I am currently writing a religious sci-fi fantasy and am having trouble with fitting characters "Birth "( or Creation) plot basics of the story is "GOD " as in ascertaining the christian blah blah blah ect. GOD was an alien genetic scientist who created humans ( 7 Males, 7 Females ) and let us go our own way to study us. He also created "Angels (and as a bi product "Demons ) but i can't figure out how to work the seven sins/virtues and the four horseman stories out. 1 idea i had about the seven sins/virtues was that he created them as a physical means of testing out human instincts and they were never destroyed, and with the horsemen i couldn't work out if they should be aliens as well ( kind of like his research team or something that all work in different fields? ) or if they should be creations as well maybe as a default destruction policy or maybe just failed experiments that got loose. So ANY! input or ideas would help a lot so please help and thank you in advance if you do help, as i plan one making this my debut novel (hopefully )
Do you a character you can just start writing with ? I find when I start the ideas come as I write the story. What about him having playing chess with devil - the deadly sins and the horsemen can be pieces and as they move them things happen ? Kind of like with Job they can argue over someone and play the game to make things happen.
I like the Four Horsemen as a default destruction policy. If the experiment gets fouled up to a certain degree, it triggers them... The seven sins/virtues being physical? What would they *look* like? I'd imagine them more as hypotheses to be proved/disproved... Hm... playing with Christian theology in sci-fi... have you ever read Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold? Highly recommended. (It's actually a novella, but it's sold within a larger book of the same title. The other stuff in the book is good too, esp "The Mountains of Mourning." Check it out.)
I don't mean to sound snarky, but if this is to be YOUR novel, you really ought to do the majority of the plotting yourself. The purpose of the Plot Development section of the forum is to help you when you've hit a snag. If you need a spy to sneak onto an army base plausibly, or you need an ingestable poison that has X and Y symptoms but can be quickly cured by a doctor, or you're torn between two options and you'd like us to help list pros and cons of each, we're more than willing to help. But we aren't going to work out a huge chunk of your book for you. Above, you ask for ideas regarding the origins of the Four Horsemen and the seven deadly sins (apparently embodied as people or aliens), and it sounds like those are a significant portion of your cast of characters. In fact, of the explicity named characters, you're asking for help developing 11 of 12. That's a bit much. If you can refine your questions a bit, and narrow the scope of what you're asking, you'll probably get more responses. For example, if you've come up with justifications for why five of the seven deadly sins would be destructive when embodied, you might ask for help with the last two. (Maybe gluttony is destructive because they hoard food, and then a bad winter comes and others starve...) Anyway. I'm just saying that right now, you're asking for so much help that it's not clear where you want your story to go -- and that's not a good sign if you want this book's plot to originate primarily from you.
What would Dream, Desire, Delerium, Death, Destruction, Despair and Destiny look like? The artists for Neil Gaiman's Sandman series managed to come up with something. Anthropomorphisations of abstract concepts have a pretty long history in fantasy. And I'm not sure what you mean by things like "patience" or "sloth" are hypotheses to be proved or disproved.
Yeah, I was writing kind of in shorthand there. I think what I meant was something more like... elements you're trying to discover? You know, like a scientist posits the existence of an element, or a particle like a quark, and then he's trying to prove that they really exist. If a scientist experiments with humanity, he could be trying to prove whether patience or charity really exist... But yeah, anthropo... holy cow that's too long a word for my brain just now... turning them into *characters*. I was picturing them as physical but not personal, which didn't make sense, but turning them into characters does.
The four horsemen were of the apocolyspe, so they could be diseases, viruses, mutations or something horrible that could happen within the world of science.
Well, the four horsemen are usually War, Famine, Pestilence and Death (in the Bible there is Conquest, not Pestilence). The things you describe would probably all come within the remit of Pestilence, so there are still three horsemen to play with.
Right, but I don't think the OP wants to be *TOO* similar to real religion; he just wants to subtly parallell it, right? Maybe they could be different types of viruses. A viscious-turning virus that makes people violence prone (think along the lines of the movie "The Crazies"); a starvation-causing virus that does something with metabolism so you starve no matter how much you eat; something causing disgusting sores; and something that kills instantly.
