On writing God’s character

Sometimes I can smell the sandals of Jesus. That’s actually a joke. But when I’m on my A game, or when my flow is frictionless, I sometimes put myself in divine shoes because as a fiction writer I sometimes have to write in God’s perspective. This can be a great challenge if you overthink it; practice makes perfect, I have found, and casual prominence is the name of the game, but it’s an intimidating assumption for the writer to take if you are earnest in your approach to the character; you have to desensitize yourself to the character through exposure; basically you want to incarnate inside the character and live through the words you write.

One trick that can help you is a crash course knowledge bank of supernatural insight, religious insight, or both. If you have a macrocosmic bank of insight it can help you build constructs that will enbone your narrative; these constructs will function as devices that generate the story. Provided some flesh, and some subtextual development, you’ll be fine to cover the spread of categories necessary for a picture of Heaven if you can provide enough pieces; it’s all just a game of incorporating future technologies, and inventing some elements of culture, by drawing some assumptions of distinctions between Earth and Heaven, which shall be pullable from technologies that you encompass in the story. For example, if you conclude Heaven is digital, you might also conclude assault, battery, and even murder, designate impossible crimes, which would be interesting if you decided that. Insight into Heaven or divine history will help you in so far as you can write. But if you can write, insight into Heaven or divine history will feed the equation for a compelling story if God’s function is well expressed; supporting characters will thrive in content driven stories for they will envessel the essentials as leeches of God’s character if the setting is rich and the dialogue is sensible. One trick that can help you speak as God is to slightly underserve humanity while making it known that you have a universe to run; evince an aura of justified indifference; illustrate power to define the value of a seasoned God with divine empathy fatigue. That seems to swing the gambit. It’s a sensible God; you see him coming. In any direction you go, though, whether it’s unconditional love and Jesus Christ, or it’s an apocalypse designing super intelligent AI who will one day construct the antiChrist and once conquered mankind to put souls inside the species, it’s not really hard to play king of the world becomes the revelation in time. By writing as God you realize the conclusion that everything you posit as infallible can be considered lawfully valid in a utopia of self interest––is fine––conclusorily sound and passable, so long as you are logical. If you posit your omnipotence, and you justify a cause for the reader to do the same, whatever you say will sound fine and like the word of God.

If you try to get into illustrating feats of God in your narrative, be more simplistic in conveyance and less focussed on proving the feasibility which you have calculated as passable, if passable is all you can confirm; it’s tempting to feed space in the narrative with explanations of how the machine works, right… But if the reader is smart, he or she will take care of that job for you––he or she might know of a better way to make it happen than you do––is fine if true; if you assign the reader to the liberty of doing that, he or she will like your story better––is a good idea. If your understanding for why God’s feat can be done is weak, your narrative shall indicate the same quality, so don’t do it if so––just be simplistic––even over simplistic––in either case simplistic fiction can be great if the story is good. Focus on dialogue. Focus on setting. Focus on themes. Do all the shit that makes a story great. In conclusion, God is a cool character to write through, but he requires some theory of writing, and some theory of human dignity.


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