When you’re writing fantasy, it’s easy to spend a lot of time and energy on your worldbuilding: history, geography, sociology… and religion. Some writers base their religions on those that exist or used to exist, while others make them up whole cloth. Either way, the goal is to make the gods feel as real to your characters as your own gods are to you.

Sometimes authors talk about their characters taking on lives of their own, and sometimes the beings you feel hanging around after you put the keyboard away are the gods themselves. This is something I’ve had happen to me, but it occurred to me during a conversation on Facebook that I’ve never really posted about what to do in that situation, though it’s Theos Logos 101.

So what do you do when you’re getting the sense that a spirit or deity you recognize from your writing is hanging around? Well, you have a couple of options.

If you based your writing around a deity that is known and named, you can start by research how to reach out to that deity. Some light research is actually not a bad idea anyway – I’ve had good results with some wikimancy in the past. (Wikimancy is basically wandering through wikipedia from one link to another, clicking through to whatever you feel pulled towards.) Pay attention to tugs and pulls and pushes – that’s often intuition or even influence pushing you.

Whether you’ve done some research or just know what you’ve written so far, oftentimes you need to do something more to get a better sense of this being. For me, this generally takes the form of writing exercises specifically designed to give me a stronger view of the spirit in question.

For example, the shadow-spirit Rajani started out as a spirit who put in an appearance in a modern-set story, but when I pulled at the strings there, I was able to get a sense of her history that gave me a much better understanding of her as a spirit. I’ve written mythology for the world itself, staring the original spirits of the world.

Probably the being I’ve spent the most time getting to know lately is Chenek. He’s a god of sky and intellect, alchemy and corruption. (He’s also my Ascended Atlantean Dolphin Master, if you’ve heard me joke about that.) I’ve approached him from a lot of angles – writing about him with his sisters, writing from the POV of various apprentices and enemies. I feel that what I get about him, I’m given from him. I get to see how he operates, what he values, what he has to offer. He’s a dangerous spirit, but a very knowledgeable one.

I’m currently working on a project for Mara, set in an alternate Eastern Europe. Unlike Chenek, Mara is a deity I already know fairly well. Most of my practice with her is already based in instinct. But that practice is very eclectic and loose, and I’m writing the book as both a devotional effort and a way to introduce her to others.

The old standbys work just as well in this situation. Divination is great, especially if you can use a style of divination that works in your story. If you struggle with inspired writing, more traditional styles of meditation can work – don’t be afraid to write yourself a guided journey meditation and follow it, or simply place yourself at a location relevant to the deity in your story when you meditate and see where it takes you.

If you’re not sure what kind of offering to make, you have options. I tend to default to tealight candles and cold water, but whatever default offering you prefer is often a fine place to start. Rereading your fiction, you may find clues you didn’t think too much about when you were originally writing it.

Whatever you end up deciding, remember that as long as you’re satisfied with the relationship, you don’t need the approval of others. The gods call who they call, in the way they choose to call them, and sometimes it’s ridiculous. But hey, sometimes life as a whole is ridiculous.