Something Unexpected - A writing exercise

Writers - a Comparison. (Emily Dickinson and myself.)

God is a Writer

Writers are terribly pretentious people. False modesty aside, we are constantly in awe of our own ability to create, and are limited only by the ideology of our audience. If you can bend that well enough, then a book can be a revolution.  In this sense, writers have a God-complex; in a story, after all, no character is more powerful than the author.

So if God is a writer, then atheists must be critics like Roland Barthes, who kill the author and interpret what they can of the world for its own merit. Just as critics say we do not need the Author, atheists say we do not need a God, to which one must ask - could it not be the other way around? That rather than the special creator, it is God the writer who needs the story? It is the writer finding themselves in their own world, because they don’t comprehend the ideology of ours? Writers like Cheever, for instance - looking for his sexual identity through the minds of his characters, whilst trying to understand how our desires for passion and love, could be so muted by our need for money and security. In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, M. Attwood referenced a Japanese book 'The Dunes of Time' in her work, which suggested that a writer writes in order to 'distinguish between [themselves] and the puppets by making [themselves] a puppeteer'. Nevermind the character - is this what the author himself was doing in his work?

So then are writers pretentious? Are we even special? Or are we just so scared of our own reality and ideology we try to recreate something better, try to create a literary equation that will give us a solution? Whatever motivates us as writer, and whether the author is then disregarded or not, no one can doubt the power that a good piece of writing can have. Whether that power does indeed make us divine or pretentious, remains to be seen.