Don’t mess with Zeus
As an author, you are god to your characters. No matter their religious beliefs, when your characters pray to their own gods, they are really praying to an empty sky. You, as god, decide which prayers to answer and which to ignore. Likewise, if your characters are atheists, you choose whether to fulfil or crush their irreligious hopes and dreams. As authors, we play god, and we have to choose what kind of god we’ll be. Will we be a vengeful and interventionist Old Testament style deity? Or will we be a caring and peaceful god who loves their characters like their own children? The choice you make will make a huge impact on the style, tone and content of your story, so it’s wise to consider what kind of god you’ll be before you start writing.
Playing God by the Rules
First off, you need ground rules. In my writing, as god, I have control over luck, the weather and coincidences. This means if a character goes to a casino, it’s entirely up to me whether they win or lose. Likewise, I decide if it’s sunny or rainy. This is where John Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy comes into play. We can use the weather to mirror a character’s emotions or we can use it ironically as a contrast. It’s something of a cliché to have a broken-hearted character walk through rainy streets but it doesn’t have to be so dramatic. A depressed character, for example, is more likely to notice the grey clouds in the sky than the warm and pleasant breeze on their face.
Don’t Reveal Yourself
As god, you have a responsibility not to reveal yourself. Imagine having a character who won the lottery ten weeks in a row. Both your character and your reader wouldn’t believe it. By fixing the odds irresponsibly, you’ve broken the reader’s suspension of disbelief and also likely driven your character insane. They might, understandably, start to believe they’ve been blessed by a higher power. This would cause them to act irrationally and doubt the very order of the universe itself. This could make a good starting off point for a story but you’d have to balance all that good luck with something else to satisfy the reader’s desire for order. If a character prays, they are actually praying to you. If you choose to answer back, you’ll have to accept the consequences.
Telling a Good Story
What does a good story typically need? Conflict. As god, it’s your job to engineer situations whereby characters will find themselves entrenched in conflict. This is where it starts getting tricky to be a benevolent god. If you grant all your characters’ wishes, your story will be over. Therefore, you have to take a step back and allow your characters to achieve them on their own. Unfortunately, happiness is rarely interesting for long. To tell a compelling story, we need our characters to struggle and suffer. For the greater good of your story, you have to be cruel to be kind. As always, though, it’s a balance. Be too cruel and the reader may become so depressed they can’t even finish your book.
The Power of Free Will
As a god, you have a lot of power, but you also have your limits. Never force your characters to do things they don’t want to. It’s tempting to do this if you have a great idea and want the character to fulfil it, but I can guarantee one thing: if you allow your characters to make their own decisions, they’ll do something more interesting than what you had planned. If you force your godly will upon your characters, there’s a good chance your characters will revolt and you’ll suffer from writer’s block. Throw as many obstacles in their path as you want but never influence their will. If you want to change their mind, try doing it obliquely through metaphors and coincidences. In this way, your characters’ interaction with their god (you) may well mirror your own interaction with God (if you’re a believer).
Do You Believe in Fate?
If you’ve sketched out your story in a plan, you may have plotted the deaths of certain characters. In my experience, these rarely change. This might contradict what I said above about free will but if you’ve decided a certain character is fated to die, it’s likely you’ve foreshadowed that death and made it such an integral part of the story that they simply have to die. This is one place where, as an author, you can make death mean more than it does in real life. Whereas death in our own world often seems random, pointless and cruel, in our stories, death is a narrative device to drive or resolve conflict. Have fun killing your characters but make sure it means something.
Authors Work in Mysterious Ways
As writers we are bound to the conventions of storytelling. Readers expect mysteries to be revealed and conflicts to be resolved. As the author, it’s up to you choose if you’re a fickle god or not. Will you punish the good guy and reward the bad? Will the wishes you grant be double-edged swords? A lot of it is guided by the kind of story we want to tell, whether moralistic or nihilistic. For the sake of a good story, I tend to put my characters through the wringer. On more than one occasion, I’ve had characters directly curse me, as their god, for the situations I’ve engineered. The weird thing is, I adore them all. My characters are like my kids. Even though I love them, I want them to have compelling stories, so I make bad things happen to them (which I wouldn’t wish upon my real life kids).
What Kind of God Are You?
Are you benevolent? Malevolent? An interventionist? Do you agree that characters should have their own free will? Let me know in the comments!
Update: Here’s a great piece of flash fiction from mythicalmusingsblog that was inspired by this post!
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Niels Saunders 
I really enjoyed this! Made me think about how I treat my characters but also gave me an idea for a short story from a God perspective watching the characters get it totally wrong and having to break the rules to intervene! Should be an interesting write! Thank you!
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Fantastic, so glad you enjoyed it! Good luck with the story and please do let me know when it’s finished 🙂
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Might be a little while but I am hoping to get more flash fiction pieces up on my blog. I’ll drop you a message and a mention for the inspiration! Thank you!
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I have posted a short (~500 word) flash fiction piece thanks to your post. I have tagged you and linked your post as a thank you, I hope people check it out! Thank you again! x
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That’s wonderful to hear! I’m going to read it right now 🙂
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Interesting stuff! Though I’ve always looked at myself more as a conduit than a god. Most of the time I feel as though I have little to no control over what’s going on; I’m simply recording events. But it was a great read and nice perspective!
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Thanks a lot for reading. A conduit is an interesting way of looking at it. It’s definitely better for the characters if you don’t meddle too much.
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That’s sort of what I’ve found. Every time I try to get them to do something they don’t want, the words don’t come out. It was only a few years ago that I learned to let go. It changed my writing completely. Of course, I know everyone has their own process, but that’s the one that worked for me.
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I’m exactly the same! It’s like my characters go on strike if I force them to act against their will. It’s fascinating how they’re as stubborn as real people.
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I feel the same way, almost like I’m channeling the story and characters. Makes it hard to plan when they turn around and change the story on me!
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Haha. Right?! I’ve also had a few situations where I definitely didn’t expect my characters to do what they did. Keeps it exciting, at least. 😉
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They have their own agendas, I swear!
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Informative. A great way to think about writing. Thank you.
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Glad you liked it, Johnell. Thank you for reading 🙂
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Very good post Sir, well written, it was a good read.
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Thank you kindly! I’m delighted you enjoyed.
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Reblogged this on Truth Troubles: Why people hate the truths' of the real world and commented:
This young man has created an interesting read, please him a few moments to see what you think of his writing.
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Terrible things happen to my characters, but then I try to have a sense of justice in the end. I think they all cringe when I open the document to start writing.
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Probably why I write, when I write I am feeding my God-complex. Probably the only thing I can control. But like you said the trick is not to be too obvious!
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Hey Niels!!
This was a fantastic post! In fact, it’s one of the best I’ve read about self publishing. Most articles online tell you to do x, y and z in a specific order but there’s no emotion or story. With this post, I could actually see you doing/applying all of this as you went along. Please, post more like this!!
Thanks,
Keef!
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Thank you so much, what a lovely comment! So glad you enjoyed it and you’ve certainly inspired me to keep blogging 🙂
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I’ve started a similar journey myself and your posts are great insight. keep up the great work!!!
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Haha, I never thought of myself but quite like it! 😀 I think I’m a mysterious god, where hardly any of the “right” characters get punished, but like to leave them with a fair amount of free will.
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Very well written. I like it!
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Thank you very much 🙂
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You have a very beautiful website. I look forward to coming back and reading more. Please stop by mine and if you like, follow back.
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Great post, Niels! True, writers do indeed play at God. If I’m a god, I’ve learned that removing my subjects’ free will is off limits. Often time I am intent on including a particular remark or point of view or plot point, yet the characters I have at hand would not be the ones to usher in the intended remark, POV, or plot point…and thus a new character is born, or perhaps the idea is scrapped or shelved for a later book. Great blog you have here, Niels. I’ve just subscribed.
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Thanks for your great comment. You’re right, free will is definitely off limits. It can be tough if you’ve got a great idea in mind, though. I find characters are quite responsive to being nudged rather than forced 🙂
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It feels nice to think that I am a God to my characters. EXCELLENT!!! I am a 10 year old boy living in India. I have just started writing stories on my blog : https://shortstories4kids.wordpress.com/ Let me know what you think about my characters.
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Great blog and advice! I never thought of writing from that perspective 🙂
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Thanks a lot. Glad you enjoyed 🙂
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Great points here. Being a devout Catholic, I’ve always been aware of how I am similar to God when I write a story. That being said, I don’t think I’m a very good god! Thanks for the read!!!
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Yep, it can be very tough to be a ‘good god’ while telling an interesting story. Thanks a lot for reading 🙂
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My pleasure!
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The one thing the god author must remember is that the deity part—it’s not you. That god can make people do all sorts of things that the real you wouldn’t. There is the liberating part. Aunt Bessy reads the book and is scandalized by whomever’s behavior—not you, that’s whomever. So you really can do all sorts of things. That’s very liberating.
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