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I just recently watched the video on writing the worst allegory ever. I don’t know how they kept their faces so straight, I was laughing pretty hard. Anyway, my story is sort of an allegory, but not about the gospel story. It’s more of the persecuted church. It is set in a medieval world, Avendor. The King represents God and Christians are calles Followers. I’m afraid it seems clichéd. What do you think?
@Allison-Grace hey! Welcome to KP. 🙂
While I agree with every point made in that video, I don’t believe that just because a story has a few (or even all, necessarily) of those ‘cliche’ elements that it’s a bad allegory.
What do I mean by that?
Well, the problem with cliches is that so often they’re written just ‘because that’s the way things are done’ rather than for a genuine reason that matches them well to the story and its theme. For your story, did you think through what you decided to call the different allegorical aspects beforehand, or was it always a no-brainer that they should be called the King and Followers? If so, why is that? Is that because that’s what everyone else does? If so, yes. You may have a few problems. There’s nothing wrong with an obvious allegory— especially if it’s not, as you mentioned, a gospel story, but a deeper exploration of the Christian walk— but if you hadn’t thought it out a lot, I’d definitely encourage you to examine your story and do some thinking. You may not even change your mind, but at the least it will give you a deeper understanding of what you’re trying to do with your allegory.
@Hope you got anything to add here?@allison-grace It’s possible you might want to change some things. I can’t say for sure.
I’ll just give some general thoughts on allegory. The main point of allegory is to get us to view something we already know about with a fresh mind. Because of this, your allegory shouldn’t be immediately obvious or predictable. This doesn’t mean that we can’t know that the king represents the God figure until half way through the book. No, some things can be obvious, but some things shouldn’t.
For instance, I the short story Josiah recently published (To whom belongs the future), we are introduced early on in the story to fact that there are many gods in this story world. This at first reminds us of greek mythology, but then we find out that there is a “thirteenth god” who sounds an awful lot like the one true God. This story isn’t really a pantheistic story, but it helps us approach the world with fresh eyes because it’s something we’re not used to. And it isn’t a deceptive story either, because there really are other gods out there in one sense, we just call them angels.
In The Wingfeather Saga, the author represents sin nature, not simply be people doing bad things, but by people getting physically turned into beasts.
So, allegory really isn’t about being something entirely new, because, really, you have limitations. You will have to be unoriginal in some sense. I mean, seriously, I really don’t think it’s possible to write an allegory of the gospel where mutated jesters save themselves by eating swiss cheese. If you could, its originality would certainly make it a mind blowing allegory, but I really don’t think it has the stuff to make an allegory at all. The point is, just make sure your allegory gets readers to view the world through fresh eyes, and you’ll be fine.
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@allison-grace Kate and Daeus already said a lot of things I would say, so the one thing I’ll add to this discussion is that, in my opinion, a lot of it depends on how central the allegorical elements of the story are to the story as a whole. If a lot of your story’s theme and message derives from the allegorical elements (placing it in the genre of allegory), I would say the potential cliche here does become an issue. However, if these are simply a backdrop to your story world and the theme & message derives from something else, I don’t think it’s quite as important to make it uncliched because it isn’t as central to the story. It can still be good to do so and if you can, you probably should, but we often can’t develop everything as writers. I’d recommend considering other ways to approach the topic, but how important it is to move past these cliches depends on how central the allegorical elements are to the overall narrative.
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What everyone else said. I think switching names and such from the common terminology is cool. That being said, I have the Prince and Followers in one of my own books. But the religion is a backdrop for another theme and not a great part of the plot in and of itself. It depends a lot on your angle and point of your story. The larger a part something takes in your story, the less you’ll want it to use a common cliche like a plain ‘the King’.
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