Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45614
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

My first answer perhaps did not set enough context or was too written in shorthand. Let's see if this performs any better.

Avoiding cliches when writing gods requires not relying too much on existing mythology. When I say "Mars, God of War", or "Jahova", each reader will have a set of expectations about how the god will behave, what will be important, and how the god will react to human challenges. This what it means to write in cliche -- using an existing set of expectations to evoke a standard reader response without needing to do the work of establishing the context.

If I say "Aphrodite", you know I am talking about a female god known for her beauty. If you were deeply rooted in Hellenistic culture, you would know more stories with more context. If not, you put your expectations in play to make her hypersexual, with all the suppositions that image brings to you.

To write a god without cliches, you must pull the god from a blank page. Nothing about godliness should be presumed. You construct the god from scratch, perhaps using some bits of god legend, but used carefully, contrasting this particular god from what the god legend might imply. You can use the reader's cultural expectations of a god not as a shorthand for the attributes of your god, but as a springboard for comparing, differentiating, and constructing your own.

If your gods possess human emotions and foibles, and I suspect they aren't interesting to read unless they do, you can use human contexts to import some expectations into your gods.

I don't write gods, but Neil Gaiman has. As an example of creating gods, I suggest reading Neil Gaiman's **American Gods**. It develops the personality of several gods in a modern framework, including the rivalry between them and integrates them into the existing Pagan theology.

He succeeded by making each god be recognizable as a human, with various extra-human abilities. He uses some human character archetypes, such as the grubby little man driven by sloth, or the silicon valley entrepreneur, to set up some of his gods. He uses events from mythology to create additional conflict, but it is done slowly. Over many pages and chapters, one comes to recognize god myth rather than having it be exposed in a sentence.

**American Gods** discusses the mechanism through which each god derives their power, and the consequences for the gods and for people as that power is disrupted or fades. I remember being satisfied with the book, even though I come to it with no established god beliefs.

Original score: 1