Why Do We Write?

             Why do we write?  What is the connection between creative writing and God?  What common ground may be found in the creative impulse that formed the Universe and the creative impulse that pushes writers to write?  And, if one may wonder about how God feels about His creation, then we might equally well ask also how the writer feels about the characters he creates. 

             Now, put yourself into the mind of the character.  Should the character know, meet, hear the voice of, or otherwise have an inkling of the author who created her?  But that’s meta-fiction!  The characters’ world should be self-contained, there should be no interaction, you say?  Yet, there are examples in literature in which the author presents himself in his own fiction, e.g., John Fowles’s appearance in the railroad car and elsewhere in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  How would the scene in the railroad car have played out if Fowles had given Smithson advice?  How would that scene have played out if Smithson recognized that Fowles had created him?  Or if Fowles told Smithson that he was a fiction of Fowles’s imagination?   

             We are God to our creations, aren’t we?  “In the beginning, the Author created Heaven and Earth.”  From nothing, through the Author’s willpower, an image of Man emerges from the blank page.  The Big Bang has ripped open a universe where before there was at most the Thought.  Man emerges, then Woman.  Or, reverse the order.  A world of complications forms around them and they are sent on their way, for better or worse, to err or to succeed.