On Writers.

I have nothing to ramble on about tonight, so I thought I’d copy a few words from The Thirteenth Tale because they resonate with me on a personal level. Miss Winter, the world famous author who has engaged the book’s narrator to write her biography, is recalling her life as a writer.

I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leant over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams. (© Diane Setterfield.)

It’s what writers do, of course. And yet, having engaged with the craft of writing a little myself over ten years of my life, I still have to consider the question I’ve posed before on this blog:

Given the possibility that reality is a rather more fluid concept than we are conditioned to believe, could it be that in writing characters we create an alternate reality in which they become somehow real? And if that is the case, do we owe them respect? Should we acknowledge a sense of obligation towards them? Should we take some form of responsibility for their pains and pleasures, their gains and losses? In other words, do writers assume the role of God in a sense that is somehow more than mere imagination?

Or am I just being fanciful because the sort of people who are driven to write fiction are inevitably fanciful by nature? I expect I probably am.