Faith as Foundation

Religion in Fictional Societies

While planning for a story that I have not yet begun to write, I have to lay the foundations for the world in which my characters will live. The idea that I am about to type out comes from the thinking that I have been doing. A well crafted fictional universe will make sense because it is built of the same building blocks as the very real universe that your readers share with you. You will find the suspension of disbelief easier to maintain if you work with your audience and create a reality that is easy for the audience to believe. Only a realistic universe will feel real when you write it.

Any fictional reality will be many times the size of the story that takes place within it. Plotting out these things, even as you can never write them into the story without bogging down the flow of the storyline, makes it much easier to maintain uniformity in the ways of your fictional world. I think about how my characters live when they are out of the text that I am writing. Readers will get a feeling of how vast your fictional universe is by the detailing that you can include in the subtext of the story. It is often a shame that the background that you create for your writing will never be seen by another living soul.

Faith is the foundation of understanding. What I mean by this is that our beliefs define the rules of evidence and the evidence that we accept in telling us about the world around us. Our view of reality, the way in which we understand reality, is not the world around us but a model of the world around us that we build within the shielded confines of our own minds. Your mind is never going to call you a liar. It is easy for your eyes to record an image that you simply do not see.

Nothing that violates our model of reality is going to have an easy entry into our understanding. Very few of us understand just how much of the world around us has to be taken on faith. We take it on faith that computer chips are small electrical machines and not simply enchanted boxes. Most people on the planet could not defend this belief. Our model of the world would not allow us to accept the belief that our world works by a series of magical spells.