Writing the Mouths of Prophecy (Patreon)

Rex had an interesting observation on an earlier post on Locals:

Earthrise feels like an interesting starting point to talk about prophecies. It was my first encounter with Liolesa's chess-playing. After coming back to it from reading the other stories that show Liolesa's talent more clearly, I started to realize just how much meddling she likely had been doing to nudge the right players on to that ship.

It would be interesting to see an article about what it has been like to deal with a major character with that level of foresight...

     In my whole oeuvre, which is scattered with Big Destinies, it’s not uncommon for there to be prophets and oracles. Liolesa isn’t the only one, but she’s certainly the best known, and one of the longest running in terms of how many years I’ve been writing events she would know about. At its most basic level, writing a prophet requires you to know where the story is going… and even when I was writing by feel rather than by outline, I still had an idea of where I wanted the story to end up. Given that, the prophet just has to say things, and act on, that foreknowledge… in a way that doesn’t interrupt the plot. You need to decide early what kind of hobbles you want to put on that power so there’s a story still to be told.

     That choice leads to the more pressing question, to my mind, which is: why write prophetic characters at all?

     Everyone will have a different answer to that, of course. Here are my reasons:

• To suggest there’s a grand design, and a reason for everything under Heaven. Terrible things might be in store, but wondrous things as well, and you can trust in both.

• To explore what you do when faced with inevitability. There’s hope in uncertainty, because uncertainty contains potential for both good and bad. But I want to know what people are like when they know something can’t be avoided: what goes through their minds. How they keep going. How they prepare. This is interesting from both the prophet’s point of view (someone like Liolesa or Jahir), and from the recipient’s (everyone else).

• To explore the permutations of duty. Duty presupposes an authority (otherwise, there’s no legal or moral code to issue it), and prophecy implies a divine authority, and therefore, one you can’t negotiate with. How do you perceive your role? How do you decide what’s required of you? What do you sacrifice, and what do you save? How do you become strong enough to answer a difficult call?

• Because writing smart people is fun, and prophets often come across as smart people. I consider a character smart if they 1. Are able to see the connections and repercussions in interlocking complex systems; and 2. Are able to make those leaps quickly. So writing someone who sees patterns because of divine insight and someone who sees patterns because of intelligence is a similar act.

     The danger with prophets, of course, is making them omnipotent. Fortunately, in most cases, even people with divine foresight can be hamstrung by circumstances, people, or their own situation. Liolesa has a lot of money, a lot of connections, and a lot of foresight… but her kingdom is small, out of the way, enticing to criminals and pirates, and full of fractious individuals. It doesn’t matter how far you can see ahead if you can’t make people do what you want… at that point, all you’re seeing is the thing you couldn’t stop because you couldn’t reach the endgame with the cards you were dealt. On top of that, her sight isn’t perfect, and (of course), she is a person with flaws and issues herself that prevent her from always making the best choice. (Thus, Surela’s coup.)

      Jahir being a new prophet landing in the same timeline as Liolesa as an existing prophet also gives me a chance to explore the issues of inevitability from a new perspective. What do you do when you suddenly know what’s in the future, but you didn’t before? It’s a very different take from someone who’s been dealing with that for centuries.

     I took a different tack with Daqan, whose foresight is limited to his task as the harbinger of the messiah. Faulza gave him the tools to do his job, but nothing else… which meant he was supremely confident while executing that mission, and very bad at anything else (and therefore, not as equipped to cope with it as a Faulfenzair without the same gift).

     But probably the most interesting observation I have about writing Liolesa, which I can make only because I’ve been writing Liolesa for thirty years, is that my feelings about prophecy have changed. When I was younger, I was sure that foreknowledge solves the problem it predicts. As I aged, I realized that knowing something’s about to happen, and even knowing how to prevent it, isn’t enough to fix something. Young Me could not have written Liolesa as a viewpoint character. (I know. I have abandoned bits of story where I tried.) She imagined a prophet as a person locked into a course of action from which there was no deviation. Older Me could see all the frustrations of knowing a course of action and being incapable of preventing it, and at that point, Liolesa became a viable character, not just an NPC mouthpiece handing down story constraints to the protagonists.

     Maybe all life lives in the space between theory and execution, and prophets are just extreme exemplars of that disconnect. What I do know is that space is the space we have to make choices… and stories thrive on choices.

     So there you go. My take on prophetic characters. That was a cool question, Rex, thanks for asking it. 🙂