On the one hand, the fiction writer has absolute power and total freedom.  She can invent new worlds and move seamlessly between them.  She is the inventor of personalities, the puppeteer manipulating decisions, the master event-planner, and the goddess of details.  The fiction writer laughs at limits, shoulders through barriers, imposes her own laws.  She is wild with creativity.

On the other hand, the writing pushes back, and that too is beautiful.  Characters refuse to be whom she asks them to be; they choose their own names, dig in their heels, are stubborn as hell.  And despite all her planning, sometimes the events unfold in ways she couldn’t orchestrate on her own.

It’s the combination of these two things– this unfettered freedom that slow-dances with the art’s own identity– that makes the fiction writer love to write.

Related posts:
Date a Girl Who Writes
My Writing Process
Love in the Form of Story