The Writer as God: Yes, No, Maybe So

During my usual reading and walking routine yesterday evening, I came across a rather pleasant and uplifting comment in a magazine. The author stated in an article on science fiction that '...Creation is fun! You are in complete control of the world and its inhabitants... and anything goes.'

I promptly closed the magazine and looked up to the dying sunset, knowing that nothing could possibly be further from the truth, aside from the ‘Creation is fun!’ part (I would say it is more 'ecstasy' than 'fun').

This might be truer for some writers than others, but in my experience of having excavated the corner of an idea, my work has only just begun. The symbols spring out at me, I watch the lines of what I'm seeing embroider something much larger, and soon, I get excited because what was once a simple stone has become a temple with treasures and secrets within, all being guarded by horrors and traps unknown. Unearthing is fun, but by no means do I have control over what I'm seeing. 

As for the world's inhabitants, I've wanted to stop, often kill, every character I've ever seen to keep them from the hell that awaits them around every turn, but they don't listen. Even when I'm trying to help them, give them signs, and point at the direction they need, they do what they want, usually to screw over other people for their own benefit.

The strongest and strangest part of fiction is the truth in it. I once uncovered a man driving home from work, day-dreaming of the expression on his lovely wife’s face when he would tell her he finally received the raise they had been praying for, the raise he’d suffered week after week of grueling office labor to attain; the raise they needed to pay for their increasingly daunting monthly mortgage payments. I’d be lying if I told you he stopped just short of the eight-year-old boy riding his black Huffy with the yellow flames riding down the frame–Lil’ Outlaw bunched across the side in big blocky red letters. No, for a fiction writer, I’m not in the business of lying. The things we see are often horrible, but they’re pieces of true reality. How are we any different from the people trying to cope with their mundane life problems within the confines of plot? Is not life a plot in its own, only to end tragically with the death of our beloved hero, premature or otherwise?

In that case, whatever God you believe in might have his divine plan–his epic plot–but how many of us do precisely what our Lord or otherwise asks? My characters do precisely what they would do if they were birthed and raised to be the people they are, and that's rarely in compliance with the world they're in. To muse upon a question that has plagued this and many other generations of mankind: why would a loving God allow suffering to exist? Suffering is true human nature. To deny that would be an outright lie. Lastly, if observing true human nature has proven anything, it's that suffering is damn entertaining to watch.