Writing and belief: a stray realisation

[la_marquise]

I've just realised that a key theme in my writing -- apart from water, which literally gets everywhere -- is rationalists and non-believers discovering that the irrational and the weird are real and can affect them.
I have no idea why. I'm not particularly religious/spiritual in the formal sense (though I may be superstitious and I do talk to saints and trees on occasion. Also to the late and loved Caspian cat). I wasn't brought up with any kind of faith. But it's there in Living with Ghosts, particularly through the characters of Thiercelin and Joyain. It's in quite a few of my short stories ('The Whale's Daughter, certainly; 'Coldrush'; 'Clocks'; to some extent in 'Seabourne') and in the various sections of the ongoing, unfinished Gaheris saga.
What's this about? Should I be worried? Is this a sign of Dangerous Fluffiness or WooWoo, a weake girly non-science-yness? Or is it an artefact of a background in, amongst the history, social anthropology, which leads me always to look at the stories cultures tell about themselves, their origins and their environment. I tend to find fantasy novels which either lack reference to beliefs of any kind, or import default cardboard ones, very unsatisfactory. (And somewhere someone must have written a story about J******h's W******s in their mission starship, banging on the doors of new colony worlds.) I tend to be much more convinced by books where the author has clearly thought through how and what peoples believe -- Violette Malan's The Sleeping God, glass_mountain's Children of the Shaman, freda_writes's Dark Cathedral, to list a few. It's about world-building and depth and texture.
And yet, none of that explains this writing tic I seem to have, this 'more things in heaven and earth' -ishness that I seem to be returning to, over and over.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Isn't this inherent in the whole fantasy concept? You start writing about a world wherein magic of some kind does exist; worldbuilding demands also that faith exists; at some point, you are going to wonder whether or not that faith is based on something more than wishful thinking. Where dragons are real, why would the gods not be?

And if you have unbelievers, there are better things to do than shun them. They can't be let walk blindly through the novel, where veils exist to be dropped and epiphanies enacted.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Yeees... but I avoid magic as much as possible, and when it crops up, it ends to relate to the religion/irrational rather than standing alone.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I am currently intrigued by the notion of fantasy-without-magic, and keep writing it in spurts and dribbles. But where there is anything irrational, I think it is the duty of the novelist to fling it in the face of the unbeliever: as being so much more interesting generally than the other thing. Except where a believer is suddenly brought face to face with the actuality of his own belief, which is something else I am currently exploring...

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Yes. I know writers who consciously work through issues with their own beliefs in writing, but I'm trained to think that my inner working are not that interesting, and that belief is somehow a dirty word. I mean, I don't believe that, but enough people tell me off for the beliefs of my culture that I feel obliged to let them have control. Which irritated me, but I still feel I have to do it.
Hmm, clearly I should go to the SoA thing on responsibility to readers. Except it clashes with World Fantasy...

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Not necessary. At least, I have never found it so. Magic can be treated as a form of science.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Heh. You remind me of happy arguments from my teenage, about whether biblical miracles and whether God was or was not obliged to follow the physical laws of his own creation... But I do get tentative about allowing actual magic in a world, while insisting that religion should remain superstition. Which is why I got tripped up by an unexpected goddess in the latest, and have pretty much spent vol three trying to sort her out...

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Hmm. In the oldest and most complex of my fantasy worlds, knowledge of how 'magic' works (by mental manipulation of perfectly natural forces) and therefore how 'miracles' happen is why religion died out. The only peoples who are superstitious and still have religion are those who cannot use it or refuse to use it.

"Gods worshipped" or "worshipper" is a (fairly mild) insult.