Writers: do we actually do anything?
Nov. 5th, 2013 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerI'm a fan of the D'niverse, the fictitious reality created for the Myst and Uru series of games by Cyan Worlds (now Cyan Inc.), in which it's possible to write a book which contains a description of a world, and then travel through that book to that world. A better metaphor for my vocation I have yet to find.
There's an interesting philosophical point here, which as far as I'm concerned remains unsettled; do the Writers in the game actually create the worlds they write, or do they merely link to worlds that happen to match their description, in a quantum universe where all possibilities are equally real? Cyan has to my knowledge never officially pronounced on this; the characters in the game, though, being religious, definitely lean to the latter explanation, in the belief that thinking otherwise inevitably leads to a god complex and divine retribution. I don't agree. I think it's possible to believe that you create a world without going mad over it, and if God exists in that fictional universe, I don't believe he's that jealous. So, in the game and in my writings set in that universe, I'm the Heretic.
And why am I writing about this now? Because someone identified only as Grey Wolf has commented to one of David Gerrold's Facebook posts, to the effect that in his opinion actual writers in the real world, tellers of stories, don't actually create the stories they tell; they just spy on other worlds and report back on what they see. I've never seen that view seriously advanced before; a writer might jokingly suggest that s/he is just watching, just along for the ride, has no control over the characters, but in the end surely everyone knows that isn't true, don't they? Can we not even have acknowledged control over our own imaginations?
I think, if I weren't so stressed about more important things at the moment, I could get seriously harrumphy about this. So it's probably a good thing that I am. :)
There's an interesting philosophical point here, which as far as I'm concerned remains unsettled; do the Writers in the game actually create the worlds they write, or do they merely link to worlds that happen to match their description, in a quantum universe where all possibilities are equally real? Cyan has to my knowledge never officially pronounced on this; the characters in the game, though, being religious, definitely lean to the latter explanation, in the belief that thinking otherwise inevitably leads to a god complex and divine retribution. I don't agree. I think it's possible to believe that you create a world without going mad over it, and if God exists in that fictional universe, I don't believe he's that jealous. So, in the game and in my writings set in that universe, I'm the Heretic.
And why am I writing about this now? Because someone identified only as Grey Wolf has commented to one of David Gerrold's Facebook posts, to the effect that in his opinion actual writers in the real world, tellers of stories, don't actually create the stories they tell; they just spy on other worlds and report back on what they see. I've never seen that view seriously advanced before; a writer might jokingly suggest that s/he is just watching, just along for the ride, has no control over the characters, but in the end surely everyone knows that isn't true, don't they? Can we not even have acknowledged control over our own imaginations?
I think, if I weren't so stressed about more important things at the moment, I could get seriously harrumphy about this. So it's probably a good thing that I am. :)