’t know how that’s going to happen. Having an apocalyptic one-on-one spelt out as inevitable on page 3 is, to a reader, always going to be less exciting than watch it unfurl naturally.

Prophecies have to be spelled out in advance.
But can’t you have your prophecies revealed after the fact? This way you can show the subtle machinations of Fate and how your story has been woven together to meet this destiny. Now, you’re the writer. It’s your Bum On Seat, Fingers On Keyboard time. So you can do whatever you want.

I can’t think of a single good reason why you would want a retrospectively-revealed prophecy.

It seems suitable enough when you first think of it. Perhaps someone, after the crown has been planted, or in a dying breath, reveals that ‘all has been foretold’. Perhaps our protagonist is the child of a God or Goddess who has a penchant for forseeing their offspring’s futures.

Whatever.

Explain to me, please, how retrospective prophetical matters influence the development of a story for the better?

There. I thought so.

Until you can, don’t.

Having a prophecy spelled out retrospectively is a waste of time. We already knew what has happened. Things should have happened with believable, real causes, not mystical mumblings. So you’re either giving us an unnecessary flashback, awkwardly constructing motives for your antagonists, or lamely justifying bad storytelling. Not the most pleasant of polylemmas.

Prophecies railroad your character’s decisions.
Readers fall in love with characters who feel alive and real to them. They care less, no matter how well written, about characters who are stuck on rails by a few mystical words spouted somewhere around Chapter 3.

If a character is moving with the situations that develop, making their own judgements and responding to the crises that arise in front of them, then they’re going to garner the sympathy and empathy of your readers. Prophesying an end-game where The Sword Of Foo will be found and used to slay the Dragon Of Flaming Death reduces your story to a long series of MacGuffin-hunts. Is that tired, hackneyed writing what you want to be putting out into the world?

If you deliberately engineer your character’s responses towards a goal that will have them fulfil a prophecy, or their fate, then you weaken them. When you’re actually writing, you’ll force yourself to push protagonists towards a particular set of decisions, and then try and reverse-engineer their characters to make those arbitrary decisions more realistic.

Unless you’re a superlative creator of characters and moulder of personalities, you’ll find that your efforts will result in wooden, unbelievable and unsympathetic Hero/ines, and nobody’s going to enjoy that.

That’s it!
So there you are: some of the strongest problems that including prophecy and fate in fiction will present you with. I’m going to write a second article this week about some methods you can use to intelligently apply destiny and fate to your world.

In the meantime, feedback is always appreciated, the comment box is just below, the archives are waiting for your further browsing, and I’m only an email away!

Go Write!