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I love fantasy novels. I love the depth and allegory writers manage to weave into their stories, and I especially love learning about God through them. However, I have always struggled to put such stories on paper. That has never been more true than recently.

I recently came up with an idea for a new high-fantasy novel. The plot is rather straightforward, but the world is ridiculous. My problem is that I don’t know how to explain the ridiculous without info dumps. It also feels two-dimensional and silly even in tense scenes. I don’t know how to balance everything out, and while the obvious answer would be to eliminate the ridiculous, that stuff is part of the point of the story. Here’s what I mean:

The premise is that there’s this guy named Mike who decided that he was bored. Because of this, he pulled the “gray, mushy ball in his head” out through his ear to see how high it would bounce. That’s how the world was created. Then, still being bored, he put a string through it and spun it around. That’s why the world turns. Then he was still bored, so he took some of the slime from the ball and made people with them. But he was still bored, so he decided to make their lives miserable. That’s where all the bad stuff in life comes from. At least, that’s what everyone believes.

The story starts when Mike sends a young man named Stinger on a quest to find a treasure. Stinger takes his only friend with him and they pick up some people along the way, and they learn about themselves on the journey.

Eventually, they get to where the treasure is supposed to be and find out that Mike had lied to them – there was no treasure, and he lured them there to die. Then someone else appears and shows them the real treasure which turns out to be the truth about the world and about themselves. Then they all go home and “everything looks different when the truth glares off the sand.”

The thing is that I’ve leaned so hard into the ridiculous aspects of it that it has influenced the narrator’s voice (the narrator is a character in the book). It makes everything sound sillier than it’s supposed to be, but I can’t figure out how to add weight to everything without killing the flavor of the book.

Any thoughts?