If I don’t want God’s job, why do I write fiction?
Writers often speak of “playing God” with their characters. Because of course, the writer must have a better grasp on that character’s strengths, flaws, past, motivations, fears, hopes, goals, etc, than anyone else in the story world, even the character himself. You can’t write a convincing person if you don’t know who they are. But an interesting side effect of this knowing is that sometimes a character will do something the writer didn’t expect. Something that flows out of who that character is that maybe the writer didn’t notice the first time around. But you, the writer, kinda have to go with that, because forcing characters to follow an author’s agenda inevitably drains the life right out of them. Paradoxically, you have to know your characters so well that they quite literally start taking on a life of their own.
But fiction, like life, has conflict and pain and sorrow and people that fall. In fact, one of the first things one learns as a writer is that fiction NEEDS conflict, or it becomes boring and lifeless. True conflict, the kind that grows and breathes and expands in directions you don’t always expect and changes characters you care about…this is hard to write. It is hard to ALLOW this kind of conflict in a story, because it means surrendering some of your godly writerly power to do whatever you wish with your characters. It means sparing characters you’d rather destroy, and destroying characters you really, really wish you could save. True, you could still have the villain have a last-minute change of heart…you are the author, and it’s your story. But you know, and your audience will certainly know that the change wasn’t real, didn’t flow out of who that character was. Such authorial fiat…even when done for the benefit of the character…it invalidates the character as a person. Their choices no longer matter. And they cease to be real.
And the story fails.
I suppose, as a writer, my first priority…my first loyalty, as it were…is not to the characters in the story, but to the story itself. I have to ensure that the story moves, breathes, lives. But what is a story, if not the interaction of characters to each other, to their circumstances, to events that happen within the story frame? It’s not like loyalty to story and loyalty to character can be separated; you don’t have one without the other. I guess it’s a matter of looking at a story and being invested in the characters themselves instead of a particular outcome. I have to first decide what my characters are like, but then I have to allow them to actually BE that, whatever the consequence to them, the plot, and my own sensibilities. If one of my characters asked me what the hell I wanted with them, I’d want my answer to be “I want you to be you”, and not “I want you to do this…”
But, see, that means letting characters fall. Do terrible things. Destroy themselves. Die. It’s taking the stance of “I will not save you if you will not let me.”
Not can’t. I’m the author. I control everything about the story. Of course I could save any character I wanted to. Hell, I could write them without flaws and without conflict in the first place, thus saving myself the need to save them at all. But if I did that, they’d be flat and lifeless and they wouldn’t really be alive.
No, I won’t save them. I refuse. I have to, or the story itself dies. The truth is that I create some characters to fall, some for the sole purpose OF falling so that their story could live. Even though technically it was their decisions and their personality that led to their downfall, that I did nothing more than leave them to it, I would hold myself responsible. Because everything they have, I gave them. I am a cruel, ruthless, Calvinist god, and if my characters knew about me, they would have every reason to hate me. They should hate me. Even though everything I do, I do to preserve their only reality, integrity demands that they hate me. I would expect no less of them.
I don’t always like being that God.
So what if we’re all just characters in a vast, cosmic story? What if Calvin was right, and some of us really were created for the purpose of falling? Personal theology aside, it’s not like I can’t imagine a scenario where love demands I let a character experience pain and anger and heartbreak and death and destruction. How many times have I lamented over Raphel’s fate? And yet I don’t think there’s a character I love more. Wouldn’t I like to break the rules of the Waters and let Alex and Lauren be together in the end? Wouldn’t I love to save Fayna from Cain’s Curse without killing her…don’t I know how that’s going to hurt Caleb? But I wouldn’t write a book in which those things happen if I didn’t love the characters and their story. It’s kind of beautiful and reprehensible all at once.
I can imagine that kind of God. I could understand why he allows what he allows, and I could even believe he does it for love of me.
But I couldn’t worship him. I couldn’t love him back. And I don’t think the real God is like that.
Maybe he is a kind of storyteller, and we are all characters in a grand story. But that’s as far as the analogy would go, because the story he’s telling and the stories I tell have different purposes. My stories exist to evoke a powerful emotion from the reader. That’s it. Emotion. Whatever that emotion happens to be; as long as it’s strong. That’s the whole point of the whole endeveour. It’s all very self-serving, really, especially if I’m also the reader. Somehow I don’t think God’s story exists only to make God feel stuff. I think it exists because God is Love, and Love is a two-way street. Love without a recipiant is like performing a play to an empty theater. It’s incomplete. The story is the link between lover and beloved; the story exists to create and preserve that link. Now, I don’t have any idea what that story, overall, looks like. From my perspective it looks a whole lot like the stories I write, in which bad things happen to advance the story. But that makes for a terrible, cruel cosmology; therefore, I assume I’m missing something.
After all, I’m not God, am I?
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