The main character of any fiction you are writing now

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fullbookjacket

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Not in this novel, because I couldn't do it the way I wanted. In order for a first time writer to get published, from everything I have read, I need to both keep the novel self-contained and within a rather small word-count. Even with cutting thing way back I am at 130,000 words.

I think you're going to find it virtually impossible to get a first novel of that length even looked at by an agent. I would recommend you think about splitting it into two novels. Not necessarily by just ending a first novel halfway through the manuscript, but by moving storylines to set up two different complete stories. I wish you luck, because it won't be easy.

Don't make that decision on my input, however, because I still can't seem to land my own agent. See if you can get a couple more opinions in these forums.
 

zornhau

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I thought it might be interesting to discuss the beliefs or the protagonist of your current work in progress and see what range we have.

I'm writing a Military Swords and Planets tale. The main character, Julian Greentree leads a squadron of voidbeast riders - think Lovecraftian things with space wings - in battle against the Myrmidions of the Ecstatic Myriad who ride the eyestalks of their Bound God.
 

Zoombie

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I have two mains in my story Wake Up. MIRS (Magical Internal Regulation Service) Agent Milo Valentine and her/his partner, Max Wu. Milo was not really much of a believer in anything, but now she/he believes in the basic tenets of humanism. Wu is Catholic, though he kinda stopped going to church in his old age.
 

Marian Perera

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I thought it might be interesting to discuss the beliefs or the protagonist of your current work in progress and see what range we have.

My main characters tend to be non-believers, with one exception - in a previous manuscript, the heroine was a religious fanatic. Her people worship dragons. If a dragon told her to jump off a cliff, she would do it, and if it told her to push someone else off the cliff, she would do that just as willingly.

The hero was an outspoken atheist. He couldn't not believe in dragons, given that they clearly existed, but he didn't treat them as gods and wasn't prepared to drop to his knees the moment one of them gave him an order.

I tried to keep the heroine's faith more or less intact in the face of everything that happened. Although she's more tolerant of other views at the end, she never stops believing. It was curiously fun to write.
 

Caitlin Black

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In the script I'm working on which is based on characters from my saga, the MC is a Goddess who doesn't believe in religion. The premise is that science can do all the things that we call magic, so even though she's a Goddess, all it means is that a large population worships her for who she is. She didn't create the Universe, nor did any other God.

I loves her!
 

Ruv Draba

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I'm designing a story that was originally conceived as a short, but now looking novel-length. Here's the premise:
Born with an unusual imagination, the young amphibious weedneck Glid is the black sheep of the Rednail tribe, so when he is adopted as a pet by the lonely dryfoot Shea, he finds a chance to learn where another weedneck would have languished and died. As Glid comes to adulthood and sees the systematic devastation the dryfoot wreak on his species, he grows convinced that subjugating the dryfeet is key to weedeck destiny. But the dryfeet are many, and command fire and steel, while the weednecks command only fish and stone. Can Glid's revolution do anything more than hasten an inevitable weedneck extinction?​

This story's main theme will be about zeal -- especially zeal for the stories of one's people. The dryfeet believe they're a superior species because they are more numerous, have better tools and originated off-world. The weednecks believe the dryfeet are evil because they are destroying weedneck dignity and way of life. While religion doesn't feature in the story, superstition and xenophobia do. Dryfeet believe that weednecks are responsible for their plagues. Weednecks believe that dryfeet evil is contagious.

A secondary theme will be forbearance. Many of the characters in this story are wronged by the zealous excess of others. Some react in self-righteous outrage and thereby themselves commit zealous excess; some learn to contain their reactions and respond with moderation and growing understanding.
 

Rufus Coppertop

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My two MC's are twelve year olds in an alternative Roman empire. They believe in a multiplicity of gods. The mother of one of them is a sibyl. They believe in werewolves because their uncle was a werewolf and werewolves are common. They don't believe in vampires though. Only a complete idiot in this world would believe in vampires.
 
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Maxx

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My two MC's are twelve year olds in an alternative Roman empire. They believe in a multiplicity of gods. The mother of one of them is a sibyl. They believe in werewolves because their uncle was a werewolf and werewolves are common. They don't believe in vampires though. Only a complete idiot in this world would believe in vampires.

Yep. I've excluded vampires from the internal metaphysical world of my current MC as well. He has lots of other beliefs though. His mother is the Moon Goddess and he believes that is very embarrassing.
 

Scandiaca

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I have about 8 characters in my WIP.
three are Japanese, all of them have this mix of Buddhism and Shintô which is quite common for Japan, but only two of them would consider themselves religious.
one of them is kind of a family believer... she believes in her obligations towards her ancestors.
three of them are atheists
one is kind of following the nature religion road.
 

RavenMoon

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Religion is the main theme of my novel. My MC is apart of a race I invented called the Glori, who were the first race to be crafted by the Divine from two older species. She herself would be considered polytheistic, she worships five guardian gods and a legendary figure (I guess similar to Hercules or Jesus if you need a comparison) named Wakan Loyuten.
 

Her Dark Star

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Religion does tend to feature in my worlds because it is powerful influence in culture. My MC's tend towards the atheist simply because my own lack of belief has so far made it difficult to write a convincing character of faith.
However in my WIP, the sisters of the MC are all religious in some way. The MC will also see a lot of evidence of higher powers but hates them as he is majorly anti-authority. He knows gods exist but he just doesn't like the fact.
 

ConChron

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I thought it might be interesting to discuss the beliefs or the protagonist of your current work in progress and see what range we have.

I follow my MC from childhood, through life, through death and beyond. She starts out as religious because that's how she's been brought up to be. It's a bit of "everybody does it so I do it too". Then she starts to question what she has been told and after death she pretty much concludes that she's either a goddess or there are no gods at all. The later being her final conclusion. Her religious thoughts are never a main theme, it's just there among the cookies she eat and the sunset somewhere.
 

akaria

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My MCs are all angels but there is no concept of God for them. They are servants of the Creator and run around doing it's bidding but would laugh at the idea of worshipping it. Why would you worship your boss? In this world the Creator is just what it says on the tin. It goes around forming stuff out of the void then leaves some minions in charge and goes on to the next project. It occasionally checks in to see how things turned out. If it likes what it sees things are left as is. If not, nuke it from orbit and start all over.
 

Hypatia

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My main protagonist is an atheist, as a result of a bad incident that left her believing Christians are too hateful and she didn't want to be like them.

Other characters include a Buddhist, some not very devout Christians, one devout Catholic, and a little girl who just learned "heaven" doesn't mean a special kind of nursing home.

I'm Catholic myself.
 

Jessianodel

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In one of my books there's a major rift between the group of people who worship Solturii (sun god) or his brother Soltu (Sky God) or their sister Jianas (Moon Goddess). It's a polytheistic world/region but there are fights on who in the mythology is to blame for what problems and it has basically morphed into a political turf war.

Jianas was attacked and disappeared from the night sky (hence the phases of the moon) so the main issue is which of her godly brothers is truly to blame.
 

Hypatia

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My main character is extremely devout, and believes her quest is the will of the gods. The theme surrounds taking responsibility for your own choices, and not blaming fate when those choices harm others.
 

Ayliea

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Interesting topic, thanks for starting it and keeping it going for so long - it's nice because this fits in with what I'm writing about.

My MC is atheist and looking back over her life and how religion really screwed up the entire world. Not just Christianity, but all types of religious beliefs - because none of the religions were tolerant of other religions, which in the end - was the end.

The biggest problem with this line of writing is researching so many different religious beliefs, when my own beliefs have flown out the window...
 

Escape Artist

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I had an atheist character before even I became an atheist, but Evelyn's atheism is more due to her anger toward the injustice she sees in the world than anything else.

Gryph is a very logical-type, so for him it's just that he sees no evidence for the divine. If there were evidence, however, he'd be very devout.

^by the way, if you saw this shortened version of his name (which is Gryphon) would you pronounce it with a short 'i' sound or long 'i' - I've waffled between spelling his name Griffin or Gryphon, though I prefer the latter.

Ray is such a masochist, so no matter what circumstances I clothe him in (he's been a vamp and Death, among other things), he hates himself and very much hopes there's a god who will punish him for all eternity. That being said, although he lives with the fervent belief that there is a god, his lifestyle doesn't really reflect it - he rarely warms a pew (doesn't believe he's deserving of a god's love or forgiveness).

As for Noah and Roz, religion and spirituality apparently play no role in their lives whatsoever. They just don't think about it. Noah's made the odd comment here or there about "playing God" but that's because he's a neurosurgeon so he often feels like people's lives are in his hands.

I don't know any of my other characters quite well enough to address the spirituality issue, but for the most part, my characters don't think much about religion or God at all.
 

French Maiden

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My FMC, Amaya, and her people believe in a God or Gods depending on how you want to look at it, it is only really refered to through prayer and when one of her people die they 'go to the Gods'.
 

Finis

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my first person MC is agnostic, and at one point struggles with it when his father dies, trying to find meaning in it.




Took something I said to my sister when our mother died and gave it to him. My sister and I are both strong atheists by the way. Of course, with time to write it, I made it a little more eloquent than when I said it out loud ;)


From my WIP:

"I'm not a religious person. I've never seen any evidence for a higher power, or greater meaning in life. I've wished I were so – so many times. But you know what they say about wishes and shitting.

My father is gone. He died of a brain aneurism three days before Thanksgiving in 1994 at forty-four years of age. Its nearly twenty years later and I still can't find any meaning in it. To teach me a lesson; humility? The value of our family and loved ones? Bullshit.

My father missed my graduation from Stanford, graduate school, my wedding, the birth of my children, and a hundred holidays and birthdays. Not to mention thousands of plain, ordinary days that I could have picked up a phone and called him; except for the fact he's a pile of ash in a concrete cubby hole.

The only thing I learned from my father's death is how fragile and fleeting it all is. Cherish your friends. Cherish your loved ones. Cherish every moment you squeeze out of the universe.

The only thing I've learned about losing someone is what I learned from astrophysics; Stephen Hawking and Einstein. The universe is a tapestry of moments strung together. We are but passing stars relative to one another, and each moment we are flung farther and farther away from the ones we grow up with. Cherish the time you have with them By the time you notice their light has been extinguished they'll already be long gone."
 

yoghurtelf

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I think most of my characters in my contemporary novels aren't religious at all... because I don't know how I would write that in a modern setting, being totally unable to relate to it myself. Of course I do write some fantasy, and there is mention of god and gods and so on. I just remembered that I do have one story (not finished) that involves Wiccans. So those are probably my only "religious" characters, other than the fantasy characters.
 

Pallandozi

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My MC is non-religious, going on apatheist.

There's a virtual reality multi-player online game in my book, set in a fantasy world that has deities. One of the NPCs is "Dio the Atheist" who is a nightwatchman and goes around carrying a lamp. When a player meets Dio they can get a quest to prove to Dio that the deities exist. So far, no player has successfully completed this quest. :)
 
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