Overview
Title: Ill Met In The Arena
Author: Dave Duncan
Publisher: Tor
Length: 300 pages, trade paperback
Genre: Heroic Fantasy, with a splash of Romance
Review copy from: Purchased from Ellison Hawker, my local.

Ill Met In The Arena is an interesting, eloquent and somewhat unexpected fortieth novel by accomplished Fantasy author Dave Duncan. Departing in many ways from his holdfast of adventure fantasy, Ill Met In The Arena still gives the reader more of the same excellent quality that we’ve come to expect from this superlative writer.

Refreshingly presented as a stand-alone in a genre often hampered by painfully drawn-out storytelling, IMITA keeps the pace flowing with superhuman gladiatorial combat, labyrinthine relationships and incestuous politics that would give the French aristocracy a run for their money. Somehow, Duncan also manages to squeeze in two perfectly-executed love stories, wrapping everything up in a healthy 300 pages.

The World of Aureity
Duncan builds his worlds in style, and this one is no exception to his norm. Pelagic’s math and basics are laid out briefly at the start of the book, so we aren’t left guessing as to how the world itself works. With twin suns that follow each other across the sky with a 60 degree lag, the day is neatly divided into quarters. Calendars divisions are non-standard but explained succinctly and add verisimilitude. Great stock is placed on the highborn’s system of tracking nobility through multiple generations, so it’s good to come to grips with it before you settle too deeply into the story. Once you get going, Duncan rockets the story along at a pace that’s fast enough to let you keep your breath, but if you don’t have a fine eye for detail, you may get a little lagged out.

Superpowers and grooviness
The glorious worldbuilding continues with the emergence of supernatural powers attributed to those of royal caste. The men manifest psychic abilities physically, giving themselves the ability to teleport, move massive objects through force of will. Both of these skills are used to great effect through the story. The protagonist, Quirt of Mundil, traverses the continent the story takes place in in a series of ‘ports’.

Male royals can teleport to locations they have memorised previously, leading to a whole host of ingenious logistical problems.
This is one of the things that Duncan does best – creating a system that’s unique, and then deconstructing the challenges it poses to protagonists.

Combined with this teleportative ability is the capacity to psychically ‘heft’ objects. This can mean both themselves - giving them the capacity to fly in a limited fashion – and an ability to hurtle around solid objects with terrifying force. These two abilities are shown off in the gladiatorial contest that let the political shiftings of the story take place around them. Gladiators progress in a single-elimination tournament with increasingly challenging rounds.

The recurrent theme of porting is used throughout the story to great effect. The story skips locations rapidly and gives the narrator an excuse to cut to the action directly in each scene, which keeps things moving along freshly. Having every second or third paragraph interspersed with a heavily-typeset:
***PORT***
is a little off-putting at first, but you quickly adjust to the at-times-bewildering pace. I liked it, though. The excitement of instantaneous travel is worth having to drastically re-orient yourself as a reader much faster than normal.

Matrilineality and strong women
The women in the story are, if anything, more powerful and intriguing than the men. The ruling system is matrilineal, and with hegemonic rule. Women manifest their psychic strengths mentally, able to wield prodigious powers of illusion, perception and compulsion. Men compete for attentions of royal ladies, hoping to be assigned as a consort in order to raise both their standing in the world and provide a greater lineage for their offspring. With nobility followed four generations back, this adgerence to family lines and ties allowes for deep, complex political maneuverings to be palyed out, and played out well they are.

The women’s strengths in illusion create some interesting results. Most touched upon is a woman’s capacity to change her appearance. In the world of the nobility where women can look as tall, young and beautiful as they want, it is considered an honour and a sign of respect for illusions to shrink or fade and the real woman to be visible for an audience. They have truth-telling and memory-searching capabilities that are enhanced by proximity. Through this system crimes are meant to be controlled and prevented, for anyone with a guilty secret would give themselves away to any noble woman within close physical range.

The punitive measures the ruling women can deal out are mesmerising. The darkly hinted-at ‘improving’ robs a miscreant of some element of their personality. A skill used through physical contact, some hegemonics use it to trim elements of aggressiveness or other untoward behaviour from their spouses. More terrfying, though, is that ‘improvements’ can only take AWAY from a victim, so the process is more like a psychic lobotomy.

The plot thickens
Of course, no system is perfect. Quirt’s mother was brutally raped by the unknown Enemy on the eve of her betrothal, made helpless by a soporific drug. Quirt has spent his life searching for revenge, and it soon emerges that not only are some secrets being, impossibly, kept, but that Quirt’s quest may be in vain. His struggles against a web of power far outstripping his own means he needs to tread carefully through layers of secrets going back generations, where each truth he unearths earns him nothing but more enemies.

As mentioned above, the unique setting Duncan has created in Auriety, combined with the hegemonic powers the nobility of the story possess, make for some interesting problems.

In a world where people can teleport to locations they’ve been previously, how do you maintain security?
How do you escape an enemy?
How do you set up an ambush?
How do you imprison someone?

All these questions and more get addressed through the story itself, which has enough twists and turns to keep readers experienced with political drama guessing until the very end. Doomed to find a fearsome, yet seemingly invisible Enemy, we meet our hero who has just had a hint of the enemy he’s been tracking for a third of his life.

More setting
Names and places hew closely to Greek styles of naming, giving the entire story a distantly familiar feeling. The physical setting of the story is familiar enough that Duncan doesn’t waste much time on physical world-building. Once again, the familiar naming structures show us that Duncan’s capable of building a comfortable, relateable world, with enough twists and variations in it to keep us intrigued. He doesn’t have to resort to alien-sounding-and-inevitably-unpronouncable gibberish in order to impress us.

Also notably absent is the common Fantasist’s curse of over-capitalisation. Considering we deal with several politically powerful, and royal families, the wielding of titles and formal address is kept to a minimum, and the narrator’s conversational tone as he relates his story is friendly without being off-putting.

Early on Quirt meets up with Humate, a delightfully arrogant young hegemon. Mudar is able to overcome Hewat at the first gladiatorial game we experience, although, interestingly, this is more through trickery and cunning than any surplus of psychic strength. As the story progresses, the belligerent Humate proves himself to be superior to our hero, which makes his wavering allegiance all the more dangerous. The danger of potentially plotting against the family of someone who can snap your neck at any time, and teleport your corpse miles out to sea, gives the story a tingling sense of edge about it.

The gladiatorial combat itself is fantastic. Interestingly, there is only a miniscule amount of swordplay. Given Duncan’s proven facility in eloquently narrating the freneticism of combat in his other books, this is a bit of a surprise. Regardless, when action takes place – and there’s enough of it – it’s fast, brutal, and shockingly real in its abruptness. Duncan has eschewed the speech-laden monologuery that romantic and political novels tend to enjoin and has gone for cast, brutal combat that’s over quickly.

The harsh realities of the arena make for compelling reading. This is heightened by a stunning juxtaposition between the glorified, ritualised combat as we’re exposed to it, and the harsher realities that emerge outside the Arena.

What’s this? Real relationships?
The relationships in the story are another highlight. Deep, rich and complex, we get dumped into the machinations of royal families with an outsider’s experience, discovering how the world functions along with Mudar. Without any greater reference than the squabbling political families of Europe to go by, it’s a challenge at times to see all the connections being woven. As they’re touched on over time, though, we get to develop a feeling for the politics of the world.

Duncan is relentless in these developments; his characters are more familiar with the situation than we are and make logical leaps in instants that would take me five minutes and a diagram to wrap my head around. Luckily, Duncan weaves the exposition cleverly enough that you keep pace without feeling lectured to.

So….
This is a book that took some warming to. I’ll happily admit that the starred review from Romantic Times on the blurb had me thrown for a bit. With Duncan happily jumping about in his timelines, as characters reveal pieces of family history to each other in the form of flashbacks, the cohesion of the story lags a bit in places. Once we get a solid grip on the world, characters and setting about half-way through the book, though, Duncan’s in his element and nothing shakes him from producing a superb finale to the book.

Read this book if you: want to see how romance, gladiatorial combat and general swashbucklery can fit together.
If you don’t read this book, I’ll: be a little disappointed, but recommend you check out Duncan’s other books regardless.

Standard disclaimer: If you click on an affiliate link, and then buy something, I’ll get a small percentage. Wheee!

Prophecies, badly done, are a waste of space in your story. They may even be actively detrimental to your writing. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include them in your writing at all, though. Done well, prophecies can be exciting, intriguing, puzzling, heart-rending and completely captivating.

In the last article, we looked at the common problems with prophecies in fiction, particularly fantasy fiction. The good news is that everyone’s favourite trope isn’t verboten; merely needing to be approached with some intelligent design and awareness.

So, here to raise your consciousness and send you singing on your way into the world of writing, are a few suggestions and examples of how other authors have overcome the problems of over-cliched writing.

Make the prophecy’s inevitability the major turning point of the plot.
Tell me if this is familiar: once a prophecy has been made, and we’re aware of the characters’ destiny, then the prophecy itself is largely forgotten. If we’re lucky, it’s referenced at convenient keystone points in the plot’s progression. Slain a hobgoblin? Great! Check one mark off the list. Now what’s left? Oh, a sudden but inevitable betrayal.

This is a little awkward because it highlights just how shallow the prophecy is. Think about if someone had foretold your destiny in real life – to win the lottery, not quite pay off your mortgage -well, something more exiting than that. I bet that if you had a God, an actual God, telling you something was going to happen, it’d be preying on your mind a fair bit. I’m sure it’d come up in conversation more than once. Especially if you were at a bar and wanting to impress someone.

Yet, too often, I read stories where the characters apparently forget that there’s ever been a prophecy. What? Seriously? Can you imagine this happening in real life? Yet the characters get so blasé that, forty pages on, they blindly ignore the limping, seemingly friendly barkeep who was not-so-subtly-mentioned-by-the-Gods only a chapter ago.

Morons.

So, one approach to enhance the realism of your story is to bring your prophecy into the story more. Have characters try and understand what’s going to happen. Is it futile to try and second-guess destiny? Are the protagonists desperate to have the prophecy fulfilled? Your characters, broadly speaking, are going to be intelligent. Have them apply their intelligence to the situations at hand.

People like to think about their own futures. Have your characters extrapolate what their lives are going to be like if the prophecy succeeds. Is the future looking rosy? Bleak? Awkward? How is what’s happening to them tying into their expectations? Do they begin to doubt the prophecy? Are their actions strengthening it, creating a chain of events that increases the likelihood of a particular outcome?

Thwart the prophecy.
Often prophetic instructions signify a breaking dawn. They herald the overthrowing of the bad guy, the ushering in of a new era of discounted popcorn and snacks for every peasant. Predictably, then, the story unforlds with the antagonist trying to thwart the prophecy and the good guys trying to make it come about.

Consider what happens if you want to reverse the roles. What happens if a prophecy has already taken place and been fulfilled, and not everybody’s happy with the outcome? What happens if the Gods decreed that Evil Overlord #13 would rule over the Empire for a thousand years of good health, and we’re only at year 350? Pitting your protagonists against not only an antagonist, but the decrees of Fate itself makes for some interesting reading.

This also gives the clever, thinking-ahead plot builder the capacity to expand on a series of Xanatos Gambits, which, if executed well, lead for a terrifying opponent and a series of frustrating adventures for the hero. Nobody wants to make it too easy for them, after all.

Tragedy
As a reader astutely pointed out, prophecy and predetermination has an important role to play in tragedies. Now, strictly speaking, most stories written nowadays aren’t tragic, more closely hewing to the Hero’s Journey or other storytelling aarchetypes. However, the Greeks were deeply into tragedies, and they were generally agreed to be some pretty top-notch thinkers, so consider what makes prophecy such an important force in tragedy.

Firstly, we are given the sense of the inevitable. The hero, flawed either in nature or by unfortunate happen-stance of birth, is placed into a situation where they are forced by the nature of their character and circumstance to inevitably destroy themself. Watching the events unfold is striking for the audience because they know what’s going to happen. It’s like clicking on a Youtube link to a video of a train wreck. You know it’s coming, and it’s going to be horrible, but it’s relentless intriguing nonetheless.

If you’re intrigued by the processes that tragedies undergo, there are tons of resources to guide you. Check out Christopher Booker’s work, Shakespearean tragedies, and for an introduction to Greek tragedies, Sophocles is your man. Look at his Theban Plays to see if tragedy is your thing.

Get Delphic
Straight forward prophecies are boring and formulaic. Go get that sword. Kill a dragon. It sounds like a shopping list.

Luckily, there’s another way to pass on a prophecy that addresses all the good things about destinies while limiting the downside. This is to provide the prophecy in the form of a riddle, which will be unravelled over the course of the story. This unravels our Gordian-esque knotty problem with one sure stroke.

• The characters don’t have a clear idea of what they’re in for
• Readers can enjoy trying to solve the puzzle presented to the characters
• Retroactive revelations become a solution and a recognition, not an annoyance

A great example of using non-direct oracles is in Dave Duncan’s excellent The Reluctant Swordsman trilogy. Wallie Smith, a nuclear technician, finds himself transported into a seemingly stock-fantasy world. A God gives him the following riddle:

First your brother you must chain.
And from another wisdom gain.
When the mighty has been spurned,
An army earned, a circle turned,
So the lesson may be learned.
Then finally return the sword
And to its destiny accord.

This is the essence of excellent, cryptic prophecy. The unfolding of the prophecy itself is barely underway when the first book in the trilogy ends, but hints have already been laid out by the author as to how the story will unfold.

Of the dozen people I’ve lent the series to, none of them accurately predicted the fulfilling of the prophecy until quite near the end of the series. Ultimately, everybody was left feeling satisfied with the resolution of the storyline, and agreed that the prophecy gave the characters direction, motivation, and ultimately assured the success of the story.

So why would a prophesier choose to be indirect? There are quite a few reasons. They may wish to test the hero’s mettle and intelligence. They may wish for the quest to be revealed in stages or as wisdom is gleaned. They may be in a state of confusion themselves. Remember that, depending on your methodology, consulting tea-leaves and entrails is not an exact science.

Approach with intelligence
The fundamental solution to the problems with prophecy is to approach it with intelligence. If you take the easy, mindless path of throwing a prophecy into your story without real thought, you’ll end up with a shallow, predictable book. Train yourself to ask questions.

If you read my stuff regularly, you’ll know I’m a big fan of constantly questioning and assessing your writing processes. Doing so forces you to flesh out answers and create a more wholesome, rounded product.

I’ve put together a Resources Page, which includes a list of questions you can ask yourself about your own prophecies. Answer for yourself as many or as few as you’d like. I recommend you take the time to scan through. Like with most practises in life, if you see a question you’re hesitant about answering, it means tyou probably should. Your story-writing muscles could be a little under-developed in that area, and the only way of strengthening them is by flexing.

Have fun!

Go do the Write Thing.

Hi! Welcome to the Prophecies Page. If you’ve come here independently, I’ve written two articles that can get you started.

The first one, The Problem With Prophecies, looks at the particular problems that plague prophecies, especially in the realm of Fantasy fiction. Getting an understanding of these is going to help you make the same errors that other authors have, and ensure your work is of superior quality.

Then we’ve got Doing It Properly, which discusses some intelligent approaches to prophecy in writing.

Below, I’ve listed a handy set of 80 Questions Of Awesomeness for you to answer. Some of them could be reduced to a ‘Yes/No’ response, but I encourage you to give them a little more thought than that. Even to yourself, a one-sentence justification will give you more colour and depth to enjoy.

Remember:
Ask yourself ‘why?’ about everything to do with your prophecy.

1. Who prophesied?
2. How did the prophecy come about?
3. What initiated it?
4. Why did they do it?
5. Were they compelled?
6. What were their motivations?
7. Are they infallible?
8. Are they likely to be truthful?
9. Can they be trusted?
10. Have they prophesied in the past?
11. How did that turn out?
12. What expelling of energies does as prophecy require?
13. Is the oracle / seer drained afterwards?
14. Is it effortless?
15. How is the prophecy communicated?
16. Was it open to interpretation?
17. Is there any disagreement over the wording?
18. Intent?
19. Are prophecies jealously guarded?
20. Secret?
21. Hoarded?
22. Recorded?
23. Publicly available?
24. Commonplace?
25. Was it bought?
26. Through sacrifice, dedication, prayer, devotion, merit?
27. Is there a ritual involved?
28. If yes, what sort of ritual?
29. Was the prophecy provided for someone’s entertainment?
30. As part of a larger scheme or plan?
31. Did someone ask for the prophecy?
32. How did they know they could ask for it?
33. Did they ask properly and completely?
34. Has the giver-of-prophecy been ambiguous or tricky in the past?
35. Do they have a reputation?
36. Is the Oracle omnipotent?
37. Omniescent?
38. Threatenable?
39. Intractable?
40. Is the prophecy clear-cut?
41. Esoteric?
42. How strong is the prophecy?
43. Is the fate that’s given predetermined?
44. Can outside events effect the prophecy?
45. Are there dangers to the prophesier in the act of divining?
46. Are there costs in terms of pain?
47. Sacrifice?
48. Effort?
49. Who is going to be pleased with the prophecy?
50. How will they react?
51. Are they going to be informed of the prophecy?
52. How?
53. When?
54. By whom?
55. Who will be displeased?
56. How will they react?
57. Who will tell them?
58. What immediate actions will they take?
59. What will they plan in the longer term?
60. When will the subjects of the prophecy find out about their involvement?
61. What other parties are involved?
62. What are their interests?
63. How can the prophecy be broken?
64. If it’s a chain of events, does the breaking of one destroy the others?
65. Is the prophecy mutable?
66. Resilient?
67. Fragile?
68. Are there more than one source of prophecies in the story?
69. If so, which is stronger?
70. Can conflicting prophecies be given?
71. What happens if there are?
72. Is anyone likely to lie about the prophecy?
73. How?
74. By withholding information?
75. By altering the prophecy?
76. Denying its’ existence?
77. What do they stand to gain from this?
78. What if people don’t believe in the prophecy?
79. Does that affect it at all?
80. How will they be convinced?

Naming Your Prophecies
Don’t feel stuck with that one word. Look! I’ve made another list for you. Not comprehensive, but enough to get excited about. Prophecies can also be called:

Divination
Casting
Dooms
Edicts
Fates
Foreboding
Foretelling
Geas
Oracles
Portent
Prayers answered
Premonition
Presciences
Prevision
Prognosis
Revelations
Visions

Says Who?
Prophecies can be given by:

Animated Objects (mirrors, ponds, candlesticks)
Augurs
Channellers
Clairvoyants
Dæmons
Demons
Diviners
Diviners
Djinnis
Enchanters
Enchantresses
Forecasters
Foretellers
Fortune-Tellers
Genies
Gods and Goddesses
Harbingers
Haruspexes
Heralds
Mediums
Midwives
Miracle Workers
Prophets
Psychics
Satanists
Seers
Shamen
Soothsayers
Theurgists
Voodooists
Wise Men
Wise Women
Witches
Wizards

There you go! A pretty comprehensive coverage of prophecies. Of course, if I’ve left something out, please comment below or contact me directly and I’ll remedy the situation immediately.

Cheers!

Pip.

Welcome to the second Blogsplosion, where I bring you the summaries of my last two week’s scouring of the ‘net to bring you the best and greatest.

Authors
The inestimable Joe Abercrombie lets rip in a cracking interview over at the David Gemmel Award‘s website. Abercrombie writes fast, funny, brutal stuff, and if you haven’t read it already, here’s an official Write Thing Plug. check him out, check the interview out, go read his books. Now. Then come back to the rest of this blog post.

China Mieville, fresh off finishing Kraken, flays our faces with his own particular brand of wit, wisdom, and esoteric pop culture knowledge.

Rants
Shaun Duke from The World in the Satin Bag gives us a bit of spin on Fiction Narratives: The forgotten strand. He argues that there are two kinds of bad narratives: the predictable, and the illogical. He then soundly demolishes both, with the new Star Trek movie held up as a shining example.

Over at The Galazy Express, Heather Massy has a delicious piece on The Gritty, Smelly, Dirty Details in Science Fiction Romance.  I absolutely love when writers get passionate about good craftsmanship, and Heather does an awesome job.  If you read one thing from the Blogsplosion this week, make sure it’s this.

Romance reader?  How many sexy, galf-naked bodies do you like on your covers?  Dear Author’s got a fine discussion on the issue.

Writing Inspiration
Missy Frye, of of my favourite posters, hosts some writing from Janet Morris Grimes on “Failure as a stepping stone” over at Incurable Disease of Writing. Ms Grimes reminds writers that rejection isn’t, nor should it be, the end of a writing career.

Victoria Janssen has a short but sweet post on Making Time for your writing.  It doesn’t just happen, folks!

Right here at Write Thing, I’ve posted up a quick guide to Creating a Writing Bible.  It’s a handy resource for anyone udnertaking a serious writing journey.  Check it out!

Also this week, I have a look at the Problems with Prophecies.  Prophetic visions are the bane of good storytelling, especially in Fantasy books.  If you want my reasons why I’m warning you off them, click above.

Poetry
Mad, Mad, Mad Kane has some awesome self-referential haikus and limericks. Man, those poetric structures tickle me when done well, and I’m toasty warm all over right now.

Reviews
If the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms hasn’t blown you away yet, then read this.  Then go buy it, twice, read it, a dozen times, and give your spare copy to a friend.  Thank me later.

That’s it!
That’s everything I’ve got for you this fortnight, folks.  Write Thing is still finding it’s feet on the net, but the site’s growing in content and community nicely.  If you haven’t already, consider subscribing to the RSS feed to get more regular updates on new content.  I’m contactable by email and will respond to comments posted anywhere on the blog.

Cheers;

Pip.

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!