A Written God

111/365

And it was an accident.

See, I sat at the table early. And I started to type away. And I typed, and I typed, and I typed away. And this world began to form within the text. It wasn’t clear what I was looking at when I began, but as I continued the things written earlier became clearer. And I’d go and I’d make tiny adjustments to keep things consistent throughout the entire text. And these people within the universe I created developed personalities and lives. And as I continued to write they had families and friends. Loved ones.

And to make the story exciting, one day, I killed one. Just one character. And then I wrote the sad emotions of each character grieving over the loss of this individual. And the drama was lovely. So I killed a second, just for shits and giggles. And their lives were destroyed, again. Catastrophically beautiful.

As I continued to develop these characters after their dramatic losses I realized my impulsive actions created unfixable inconsistencies. The first one’s death was fine, it was the second one which needed to be undone. And as God of this written world I can do that.

But I halted. I didn’t know how to fix it without deleting all these things which were based on the character’s death in the first place. It’s my universe, yet I somehow found myself in a predicament where I couldn’t know how to alter any of this. I could bring the character back to life but only if I caused a large enough scale genocide somewhere in the character’s universe to keep their family’s reaction intact.

When I decided to do this I found other tiny inconsistencies left and right. Things which I couldn’t explain away with infinite time. Things I couldn’t make work even if I tried. And I had to fix many of them by covering them up with worse things unrelated to the main story.

It becomes clear to me that I’m a god which has no idea what he’s doing. And I’m trying my best to keep the story focused on the main tragedy, but I’ve caused quite a couple, and they are great fixes for large problems, but now I have a bunch of emotional characters wondering how all these things are happening and why.

Now, the tragedies themselves being cover ups for my poor skills as a writer come with no fixes. I’ve simply aligned the universe they’re within to allow these things to happen and be common place which allows me to keep the drama minus having to actually harm main characters.

But I’ve designed intelligent characters who then question the probability of these disasters. And I need subplots, so I zone in and indulge their curiosity. Their questions spin off into madness and a large subplot develops. But as writing goes, holes-for-days, and I end up with more shit to fix. And I’m lost and confused desperately trying to stop their lives from being shit. But they question everything and they’re intelligent, so they know it doesn’t make sense, and I want it to make sense but I could never find a way. I just make their lives worse thinking these adjustments made will work and then find more holes.

Eventually the realization that the holes along the sides of the subplot are insignificant force me to simply lead the characters to unanswerable questions. Taking a page from experience I looked to find the unanswerable question in my surroundings. The answer which kept coming back was to make the characters question whether I, the writer, was causing these things to happen for reasons beyond their understanding. Which just so happened to be the truest fact of all. I’d be able to gradually answer things with logical reasons because they’re based in true reality.

The answers the characters came up with were somewhere along the lines of a great writer making this puppet show out their world to entertain other creators which did the same to their own personal worlds on a regular basis. They discover many other realities where these creators have designed the universe to be at the brink of extinction and a singular hero arrives last minute to save everyone. All for entertainment.

After that point it wouldn’t have made sense to involve these creators any further as they’re essentially gods and couldn’t realistically be bothered by the characters. And the need for a branching conflict arises. And this is where it gets fun. I create the non-believers. Those that think the writer doesn’t exist. Those that think the writer isn’t real. And it’s great because I can use the conflicting questions it bring up for the entirety of the story. The tragedies have several explanations. The non-believers seek a physical proof while the believers seek for spiritual proof for their arguments. And from their questions I know what to hit for drama and what to not.

Destroying their lives has never been better because I couldn’t be blamed for anything if everyone forgot to question whether I’m writing it and are blaming each other because it’s the only enemy they can see. I didn’t have to answer anything anymore and it’s because of the struggles at the beginning which lead me here. The characters story are ultimately forced to accept that my reasons are beyond the understanding of their universe and there is no way to fully comprehend from within the story why I need to cause these things. Ultimately the lesson I took from this experience came in the form of acceptance just like the characters in the story. Acceptance that even as god of my writing I’m not all powerful, and not all things can be done while keeping the story entertaining and consistent. The only rule is consistency, and even I must obey.