On Writing Prophecies and Chosen Ones (+ FREE Checklist)

Last quarter (because yes, I plan my content calendar on a quarterly basis), I published a blog post on chosen ones where I talked about why the trope is overused, doesn’t really work in modern fiction anymore, and why I think this classic trope needs to be subverted and readapted to the twenty-first century.

Now, I know a blog post like that would ruffle a few feathers. Thankfully, no one had anything bad to say about it. But I do understand that a lot of people might not agree with me. After all, it’s a classic trope for a reason, yes? 

And unlike a lot of writers and authors, I don’t think I’m god’s gift to humanity for literature. Even if my book series turned into a huge success, akin to a certain series I will not mention here because this is a safe space and I’m tired of bad people ruining good stories because of their inability to grow up.

Seriously, if there’s anything that makes me angry, it’s people branding themselves as progressive and then refusing to believe in actual research. But that’s an argument for another day.

What I want to say is that if you don’t agree with my assessment of the chosen one trope, and you want to write it, I support you! And as a self-appointed producer of writing guides, I thought it might be a good idea to present how good chosen one tropes are written.

So, in this blog post, we’re looking at the chosen one trope, why people still love reading these stories, how you can write your own chosen one story, what role prophecies play into this, how you can connect these two, and what mistakes you need to avoid.

Let’s go.

What Makes a Chosen One Worth Reading?

So, before we get to the how, let’s talk a bit about the why. Specifically, why people still love chosen one stories when—as I mentioned in my last blog post—it’s done so badly, so frequently?

I think the answer’s pretty simple and it’s also why it’s easy to mess it up. It’s about potential: human potential. We all want to be more than ourselves, our material conditions, and ultimately, do something great for the world. I think it’s easy to forget this part of the trope because readers want complex, interesting stories so it’s easy to get lost in the details. But as a writer—as the creator of your own world, essentially—you can’t get lost like that. It’s okay if you spend eighteen months on a subplot (I won’t blame you, I’ve done the same) but it’s important to remember the overarching theme of your narrative.

Your chosen one cannot “fall” into anything randomly. When you choose your protagonist, there has to be a reason behind them being the one.

Know The Difference Between Being Chosen and Being Interesting

Being chosen is a plot condition—a device that writers are intentionally choosing to make their stories interesting. This plot device cannot be all there is to your character. Your hero needs something more. 

And that’s why it’s so important to make them interesting. Traditionally, chosen one tropes consist of morally good characters like Percy Jackson or Aang or Katniss Everdeen. But you don’t have to have a good character. You can make your chosen one annoying, ungrateful—this is where you as the writer gets to decide stuff.

But the point is, your chosen one needs to be interesting. Don’t confuse them being “chosen” as a character condition. Being a chosen one and being a boring character are indicative of bad writing. Sorry, but it’s true. Treat being chosen ONLY as a plot device. If your character keeps saying, “I am right because I’m the chosen one” or “I can do this, because I’m the chosen one,” then you have a problem.

What makes a chosen one worth reading is everything that exists outside the prophecy. Their relationship with failure. Their sense of humour, or lack of it. The thing they want that has nothing to do with saving the world. The person they’d be if no one had ever told them they were special.

This is the stuff that makes readers want to come back and honestly, write fanfiction about your protagonist. I, for one, wait for the day my writing touches people so much that they write about my characters. It’s the highest compliment a writer can receive honestly.

So, how do you make sure a character is fully well-developed without their chosenness? Well, remove it from the equation completely and ask yourself: is there still someone interesting standing there? 

Destiny is Not a Personality Trait

This is similar to the last point but hear me out because it’s a mistake I see a lot in contemporary stories. This mistake produces the flattest chosen ones in fiction. And trust me, I don’t want your characters to be flat.

It ties back to my point about writers getting lost in the details. Often, writers confuse their protagonist’s role with their identity. Those are two very separate things.

Destiny tells your chosen one what they’re supposed to do. It tells you nothing about who they are when they wake up in the morning, what they’re afraid of in ways that have nothing to do with dark lords, what they find funny, what they refuse to forgive, what small ordinary thing they love that the plot will never have time to acknowledge.

Personality is built from specificity—from contradiction and the gap between who a person is and who they’re trying to be. When your character’s destiny is their personality trait, there’s really nothing to do there. You’re basically writing a plot device with dialogues and that’s boring.

This is something I don’t like about the Remembrance of the Earth’s Past series. It’s one of my favourite book series in the world, but—apart from Ye Wenjie for a very specific reason—I don’t care much for most of the characters there. And there’s an aerospace engineer in the series!

Sure, you can argue that for a sci-fi like that, characters aren’t important. But characters are the backbone of chosen one stories so if they don’t have a personality beyond destiny, what’re you doing?

The chosen ones who last—the ones readers carry around for years after finishing the book—are interesting in spite of their destiny, not because of it. Their chosenness is the pressure that reveals who they already were.

The Chosen One as a Vehicle for Theme

And now we get to the thing that really annoys me about modern chosen one stories: this trope is not a plot point. Seriously. It’s treated like one, but it’s not. I also called it a plot device earlier because it’s easy for people to identify it as such.

But if you’ve studied literature, you’ll know that it is just a thematic framework.

There, I said it. Feel free to roast me in the comments, but it’s true.

At its core, the chosen one story is asking a question. Usually one of these: 

• Does the individual matter, or only the collective? 
• Is greatness born or made? 
• What do we owe to a purpose we didn’t choose? 
• Can one person actually change anything?
• Or, is that a story we tell ourselves because the alternative is too frightening?

Your chosen one is the character through whom you explore that question. Which means before you write a single scene, you need to know what your chosen one story is actually about. Not what happens in it, what it’s arguing, what it believes about the world.

Because a chosen one without a theme is just a person with a prophecy. And a person with a prophecy, without anything deeper underneath, is exactly the kind of chosen one story readers are tired of.

Building Your Chosen One From the Ground Up: A Step-By-Step Guide

Okay, so now that we’ve established what a good chosen one looks like in theory, let’s get to the writing part. Because understanding the problem is one thing, actually building a character who avoids it is another. 

Here’s how to do it step-by-step.

Step #1: Define What They Were Chosen For (and Why Them Specifically)

I know this might sound obvious but I’ve read way too many stories in recent months where this wasn’t obvious. Of course, almost every writer knows what their chosen one is supposed to do: defeat the antagonist, fulfil the prophecy, restore balance. 

But far fewer can answer the harder question: why this specific person? Not “because the prophecy said so.” That’s circular. What writers need to be able to answer is:

• Why does the prophecy point to their chosen hero? 
• What is it about who they are (their particular combination of traits, history, circumstance) that makes them the right person for this specific task?

If your answer is “they were born with the power,” you need to go deeper. Power is circumstance. It’s not the reason.

The Difference Between Cosmic Selection and Earned Worthiness

There are two models of chosenness and they produce completely different stories.

• Cosmic selection: The universe, a god, a prophecy, some external force decided. Your character didn’t earn it. They were assigned it. This is fine, but it means the worthiness has to be demonstrated through the story, not assumed from the premise.
• Earned worthiness: The character becomes the chosen one through a series of choices, sacrifices, and developments that make them the only person who could be standing in this position by the end. The prophecy didn’t select a person. It selected a trajectory, and your character walked it.

Neither is better. But you need to know which one you’re writing because they require completely different approaches to character development.

What Makes Them the Right Wrong Person

The most compelling chosen ones are often people who seem like the wrong choice on paper. Maybe they’re too young, too broken or too ordinary. 

The interesting question isn’t why they were chosen, it’s how they become worthy of having been chosen. That gap between who they are at the start and who the prophecy needs them to become is your entire character arc.

Step #2: Give Them a Life Outside the Prophecy

Your chosen one existed before the prophecy found them. They had a life, relationships, and things they were good at that had nothing to do with destiny. 

And most importantly, they still have those things after the prophecy arrives, even if the prophecy makes them harder to hold onto.

Wants and Needs That Have Nothing to Do With Destiny

Every protagonist needs two things: what they want (the conscious goal) and what they need (the thing they’re missing that the story will force them to confront). 

For a chosen one, the temptation is to make both of these about the prophecy. You need to resist that.

Give them a want that is entirely personal and entirely unrelated to saving the world. Maybe they want to go home. Or, they want someone to love them without the weight of destiny in the room. Maybe they want to be ordinary so badly it’s become its own kind of grief. 

That personal want, rubbing against the demands of their destiny, is where your best scenes will come from.

Relationships That Exist Before the Calling

This is perhaps the most important thing that can seriously impact your story’s development. The people your chosen one loves before the prophecy changes everything.

Those relationships were built without the prophecy in them. And now that the prophecy is in everything, and your protagonist has to watch it change the people they were closest to.

That’s where the emotional weight of your story lives. Not in the battle or the grand quest but in the conversations before it, with someone who knew them when they were just a person.

Step #3: Build Their Flaw Around the Prophecy

Flaws in chosen ones are often decorative. Writers know they need to include them, so they add something small and manageable like a temper, a tendency to rush in that never actually costs the character anything significant. 

That’s not a flaw.

A real flaw is something that emerges directly from who this person is and what the prophecy has done to them.

The Flaw That Destiny Creates

Being told you are chosen does things to a person. It creates entitlement, or paralysis, or a saviour complex so deeply embedded the character can’t see it as a problem. 

And it creates an inability to ask for help because asking for help feels like admitting the prophecy was wrong. Relationships with other people will always feel slightly off because how do you be a normal friend when everyone in the room is aware that you might be the only thing standing between them and catastrophe?

Build the flaw from that. Make it something the prophecy caused.

The Flaw That Makes Them Dangerous

The best chosen one flaws are ones that could, under different circumstances, make them the villain. The same quality that makes them capable of doing what needs to be done. This can be ruthlessness, or certainty, or the willingness to sacrifice—something that could destroy everything if it tips too far.

It asks the question your story is supposed to be asking: is this person good, or are they just useful? And this is the kind of stuff readers love.

Step #4: Decide Their Relationship to Being Chosen

This is the interior question that most chosen one stories skip straight past, and it’s the one that produces the most interesting characters when you sit with it properly. Here’s how you address them. Answer these questions.

Do They Believe It?

Not every chosen one has to believe in their own destiny. In fact, a chosen one who is genuinely uncertain—not as a phase before they accept it, but as a sustained state they never fully resolve—is far more compelling than one who doubts for two chapters and then commits.

Do They Want It?

These are two separate questions and the distinction matters. A character can believe the prophecy is real and desperately not want it to be. A character can want to be special and refuse to believe the prophecy because the wanting feels shameful. The relationship between belief and desire is where your character’s psychology lives.

What Would They Sacrifice to Escape It?

This is the question that reveals everything. If your chosen one could walk away—like,truly, completely, with no consequences—would they? And if they would, what does that mean for every choice they make while they stay?

Step #5: Plan the Cost

A chosen one story without real cost is a fantasy of specialness, not a story about it. The cost has to be specific, personal, and irreversible. So, when you’re planning the cost of your protagonist’s chosenness, answer the following questions.

What Does Fulfilling the Prophecy Take From Them?

This can’t be something abstract. It has to be specific. You need to name the thing.

It can be anything. A relationship that can’t survive what they become. A version of themselves that has to be given up. An ordinary life that closes off the moment they step fully into the role. 

The cost should be something the reader understood was at stake from early in the story so that when it’s taken, it lands.

What Do They Lose That They Can Never Get Back?

The best chosen one stories leave their protagonists permanently changed in ways that aren’t triumphant. They saved the world. They also lost something they can’t name in the epilogue, something the victory doesn’t touch. That irreversible loss is what separates a story about destiny from a story about a person.

How to Write the Prophecy Itself: A Step-by-Step Guide

Now that you’ve got your chosen one character mapped out, let’s look at the prophecy itself. It’s important to note that you don’t need to have a prophecy for your chosen one, but it’s pretty standard to see these two together. And that’s the assumption we’re making here.

Because when creating their chosen ones, writers often don’t spend any time thinking about the prophecy itself. And that’s why some prophecies feel like these grandiose paragraphs with almost nothing substantial to offer except that your protagonist is special.

You shouldn’t treat your prophecy like this. It’s a narrative mechanism, a worldbuilding tool, and a character in its own right. It deserves the same level of intentionality you’re giving everything else.

What a Good Prophecy Actually Does

Let’s get one thing right: a prophecy’s job is not to tell the reader what’s going to happen. If it does that, you’ve already lost the plot (see what I did there).

A good prophecy needs to create tension and questions. It’s supposed to make readers lean forward, not be robbed of the grand reveal or tension.

It Creates Questions, Not Answers

As I’ve mentioned before, the moment your prophecy becomes a spoiler, it stops being useful. Your readers shouldn’t read your prophecy and immediately know how the story ends. That’s bad writing.

Instead, your readers should finish reading it and think: I have no idea how this ends and I have to know.

It Is Specific Enough to Feel Real, Vague Enough to Allow Story

Your prophecy also needs to be specific, real and yet vague enough to allow any sort of interpretation. Because that’s the point. A perfect example of this is George RR Martin’s Azor Ahai prophecy in A Song of Ice and Fire. Readers have spent decades arguing about who it refers to. That’s exactly what your prophecy should do.

The Language of Prophecy

Now, this one’s pretty obvious. How your prophecy is written matters as much as what it says. Prophecies have a register—a way of speaking—and that register tells the reader something about the world that produced it.

Ambiguity Is a Feature, Not a Bug

I cannot stress this enough. If your prophecy is perfectly clear, you have written a plot summary, not a prophecy. Every piece of genuine prophetic literature, from the Oracle at Delphi to Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth, operates through ambiguity. The meaning is always contested. The interpretation is always political.

Your prophecy should be the same. Who interprets it, and how, and why they interpret it the way they do—that’s the point. A prophecy that everyone agrees on is a prophecy that’s doing the bare minimum.

What Your Prophecy’s Source Says About Your World

Here are a few questions you should be able to answer about your prophecy:

• Where did it come from? 
• Who wrote it down? 
• In what language, and who translated it?
• What might have been lost or changed in that translation?

These questions are not peripheral. Because a prophecy produced by a state religion carries different authority than one scratched into a cave wall by an unknown hand. A prophecy written in a dead language that only three scholars can read is a prophecy that exists inside a power structure. And a prophecy that has been translated three times across four centuries is a prophecy that has almost certainly been changed.

The source of your prophecy is a statement about who holds power in your world and how they maintain it.

How to Integrate the Prophecy Into Your Plot Without Killing Tension

Once you’ve written and perfected your prophecy, you need to now figure out how to add it to your story without flattening the scene. Here’s how you do it.

When to Reveal It

The timing of your prophecy reveal is one of the most consequential structural decisions you’ll make. 

• Reveal it too early and you’ve given the reader a roadmap. 
• Reveal it too late and it feels like a cheat—something you invented after the fact to tie things together.

The general principle: reveal the prophecy when it creates the most productive confusion.

When the reader already suspects something is happening, and the prophecy reframes everything they’ve already seen in a way that makes them want to reread from the beginning.

Who Knows About It and Who Doesn’t

Information asymmetry is one of your most powerful tools as a writer. If every character knows the same prophecy, the story is flat. 

But if different characters know different versions of it, or if some characters know and others don’t, you have conflict, secrecy, and dramatic irony built into every interaction.

Think carefully about who has access to the prophecy in your world and why. Knowledge of the prophecy is power. Treat it like power.

What Happens When Characters Disagree About Its Meaning

This is where your prophecy stops being wallpaper and starts being a story. When two characters read the same text and come to completely different conclusions—and both conclusions are defensible—you have genuine conflict that can drive an entire narrative.

The disagreement doesn’t have to be hostile. It can be quiet, careful, the kind of difference that only becomes catastrophic later. But it has to be real. It has to matter. And at least one character’s interpretation has to be wrong in a way that costs everyone something.

The Chosen One’s Arc: How to Map It

This part’s different from what we’ve been talking about so far.

Every chosen one story lives or dies by its arc. Not the plot arc, the character arc. The external journey (prophecy found, villain defeated, world saved) is the scaffolding. The internal journey is the actual building.

And the internal journey of a chosen one is specific. It has distinct pressure points that other character arcs don’t have because the chosen one isn’t just changing in response to events. 

They’re changing in response to a destiny that claimed them before they had any say in the matter. Here’s how to map it.

The Call and the Refusal

Every chosen one arc begins with a call: the moment the destiny becomes known, or undeniable, or impossible to keep ignoring. And almost every good chosen one arc follows the call with a refusal.The refusal is not weakness. It is the most human moment in the entire arc. 

Because the correct response to being told you are responsible for saving the world is not immediate, cheerful acceptance. It is fear, grief and anger. The desperate wish that someone had chosen someone else.

What matters is what the refusal costs. A refusal that has no consequences, and that the plot simply waits out until the character comes around, is a refusal that doesn’t mean anything. 

The refusal has to affect other people, close doors, make things worse. Because only then does the eventual acceptance feel like a real choice rather than an inevitability the story was always going to deliver.

The Moment of Acceptance (and Why It Has to Cost Something)

The acceptance is not a triumph. Or rather, it shouldn’t be written as one. The chosen one accepting their destiny is the moment they give something up.

If you write the acceptance as a rousing, triumphant moment—cheers and music, determined expression, the hero finally stepping into their power—you’ve missed it. The acceptance is a quiet devastation dressed up as resolve. The character is not becoming more. They’re agreeing to become something specific, which means agreeing to stop being everything else.

Write it like a door closing, not a door opening.

The Crisis Point (When the Prophecy Fails or the Chosen One Does)

Every chosen one arc needs a crisis point. A moment where the prophecy stops being reliable, or the chosen one stops being capable, or both.

This is the most important scene in the entire arc and it is the one most frequently skipped or rushed. It requires the writer to genuinely threaten the premise, to make the reader believe, even briefly, that the prophecy was wrong, or the hero is not enough, or the world is going to end anyway.

The crisis point is where your chosen one has to make a choice that the prophecy didn’t account for. Where they have to act without the safety net of destiny, as just a person in an impossible situation, with no narrative guarantee that things will work out. 

That choice is what makes everything that follows feel earned.

The Resolution (Fulfilment vs. Transformation)

How your chosen one story ends depends entirely on what you decided it was about. There are three honest resolutions available to you and only one dishonest one.

Fulfilled Destiny

The prophecy comes true. The chosen one does the thing they were always supposed to do. This is the classic resolution and there is nothing wrong with it. 

A chosen one who fulfils their destiny and emerges essentially the same person they were at the start has not had an arc. They’ve had a series of events.

Transformed Destiny

The prophecy comes true, but not the way anyone expected. The chosen one fulfilled the letter of the prophecy and shattered its spirit, or vice versa. 

What was prophesied happens but the meaning of it is completely different from what everyone assumed. This is Martin’s territory. It’s the resolution that rewards readers who were paying attention.

Rejected Destiny

The chosen one says no. At the end. After everything. They look at the prophecy and they choose something else and the story has to reckon honestly with what that costs the world, not just the character. 

This is the hardest resolution to pull off because it risks feeling like a betrayal of the premise. But when it works, it produces the most thematically resonant chosen one stories available because it argues that agency matters more than destiny, and means it.

The one dishonest resolution: the chosen one fulfils the prophecy, loses nothing, and everything is fine. Don’t do this. It’s going to make readers hate you for the wrong reasons.

Questions to Ask Before You Write Your Chosen One

So, I’ve covered everything you could possibly need about writing chosen ones and prophecies. It’s a pretty heavy topic, which is why I decided to create a pre-writing checklist.

You can screenshot the list or download it by clicking on the button below. You’ll be subscribed to my email newsletter and I don’t send those frequently at all so it shouldn’t be annoying:)

Anyway, before you write a single scene, before you name your protagonist, before you draft your prophecy, answer these questions honestly. If you can’t answer them, you’re not ready to write the story yet. And that’s okay. That’s what this list is for.

Questions about your chosen one:

• Who are they when the prophecy isn’t in the room?
• What do they want that has nothing to do with destiny?
• What do they need that the story will force them to confront?
• What is their flaw? 
• Did the prophecy create it, or did they bring it with them?
• Do they believe in the prophecy? Do they want to?
• If they could walk away with no consequences, would they?
• What would they sacrifice to escape this destiny?
• And what does that tell you about them?
• Strip the prophecy away entirely: Is there still an interesting person standing there?

About your prophecy:

• Where did it come from, and who wrote it down?
• Who has access to it and who doesn’t?
• Who benefits from people believing it?
• Who benefits from people not believing it?
• Is it specific enough to feel real and vague enough to allow a story?
• Can it be misinterpreted? Has it already been?
• Has it been translated, copied, or tampered with?
• What happens in your world when characters disagree about what it means?

On the cost:

• What specifically does fulfilling this prophecy take from your chosen one?
• Did you show the reader what was at stake before you took it?
• Is the loss irreversible, or did you give it back in a different form?
• Does the cost change the character permanently, or do they absorb it and continue unchanged?

The arc:

• What does your chosen one’s refusal cost (think about everyone else, not just them)?
• What are they giving up when they accept their destiny?
• Where is the crisis point where the prophecy stops being reliable?
• How does your story end: fulfilled destiny, transformed destiny, or rejected destiny?
• Does your chosen one emerge from the story permanently changed in ways the victory doesn’t fix?

The final question — and the most important one:

• What is your chosen one story actually about? Not what happens in it. What does it believe?
•  What question is it asking about greatness, destiny, sacrifice, or what one person owes to the world?

If you can answer that question in one sentence, you’re ready. If you can’t, go back and get the answers. You can download this checklist from here: