The glory of the writer.
I think that of all the things you could write about — real life would be the easiest possible topics to write about. Fiction is so much more difficult to write about than life. Real life is merely telling of events and facts. Mere regurgitation of research and experience. The next step up on the difficulty level is nonfiction writing where you make speculations and personal remarks upon the subject. Taking the subject material and analyzing it and putting out points of view is one step up from mere historical or factual writing. These sorts of things require creation. It requires creativity and intellect in order to take something and make it your own. The most difficult writings however are fiction.
Maybe difficulty isn’t the right word. Honorable, possibly. It is more worthy of praise than any other kind of writing. Fiction has to be made up. The writer has to take real life and pieces of reality and then create an alternate reality. It is not easy to create alternative realities. If the author makes mistakes, the reader will catch on and it won’t be real. Fiction is not fiction because it is not real. Fiction is real. Fiction is just an alternative reality. It is not what exists in our world, bu what exists in the world created by the author. The fiction writer is arguable one of the most powerful individuals in the world. He can create and destroy worlds – raise up or destroy life. Fiction writing is the closest humans can get to becoming God. God created us in His image, so does the fiction writer create characters and worlds in his. Fiction is our mimickry of God – our best attempts to match him.
Writing also creates a sort of immortality. Far more than athletes or political leaders, authors are the ones who are known and remembered the longest. Their worlds last far past their lifetimes. They continue to exist once their god is dead. Continue existing – continue living on showing glory to their creator. Atlantis has lived longer than most ancient civilizations, and it never even existed in this world other than in writing.
There are other professions like that of the writer. Speechwriters for famous political readers and writers of history books can alter the reality of this world. Hitler created an alternate world that actually existed in our own. It lasted from 1939 until 1944. The Third Reich was a completely different world. It did not have nearly as much of a concept of human rights as the rest of the world. It was a world that existed without external facts. Anything that Hitler or his propaganda ministry didn’t like was axed, not permitted into the world. The people of the third reich loved it. They burned books with a zest that would have made Beatty weep with joy. Hitler wasn’t a bad man in the world he had created. He was a bad man in our world. He was a horrible man measured by the standards of our world, but in the world of the third reich, he was the ultimate man. He was an ubermensch.
World War II was not so much a war of separate nations within our world. It was a war between two very separate realities. One reality held by the Allies and one reality held by the Axis. It was as if the two sides were residents of different dimensions. They were very much alien to each other.
Filmmakers also have a similar power over reality and creating worlds. They can create alternate worlds which can be experienced through sight and sound. Unfortunately they do not have the control that writers have. Writers command all senses – filmmakers command only two.
… and screenwriters aren’t filmmakers?