In a post on the SFWA blog, Gabriel Murray discusses ways your fantasy novel can benefit from a sense of the numinous. “The numinous was coined by religious scholar Rudolf Otto in his 1917 book The Idea of the Holy,” Murray explains. “Otto described an experience common to many religious traditions, beyond good or evil, of devastating wonder and mystery.”
That concept inspired many fantasy writers, including C.S. Lewis, to incorporate a sense of awe in their stories, using experiences that reshape our relationship with the world. Murray suggests two ways to use this concept:
- Know whether you actually need it. “Sometimes a world that’s consistent, comprehensible, and manipulable is precisely what you want to write,” Murray says. “Many readers derive pleasure from stories built upon worlds that are knowable.”
- Let your world humble your characters. “A classic element of adventure fiction is mastery—the ascension of a nobody to a hero, or at least to knowledge, power, and agency,” Murray writes. “But a crucial element to transporting readers to a world of such infinite horizons is to remember that it should be infinite to your protagonists, too, at least in some ways. It’s not wrong for a fantasy protagonist to be humbled, to encounter beings and stories bigger than they can change or fully understand.”
