The sacred stories, legends, and divine narratives woven into your fictional world that give it spiritual and thematic depth.
Mythology in fiction refers to the body of sacred or legendary stories that exist within your world: creation tales, hero legends, divine conflicts, and cautionary fables that characters grow up hearing and believing (or questioning). These aren't just decoration. Mythology shapes how your characters understand their place in the universe, what they consider heroic or sinful, and what patterns they expect their lives to follow. The myths your world tells itself reveal what it fears, what it values, and what it's trying to explain.
Mythology gives your world a soul. It's the difference between a setting that feels like a map and one that feels like a place people have lived in for thousands of years. Myths also create powerful narrative tools: prophecies to fulfill or subvert, archetypes for characters to embody or reject, and thematic resonance that connects your plot to something larger. When your character's journey echoes a myth within the world, the story gains layers without you having to explain them.
Gaiman makes mythology literal: old gods from every culture walk modern America, losing power as belief shifts to new idols like technology and media.
An entire book of mythology for Middle-earth, complete with creation stories, divine wars, tragic heroes, and the kind of sprawling contradictions real mythologies have.
Miller retells Greek mythology from the perspective of a minor figure, showing how myths look different depending on who's telling them.
Jemisin builds a mythology around geological catastrophe, where Father Earth is a vengeful entity and survival is the highest virtue.
Every myth you put on the page should do work: foreshadow events, explain character motivations, or establish thematic resonance. If it doesn't serve the story, keep it in your notes.
Real mythologies are messy, contradictory, and argued about. Let your world's scholars disagree about what a myth really means. That ambiguity makes it feel authentic.
Present myths the way cultures actually share them: as bedtime stories, songs, arguments between priests, or murals on temple walls. Let the delivery be as interesting as the content.
Write a creation myth for your world in under 500 words, told in the voice of someone who believes it completely. Then write a single paragraph from a skeptic in that same world who offers an alternative explanation for the same events. Notice how the tension between belief and doubt makes both versions more interesting.