Christopher Paolini

If you want to write about a new form of government, you have to be able to think of the new form of government in the first place.

And that's very hard.

I think many people can't do that even if they are perfectly smart individuals.

It sometimes takes chance and

And reading the right thing and thinking about the right thing at just the right moment to get that spark of inspiration where you go, hey, what if?

And then there's the risk, too, that if you write a future or a world or a setting where things are completely unrecognizable from anything we understand, you can end up with a situation where it's

perfectly interesting, I mean, perfectly well executed and well thought out, but the reader has too much difficulty connecting to the characters because the context is so different and the way the characters think and behave is so different.

I will say one of my own pet peeves is that I think a trap that some writers sometimes fall into is that

If you have an invented world with an invented religion or political system, the trap is to think that your characters don't actually believe what they should believe.

So if you have a monarchy and a fantasy system, your characters are all stout proponents of democracy for some reason.

Unless they're radical political activists, that probably wouldn't be the case.

Or if you have an imaginative setting with a unique religion –

your characters who are supposed to believe that religion, they don't behave as if they actually do believe it.

And we know that's not true.

We can look at historical sources, going back to Greek and Roman times and other things where, no, no, these people really did believe these religions and they behaved as such.

And even if it doesn't seem, even if that doesn't work for a modern brain, you have to hold true to that if you're writing that sort of character.

Yes, but then that's one of the wonderful things about speculative fiction, because if you do wish to write, let's say, an ahistorical Regency-era character, speculative fiction can give you the tools to make that seem immersive and appropriate.

Maybe you make the assumption that we're going to make one small change to history that explains why this character would behave the way they do, and that can be a lot of fun.

Because I read as much science fiction growing up as I did fantasy.

And although this is not entirely true, I will say it's a general rule that fantasy is