Playing God: Life Lessons I've Learned From Writing Fantasy - Part 3

    This is the last post in my three-part "Playing God" series. Hopefully you've gained some useful insights from the previous posts, but now it's time to wrap things up with one of my favorite Gospel topics: Agency.

    When I was younger, our family was having a conversation about a story in the Book of Mormon where this guy called "the brother of Jared" has a ton of faith in God and gets to see everything that happens in the world from the beginning to the end, and my brother made the following observation (paraphrased):

    "If God knows everything that's going to happen so well that He can show the brother of Jared the whole history of the world from beginning to end... what's the point? If He already knows what we're going to choose, why send us to Earth in the first place? He already knows who will be faithful and who won't! I feel like I don't have agency anymore, because everything I do is already pre-determined!"

    At the time, none of us had a satisfactory response to his comment--least of all me, because I'm his little sister and at the time knew hardly anything of use (I have to admit that I spent most of my childhood daydreaming, which is not a state conducive to learning useful stuff). However, in light of the things I've been learning these last few weeks, I think I now have an answer to his questions, and I think it's a pretty good one.

    But first, let's talk about Dungeons and Dragons.

    If you're like my cousins and have no idea what D&D is, allow me to explain (if you're already familiar with the concept, read it anyway, because there's a funny D&D story at the end).

    The game of D&D is basically an excuse for a group of friends to get together and make up a story together. One friend is designated as the "Dungeon Master/Game Master" or DM/GM, while everybody else takes on the role of a "Player Character" or PC (not to be confused with the PC used to refer to a personal computer😉). Dice are used to determine the success of attempted PC actions, which makes things more interesting because any plot-relevant action is now under the complete control of random chance.

    Before each play session, the DM will typically plan out a piece of the plot for the entire campaign in detail, working to guess what the players will do before it happens. In the session itself, the DM narrates events as they occur and tries to nudge the players into doing what they expect.

    Sometimes, the DM is successful.

    Sometimes, the DM has a group like mine, where every player is completely unpredictable and goes off to do their own thing at a moment's notice. For example, in one of our sessions, the monster our DM intended for us to fight was instead seduced, not by the bard (AKA me) as is stereotypical for D&D, but by our not-exactly-canonically-attractive half-orc fighter. This was a complete surprise to the DM, who has had to work around the repercussions of this plot twist ever since--my friend rolled an unmodified ("natural") 20 on her 20-sided die, which in D&D means the seduction attempt was a critical success; as a result, we are now taking her fish-man boyfriend around with us in a cart full of water, which is, I think, absolutely hilarious. (We even went to the trouble of calculating exactly how many donkeys we'd need to buy to pull the cart, and my character is still toting around a half-full barrel of tar from when we made the cart watertight. Our characters also had to buy a language dictionary so they could understand the fish-man, because the original courtship was done entirely through charades.)

    In other words, DMs have to be good at improvising based on new information in order to keep their intended plot on track.

    Guess what? Authors have to do the same thing, because many of us don't have complete control of our imaginations.

    Sound crazy? Let me explain.

    I suck at predicting the consequences of my choices regarding the attributes and skills I give to my characters. My brain is not infinite, and I genuinely have no idea what a character's natural response to a situation will be until they're in that situation. I've gotten pretty good at predicting what they'll do over the years, but I'm not perfect.

    I have discovered that if I hold on to my desired plot too tightly, my characterization suffers, because the choices my characters have to make for the plot to go as planned sometimes aren't choices those people would actually make. (For example, a character who hates cheese isn't going to start a cheese stand in the market just because I need them to for the sake of my plot, and a character who has already been established as a compassionate person isn't going to cause another character harm lightly, even if my plot calls for them to.) Like the players in a D&D group, my characters often do things I wasn't planning for, and if I were to write the characters doing what I want them to anyway, they would simply end up feeling flat and unrealistic.

    Because of this, I frequently end up having to rethink my plot and/or work around the decisions my characters make to get them where I want them in a way that feels natural. If you ever find me referring to my characters like they're real people, this is why.

    So, to answer my brother's question about God's ability to show someone the entire history of the earth from beginning to end, I have come to believe that when God does this, He's really only showing His plotline. Under this method of thinking about things, God doesn't know what we'll choose, but He has a plot, and he understands us well enough to predict what we'll do.

    When we don't do the things He thinks we will, He simply reworks His plot slightly to get things back on track, just as I rework my plots to ensure that my characters still grow like I want them to.

    Of course, God is a much better plotter than I am. He is truly omniscient--I can't hold more than a few things in my head at once. He understands us more intimately than anyone else can, which is something I can't say about my relationship with my characters because I get to know them as I go.

    But just because God is an omniscient, perfect plotter doesn't mean we don't have agency. We always have agency, and we can always choose to do whatever we want to do. Depending on the choices we make, God may have to change the details of His plot slightly to achieve the same result.

    Another way this concept has been expressed is that God is like the coach of a sports match. He calls the plays, and we, the players, do our best to perform them. But things don't always go according to plan, so He adjusts His strategy for the next play to get the result He wants.

    Either way you think about it, agency is never restricted. We always have the power to choose, and God will use our choice to make things work how He needs them to, even if it's not the choice He hoped we would make.

    Remember that quote I mentioned in Part 1? "...Only good comes from each experience." God is our Author, and He is the one who ensures that every experience we have and every choice we make ultimately leads to something good. Trust Him, because He knows what He's doing. He's got everything in hand, and it's all going to turn out the way He wants it to, because He is the universe's greatest DM.

    Thank you for reading this series of blog posts. Hopefully something I've said has helped you in some way, because I'm always trying to uplift and inspire others with my words and ideas.

    If you've got any thoughts on what I've said here, go ahead and pop them into the comments. I'd love to see what you have to say!

    Until next time, may God bless you, keep you, and be with you. Keep the faith, and stay strong! I'll see you soon. :)