I've begun work on my first novel and I'm having a lot of fun working on it so far. It's a contemporary fantasy set in our world in present day and I want gods to exist in it but I'm planning on creating an original mythology with original gods. Part of the reason is because I'm worried I won't be able to portray existing gods, like Greek gods, correctly and I'll get things about the mythology wrong, and part of it is because I want to set my story apart from other stories that use existing mythologies, like the Percy Jackson series. I know that I want to create an original mythology with all original gods, but I'm just not really sure how to go about starting on creating that. I was wondering if anyone else had any experience creating original mythologies for their stories and if anyone could offer any tips on it?
Hello, Moonchild! Here are a few things that I think you could do to create your own mythology, so here we go.
Read other mythologies. This one is a bit obvious, but it really would help if you studied the other mythologies and took inspiration from them. In Greek mythology, Gods and Goddesses were often clever and tricky, if you look more into it. They often tricked each other into doing things and all the like.
Another thing that I suggest doing is making a sort of family tree of the Gods/Goddesses in your story. This will greatly help organize who was born from who (if the Gods/Goddesses are born from each other, of course) and where each person in the story has an origin.
Another thing you could do is compare your mythology to other already-existing ones. And ask questions like if you're capturing the tone right or if the creation of how it all came to be seems reasonable.
The last thing that is more optional and something I prioritize lower than the others, but it's a book recommendation. If you haven't already, I suggest reading the book American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It has to due with different mythologies and everything of that sort. I will leave a content rating that it is a mature book just in case.
I think the trickiest part to overcome in your case is how the pantheon fits in with history since you're writing a contemporary fantasy. A big question your readers will be asking is "Why haven't we heard of these gods before?" and you will need to have an explanation.
I can see several different approaches straightaway, such as these being new gods for a new era, a pantheon belonging to a very insular or isolated group of people who are just beginning to reach out to the larger world, or ancient gods that have been lost to human ken when the peoples who worshipped them disappeared (for a number of possible reasons).
Depending on the explanation, your approach to building your pantheon will be quite different, so a bit more information would be really helpful.
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