phantasm (noun) - a shadow of reality

"The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal."
~Jorge Luis Borges

Why does an author write a story? That's an interesting question... and a pretty deep one. You might say that authors write because they can't help it. That for writers, there is no high quite like the rush that comes with words flowing from the heart, through the mind, and out the fingers. That for them, there is no way to resist the compelling struggle of finding just the right word, or the triumph that comes when a sentence is finally thrown down on the paper or screen before them, each word sought after, fought for, and hard won. And while that's definitely part of it, it's not everything. Not nearly everything.

Here's what I think. I think an author is a special kind of person. Not any more special than an engineer or a doctor or a businessman, only different. Engineers look at life and see a factory or a machine; doctors see a body; businessmen see life in terms of projects and deals.  In the same way, authors have a unique lens through which they view the world, and when they look around they see stories.

Engineers do work to make the machine of life perform better; doctors do work to make the body of life healthier; and businessmen do work to make the office of life run more smoothly. They use the pieces of the world that they see to make things better for everyone else.

Authors are the same. They see things in the people and places and things of life that need to be noticed: our well-being depends on it as much as on medicine and machines. We need our hearts and our spirits to be cared for as much as our bodies… and authors do that. They have the tools to put those elusive pieces of Truth into words that can be read and consumed by the other people, the doctors and engineers and businessmen.

And I think the reason that people are compelled to use their tools is because they were made by the hand of (and in the image of) a creative (and creating) God. God is an author: he spoke words and created the story of the world. So when authors get an urge to write, it’s because they see bits and pieces of God’s Truth in the world around them. They have that creative spark inside them too, and they want to use it to create stories that show these glimpses.

That’s not to say that every book and poem written actually does this. Secular authors don’t acknowledge this, of course (though sometimes they stumble on a beautiful little piece of Truth without  intending to). They create for the sake of “art” itself: and art for art’s sake too often twists truths instead of reflecting them. Also, because sin taints every aspect of the world, some written words are false, and turn beautiful things into warped, ugly versions of themselves. But that isn’t what writing is intended to be. Writing is meant to be the pieces of Truth authors share because they were given the ability to see them, the way other people are drawn to use their own gifts.

“A bird doesn’t sing because it has the answer, it sings because it has a song.”
 ~Maya Angelou