Set Up Rules For Your Fantasy Characters

One of the hardest jobs a Christian fantasy, or secular fantasy, author has is to keep track of all the “rules” governing a made-up world. For instance, let’s say I’m writing a fantasy book with a strong spiritual element, where a number of beings that dwell in the spiritual world must have certain rules to follow in the physical. If I’m not aware of these rules, or accidentally deviate from them, I could confuse and frustrate my readers by damaging the realism of my story.
“But what’s the big deal? It’s fantasy, can’t you do whatever you want?”
Well, you could. But even with fantasy you want to keep an element of realism active in your story, otherwise, it will be chaotic, and your reader will likely notice when a creature in your story is breaking a particular rule you’ve established, perhaps even unknowingly.
Let’s say in Chapter one, you have spiritual character who is unable to pass through a wall because of a special vine that happens to be growing on that wall. The reader now is programmed to believe that every time that spiritual creature encounters a wall with said vine, it will not be able to pass through. So imagine the horror our reader will feel when the protagonist cleverly hides behind a wall covered in our special vine, only to be attacked by the creature from the other side? The realism of our world takes a hit, and the reader will get frustrated.
Naturally, we as authors can remedy the situation in many ways. We can simply remove the vine from the wall, we can say the creature received some new power that now enables it to get through. Or, we can simply rewrite the scene to fit in with our rules.
And how do we know the rules? Either write them down before you begin the story, making an outline of each creature’s abilities and restrictions. Or, after the story, see what rules you’ve established, and weed out any inconsistencies.
So if you are a writer of fantasy, after you’ve written your book, look for these little violations of your “rules”, and tweak or change any scenes necessary to keep all your mythical elements in pre-set boundaries. Even authors like Tolkien did this. Do we ever see Nazgul bi-locate? No, Tolkien made sure they always had to travel through Middle Earth on some sort of physical beast (when they themselves were in physical form, that is). And he stuck to that rule throughout his entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I read a good book that helped me better understand these “rules for fantasy” called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. I’ll end this post with a quote from his book:
“Remember, because speculative fiction always differs from the knowable world, the reader is uncertain about what can and can’t happen in the story until the writer has spelled out the rules. And you, as a writer, can’t be certain of anything until you know the rules as well.”