: Re: How to write a prophecy? No, I'm not actually asking you to tell me how to predict the future! Several pieces of fiction I've read/watched recently have prophecies. One of my favourites is

@Annie587

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@SF has given a good answer. A couple of other thoughts that occur to me:

You seem to be saying that you want a prophecy that is cryptically worded. Depending on the point of the story, one could have a very clear prophecy, like, "You will have seven years of abundant harvest followed by seven years of famine." If the point is to show that the prophet really does have a special connection to God or has magical powers or whatever, making it clear and unambiguous would do that better than something cryptic.

If you want it to be cryptic, presumably so that figuring out what it means is an interesting puzzle, something I'd carefully consider is whether you want it to be so vague that no matter what happens, someone could say that it came true. Like there's the famous prophecy of the Oracle at Delphi to King Croesus. He asked if he should attack Persia, and the Oracle said that if he did, he would "destroy a great empire". So he attacked and lost the war badly. And so the true believers in the Oracle declared that what the Oracle meant was that the empire that he destroyed "would be his own". But of course if he had won the war, they would have said, See, the Oracle was right, he destroyed Persia. Or like those psychics who offer to help solve crimes and then make statements like, "The letter R will be important." Then when the case is solved the psychic can find something in there that has the letter R in it -- some geographical feature near where the body was found may start with an R, or some store nearby, or the first, middle, or last name of the person who found the body, or some object near the body, etc. There could be dozens or hundreds of people, places, and things that are in some way related to solving the crime, and just by shear probabilities one of them should have a name that starts with any given letter. If I read such a prophecy in a story, then unless the point is to say that no matter what happened the prophet could claim to have been right, I'd find that very unsatisfying.

I think the ideal mysterious riddle would be one that sounds very cryptic and could mean anything when you first hear it, but when you finally get to the solution, it suddenly sounds very clear and explicit.

Oh, and maybe this is obvious: No matter how cryptic or mysterious the prophecy to the reader, make sure that YOU know exactly what it means when you write it. Don't just make up something bizarre and think you're going to figure out what it means later. This is the age of word processors: if something you put in your prophecy in chapter 1 turns out to just not work out by the time you get to chapter 20, go back and change it. Any mystery in a story you write should be baffling and mysterious to the reader, not to the writer. You should know where you're going.

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