Superstition

by Allison Pang

I've been thinking about this subject all week, because to be fairly honest...I don't really have an superstitious characters.  Although, to be fair - superstition is often a way of coping with the metaphysical unknown. Whether you knock on wood or throw salt over your shoulder or avoid black cats or walking under ladders or whatever - it's pretty clear that many of our modern quirks had their roots planted a very long time ago.

And even today - we make new ones all the time - after all, how many athletes do you know that never wash their socks during play offs, for example? Hell, as a kid I had a rabbit's foot that I kept on me at all times, so I'm no stranger to believing in the unknown.

Or as writers, maybe we have special things we *must* do before we sit down and write. A lucky pencil or a special candle or listening to a particular song each time we attempt to work. I suspect many of us are a bit OCD with our rituals, but superstition has a slightly nicer ring to it than "batshit crazy."

But as far as my characters go, no, I don't really have any that are superstitious. And really, given the number of crazy situations and creatures my characters come into contact with, it's not much of a surprise. After all, once you've actually met *the* Devil, where do you go from there? At that point, you already know the monsters under the bed have good chance at being real, so covering your mouth when you yawn to keep the demons from flying in may be more of a survival instinct than a some sort of random belief.

However, I think I'm going to try to incorporate some superstitions into this next book I'm working on. It's not an Abby Sinclair book - more of a straight fantasy story. It seems like having a superstitious character would be a fantastic way to introduce a lot of world building concepts - anything from religious stuff to basic culture to showing how people in this particular world cope with things they don't understand - plague or gods or anything really.

Anyone out there have a particular superstition that you always follow/believe in?

Superstition as a Survival Skill

So, today's topic is, straight from our little scheduling calendar, Superstitious Characters: Writing to a stereotype or tapping unmined gold?

I read this and thought to myself...huh?

I imagined broken mirrors, black cats and heedless folk walking under ladders.

Then I started speculating which of my fellow Word Whores would come up with a topic like this. And I think I know who it is, just from the stories this person writes. Our stories reveal us, don't they? In some ways, I think our stories are a road map to our psyches, revealing the cracks and webs of what fascinates us.

All of this is a long way of saying that I'd never thought about whether my characters are superstitious, much less whether that would be writing to a stereotype. I suppose that my characters always have a good reason to believe what they do. The idea that they might be laboring under a false understanding is really interesting.

Superstition, to get the definition out of the way, is:

a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like. 

Looking at it that way, it's not really a false understanding so much as one not based on reason or knowledge. Which puts altogether another lens on the question for me. Readers of my personal blog know that I'm in thick of writing the sequel to Rogue's Pawn. The kind of intense drafting that really digs its claws into you and feeds on your innards. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around much else, so I'm thinking about my heroine, Gwynn. She's a woman of reason. As a scientist, she relies upon demonstrable facts. But she's been thrown into Faerie, a place where the evidence doesn't always add up. Physical laws are different. Magic exists. In many ways, she's having to learn how operate in a reality where what she must believe can't be based on reason or knowledge, because the one no longer necessarily follows the other. Overlooking the the ominous significance of anything in a place like Faerie could get her in serious trouble.

Oh wait, it already has.

Being superstitious in Faerie is practically a survival skill.

So, my answer? I think I'm mining this gold.

And, boy, is my back killing me!