An interesting aspect of writing different fiction series is that writers change along with their series. Looking at my three fiction series — the Waldmeer Series, the Nanima Series, and the Enanika Series — there is a clear progression in how I use fiction to explore and express ideas. It wasn’t consciously planned so much as it intuitively unfolded.
Story as the Vehicle
The Waldmeer Series was my first fiction series. I was experimenting with a basic question: How do I carry spiritual ideas inside fiction while holding the reader?
My answer was to give the reader plenty of story. A lot happens in Waldmeer. There are many characters, relationships, families, crises, separations, reunions, changes of place, spiritual communities, love affairs, personal transformations, losses and new beginnings. The spiritual ideas are everywhere, but they arrive through what happens to people. There is usually a concrete human situation carrying the thought.
That gives the reader a strong narrative rail to lean on. Even when the books move into less conventional territory — karma, healing, consciousness, different realities, spiritual traditions and other dimensions — there is generally a person, relationship or event anchoring it.
The movement of Waldmeer is:
life → relationship → event → spiritual meaning.
I was playing with the notion that fiction could carry the ideas I wanted to write about.
Talking About Ideas
By the time I began the Nanima Series, things had changed. I knew I could write fiction after five years of writing the Waldmeer Series. I no longer felt the same interest in big narrative movement. This time I wanted to stay with the ideas themselves for much longer. And so Nanima became much more contemplative.
Things still do happen. But the narrative often pauses within an experience to examine it. A circumstance may lead into a psychological reflection, a spiritual one, an energetic one, or something symbolic. One thought opens another. It’s less about what happens next than about what this experience means, or why it occurred. What is happening beneath it? What does it reveal about consciousness?
That makes Nanima more associative and somewhat more demanding of the reader. The flow of thought is not particularly linear. An idea may circle around and return later from another direction.
The movement is:
experience → contemplation → association → spiritual idea → another experience seen differently.
If I had made the thought-flow more obvious and linear, the books might have been easier to read, but they would also have become less layered and less capable of deepening the reader’s own thought patterns.
If Waldmeer expands, Nanima penetrates.
Living There
After four years of writing the Nanima Series, the Enanika Series came next. I neither wanted to surround the ideas with constant action nor spend too much time discussing them. The new question became: What if I convey these ideas without talking about them much? What if I create the experience of living them?
Enanika contains very large ideas: incarnation, interworld contact, memory across worlds, consciousness, identity, the loss of original awareness, why beings might enter dense physical realities, and what is gained and lost by doing so. But instead of stopping to explain those ideas, the series embodies them.
Enlan is not merely a character with whom we journey through spiritual forgetting. His life is the forgetting. And the remembering. Anu does not need to give a long argument for the existence of consciousness beyond Earth. She comes from another world. The Contact Callers and Storytellers are not spiritual concepts. They belong to the story’s reality.
Instead of saying, “Let us discuss what this means,” the series asks, “What if these ideas are true? What would life actually be like?”
The movement of Enanika is:
idea → embodiment → lived reality → meaning.
Enanika is not a return to the more event-driven structure of Waldmeer, and it is not a continuation of the contemplative structure of Nanima. It is another way of experiencing existence. The reader enters the imaginative possibility and lives there.
Series Siblings
- Waldmeer says: Let me tell you a story and I will show you these ideas.
- Nanima says: Let’s sit down with these ideas and investigate them.
- Enanika says: Let’s suppose these ideas are true. Let’s see what life would actually be like.
Another way of putting it is:
- Waldmeer asks, What’s going to happen here?
- Nanima asks, What does this experience mean?
- Enanika asks, What if reality actually works like this?
Waldmeer is the most traditionally novelistic. Nanima is the most explicitly contemplative and philosophical. Enanika is the most purely visionary.
- Waldmeer taught me how to make ideas live inside people and events.
- Nanima gave me permission to go deeply into the ideas themselves without worrying about whether enough was happening.
- Enanika is asking me to trust the fictional world enough to withdraw much of the explanation. The world is created. The people have life breathed into them. The reality is established. Then the reader can just live there and make their own decisions.
Waldmeer expands. Nanima penetrates. Enanika distils.
Your Path
Your own journey as a fiction writer may flow in a way that resembles mine, but almost certainly it will not.
Some writers stay within one genre or narrative style for most of their writing life and go deeper and deeper into it. Others move between very different forms, subjects, tones, and structures as their interests change. There is no correct pattern.
Your fiction will often develop in response to what your life is asking of you at the time. Sometimes a writer begins a story because they need to work through something. A first novel may arise from grief, trauma, divorce, illness, loneliness, a midlife change, or the need to imagine a different life. Later, the writing may become more adventurous, more philosophical, more playful, or more ambitious.
A fiction writer’s development is very personal. As your consciousness changes, so does your creative expression. What you notice changes. What you can imagine changes. Stories that once felt urgent may fall away, and new ones line up to talk to you.
What does your inner self want you to write now?
From Writing: A Spiritual Voice
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