An odd thing about the opening of the Bible: God does not just create light; he says, "Let there be light" -- and light is born. This is in fact how God creates the entire world: he gives voice to it... [more]

An odd thing about the opening of the Bible: God does not just create light; he says, "Let there be light" -- and light is born. This is in fact how God creates the entire world: he gives voice to it and makes it so. Language is a powerful force: it transforms things, makes things. Hence, when fiction writers take pen to paper, they are nothing less than creators of worlds, manipulating, twisting, aligning and re-aligning reality to their likings. There is no necessary or presumed pretense towards veracity; rather, the fiction writer invents the world. After all, language is not simply a reflection or representation of what exists -- it creates what exists. Of course, the creation does not stem from a vacuum or void. The writer does not create from the autonomy of imagination. The author is not an authority, as we might believe. Rather, the writer takes in hand the world as we know it and molds it, elongates it, makes it bend this way and that, like God playing with the clay that would be Adam. Indeed, in writing fiction there is all the joy and suffering that accompanies any act of creation, but it is a creation that arises from the building blocks of our culture and history. Out of these building blocks, the writer revises and transforms anew. The writer of fiction therefore maintains a rather odd posture. The words are not constrained to a stable, fixed truth and do not pretend to represent reality. A great hubris is at work in the writing of fiction: the writer creates as he or she sees fit, forging as many genders as are desirable, giving animals voice, putting the world upside down, making bodies bend and distend. The world is the writer's plaything. [show less]