Rewriting Reality - Television Tropes & Idioms

Writers are used to the power of stories to evoke feelings and create new worlds: in some stories this is explicitly possible, as a form of magic.

Rewriting Reality is a form of magic where the invocation is writing — or in more recent tales, typing. Usually it is one specific object that the writing works with, such as a book, a typewriter, a sketchpad or a PC. It is sometimes based in mythology where a creator god "writes" the "Story" of history. The device might come from a mysterious deal, a magic spell, a technical device gone strangely wrong, or it could just be, y'know, there.

In some cases, the user may not even know about the power: an author may use a cursed device to create some form of unstoppable monster, or cause all sorts of wacky hijinks for his friends. Or it may be used purposefully but unwisely, taking the statements with cruel literal-mindedness. Or perhaps the Big Bad has just found a new source of fun.

The ensuing mayhem can often be stopped by destroying the object that caused it, or killing the writer, which may, or may not, lead to a Snap Back or the writer waking to find it All Just A Dream. Other methods may involve working within story rules, either playing to or breaking the conventions of the genre.

Not to be confused with figuratively rewriting reality. Compare with Art Initiates Life, where the visual arts shape reality or Formulaic Magic, where it is pure mathematics that will change reality. See also: I Know Your True Name, Language Of Magic, All Just A Dream.

Examples

Anime

The titual notebook from Death Note, though it's only limited to killing people and writing the details of their deaths. One can have an inmate sing show tunes for an hour before he hangs himself, but one can't make him levitate and die. Also you cannot make him sing show tunes he doesn't know.
The non-card form of The Create of Card Captor Sakura was a book that made anything you write in it reality. This caused quite a bit of a problem for the titular heroine when it fell into the hands of her fantasy story-loving friend.
Rohan Kishibe from Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure has a stand, Heaven's Door, that can turn people into human books and rewrite them. While he usually uses it to manipulate memories and control a person's actions, it has also, to shown the ability to control what happens to them.
From S Cry Ed, the Alter (superpower) of Unkei is called "Mad Sprict" [sic] and enables him to write a script for reality that people will follow, and alter perceptions and (to a lesser extent) memories to fit. Not as powerful as other examples of the trope, as he can't seem to make someone behave completely out of character, he can't affect the perceptions of a character with superpowered perceptions, and the only times we see it used it was directed at a single victim. It also doesn't work very well if the person figures out what's going on. Which is bad, because then they are majorly pissed.
Lain gets ability to do this by the end of her series. She uses it to wipe out all the abnormal, dangerous elements from the world, including herself. Though she still remains watching from the outside...

Comic Books

In the Marvel Comics Crisis Crossover Secret Wars, Doctor Doom acquires the power of the Sufficiently Advanced Alien known as The Beyonder and kills all the heroes. His "friend", Klaw, mentions that Colossus may have survived and revived the others, and just by considering the possibility, Doctor Doom turns it into reality.
- The Animated Adaptation featured a somewhat less evil (but no less egotistical) Doctor Doom and a less godlike Beyonder. When he obtained the Beyonder's powers, his dreams started to create all manner of monsters that ran rampant. (Says a lot about what that guy's mind is like.)
  - And then it turned out that Scarlet Witch apparently had the ability to alter all of Marvel continuity... TWICE.
In DC Comics, John Ostrander's run on Suicide Squad briefly featured a character called "The Writer" who had the ability to control reality by writing on his laptop. However, now he was part of "the continuity" the other Writers could control him. He was soon killed due to writer's block. Canonically, the character was Grant Morrison, who wrote himself into continuity in Animal Man.
- Morrison himself later gave the ability to Pulse-8, an Ultramarine Corps character he created in JLA, and the Seven Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp in Seven Soldiers. Like the Writer, the Unknown Men resembled Morrison.
The Judgement Day mini-series from Awesome Comics dealt with a mysterious book that could warp reality. Writing in the book would cause what the writer had written to come to pass.
An arc in Shade The Changing Man featured an inversion. Anything that frustrated writer Miles Laimling wrote would be fictional, even if it were true before. Miles drew inspiration from personalities around him, and as their traits became more lifelike in his fiction, those traits would fade from the individuals they were inspired from.
One of the latter Mike Wieringo issues of Fantastic Four had God, who resembled Jack Kirby, re-draw reality. Ben Grimm literally gets his rockiness drawn onto him to 'compress his sub-plot'. Writing shows up when God gets a call giving Him several ideas. When questioned, He states it was His "Collaborator. 'Nuff said."
Kevin Thorne from the Vertigo title Fables is the 'Literal' personification of this trope.
It is the main motive of "Fone" (title that can be translated, er, as The Ond), a short comic tale by Milo Manara ("Shorts", 1995). The two characters (an alien and a human) are able to leave a strange "planet of books" by reading (not writing) a mysterious book which describes their lucky escape. The act of reading makes real the description, alas, completed with typos. And also the typos, also the nonsensical ones, become immediately real... The name of the planet is "Borges prophet" (see Literature, here above).
It becomes a centre plot point in the final book of the 6-books comic "Koma", by Wazem e Peeters (2003-2008). The tale starts in a victorian-like industrial town, where is living Addidas, an ill child with a thing for strange words. She finds an underworld where giant humanoids are mantaining machineries linked with every single human - but not her. In the last volume, the child meets one of the demiurges that constructed the devices (a creepy red amorphous creature) that thinks of her as a virus, since she is able to be alive also if her machine is destroyed. So she is "real" and we have the duel: both begins to warp the reality with gestures (the blob) and words (the child), but using a vocabulary the child is able to rewrite the being itself.
In The Sandman there is a possible version of this. The character Destiny is chained to a large book in which the destiny of the entire universe is written, and it is implied that writing in the book would change history, but no one has ever done this because destiny can't be changed.

Fan Fic

There have been at least two Fan Fics for the Beatles fandom involving using a magic typewriter to prevent John Lennon's assassination. (No links; not even a guarantee that they both still exist.) One of them had a typewriter that, for the first document it typed only, changed reality; the person who sold it to the Beatlemaniac had used it to prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming a nuclear holocaust.
In The Mad Scientist Wars Andrew Tinker is a Mad Scientist with his doctorate in English, who can invoke this trope by writing on just about anything- he prefers to use an old Notebook of his. However, he's very aware of the consequences and tries not to rely on it too much- except a few choice incidents where he has:
- Brought the Dead back to life (Although it as been established that he can't do it if too much time has passed)
- Created little odds and ends- a new Cravat, a new room in his house.
- Made a character he wrote real, a Demon named Sayasuke- 'and inserted him into the last 500 years of Japanese history to support his backstory.'
In the second When Worlds Collide fic, Dark Danny becomes all-powerful when he steals the author's keyboard.

Film

In The Mouth Of Madness had a living character and town that was written into existence by an author called Sutter Cane, who also produces a number of retcons that remove a character from existence and reshuffle an entire sequence of events within the film. By the end of the film, the entire world has apparently been absorbed by Cane's latest novel.
- It should be noted that once he finishes his novel close to the end of the film, Cane appears to be able to warp reality at will, as demonstrated with the conversations he has with John Trent.
In Stranger Than Fiction, the lead character begins hearing a voice narrating his day. He finds out he's a character in a novel, the voice is his author, and the novel needs to end with his death.
In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the protagonists face an animated monster which they only escape when the animator has a fatal heart attack.
In the short film The Census Taker, the title character begins falsifying his census forms when the locals keep slamming their doors in his face, then finds that whatever he writes becomes fact — an empty house suddenly becoming home to a happy family of five, for instance. In the end, someone is coming to kill him for reasons this editor can't recall, so he picks up a census form and writes himself into a life of wealthy wedded bliss.
The John Candy movie Delirious had him as a soap opera writer named Jack Gable. After taking a head injury, he found himself in his own soap opera. The limitation was that he could only directly affect characters for which he was the primary writer before. This did not prevent him from causing all kind of chaos before having his karmic epiphany. Fun included forcing Raymond Burr's character to not leave his house because he had to wait for the cable guy, and when Robert Wagner made an inconvenient guest appearance as Jack Gates:
Jack Gates: I have to go to... Cleveland? Jesus, I hate Cleveland!
later

Jack Gable: What are you doing here? I sent you to Cleveland.
Jack Gates: I should kill you for that alone.
The Chalk of Fate in Day Watch, with the twist that it only really works if you rewrite your own fate — trying to bring other people back to life or patch up rocky relationships just won't work. If you're rewriting your own fate, though, you can go pretty far to the point of a Ret Con of your own supernatural nature.
An interesting variation happens in Inkheart, in which the characters of a book are read out of the book. Reality then needs to be (literally) rewritten to kill/send them back in.
"Monsters! Monsters from the id!"
Pretty much the plot of the Final Destination film series. Turns out reality doesn't take kindly to rewrites.

Literature

The story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, by Jorge Luis Borges, is about a secret conspiracy that wants to turn the objective, God-based, incomprehensible universe into a subjective, man-based, comprehensible one. They do this by writing encyclopedias.
The Stephen King story, Word Processor of the Gods. (This was adapted into a Tales From The Darkside episode of the same title.)
The Never Ending Story is, within the story itself, a book that is reality itself. Anything that is written into it happens, and everything that happens is written into it.
- At one point in the story, the Childlike Empress forced Bastian's hand by ordering the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, who writes the book, to recount the story to her. By doing so, he spoke every line of the book, and wrote himself speaking those lines, and so continued to write and recite and write over and over, with all those events repeating themselves each time, until Bastian called out the Childlike Empress's new name and broke the cycle.
The Pocket and the Pendant by Mark Jefferys features books that people can step into that act as a pocket of reality. The books interact with a living mind and can end up being Your Worst Nightmare, giving the user a subconscious Literal Genie that kills the user, or a Lotus Eater Machine.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is a story about a computer with a circuit that can alter reality, acting as personal Lotus Eater Machine to every human on Earth, unless what you want is suicide.
Susannah Clarke's story The Duke of Wellington Misplaces his Horse is about the historical figure following the beast into the faery world of Neil Gaiman's Stardust, and encountering a woman knitting a tapestry writing the future, which he changes when seeing it includes his death from a quarrel with a knight.
The Well of Souls, in Jack Chalker's novel series, is a massive computer responsible for maintaining the entire universe, and getting access to it allows rewrites on a universe-wide level. The human-made computer Obie is a much smaller and limited version of same, but still capable of rewriting the reality of entire planets.
A similar sort of thing occurs on the planet that has been colonized by humans in the Flux and Anchor series. The planet was initially covered in an energy field (Flux) that allowed for the manipulation of matter and energy, and the areas humans colonized (Anchors) were areas where the reality had been fixed. And then someone gets access to the computers giving them control over the Flux and Hilarity Ensues.
Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones has a typewriter that's enchanted to do this, as the result of a misunderstanding between magician siblings. It ends up being used to force a number of the siblings, including the one who enchanted it, into a spaceship making a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri.
Michael Crichton's Sphere: the titular alien artifact/future artifact ball grants people who figure out how to get inside it the power to manipulate reality with their thoughts.
The Glooper machine in Making Money works like this, only with the flow of water replacing writing, and it only affected the circulation of gold.
This is the role of the Hierophant in Chris Wooding's novel Poison. Interestingly, the books relating to a person's life are not written until they die, nor do they necessarily end at the person's death - they are the story of that person, so would need to be in a different tone if the person devoted their life to charity than if they, say, murdered all their friends, and if the story continues after/ends before the person dies, that's where the book ends.
This is how the entirety of wizardry works in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series; basically, if you're really young and really, really good at using language, and willing to take and abide by the Oath (and take a few life-or-death risks, oh, every other week or so), you get the cheat codes to the universe.
In Piers Anthony's Xanth books, Com-Pewter can rewrite reality, but only in its immediate vicinity.
Since Thursday Next takes place mostly within the Book World, it can be rewritten from either the inside, or by editing an early copy of the book or text. If a fictional character escapes into reality, it's still possible to rewrite it with the right book. Since the Thursday Next series (written by Jasper Fforde, not the series-within-the-series) may be the final, rewritten version of the series, rewriting the real reality in the series may be possible.
The main character of Ursula K Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven could rewrite reality through his dreams. Unique in that he had absolutely no conscious control over this power, which only manifested itself as a sort of last ditch defense mechanism against sudden and/or drastic changes in his life - an abusive aunt moving into his childhood home, for example, or global thermonuclear war.
The underlying premise of Michael Grant's Gone hexalogy is that the laws of physics are just as hackable as lines of computer code. The series begins with every person over the age of 15 suddenly vanishing and an insurmountable barrier appearing over the town of Perdido Beach, California and recounts the struggles of the "survivors". Thus far it appears to be the work of an autistic 4 year old who BSODs in the middle of a Chernobyl-style nuclear meltdown and creates a stable pocket dimension and everyone else comes along for the ride.

Live Action TV

The Twilight Zone episode "Printer's Devil" features a linotype machine (gotten via a Deal With The Devil) that causes the horrific accidents that are reported on before they actually happen to become reality. The reporter who writes these 'scoops' is in fact the devil. The 'infernal machine' is eventually used to break the contract that got it to begin with.
- One Twilight Zone episode had a variation of this, in that anything the author spoke into a tape recorder became real.
  - Humorously subverted by the fact that he could also destroy the creations by destroying the tape. This is how he stopped a fight between his wife and mistress. Cut to Rod Serling's closing monologue about how the story was complete fiction. The main character interrupts Rod to warn him about saying such things, revealing a line of tape labelled "Rod Serling" and tossing it onto the fire. This was the first appearance of Rod onscreen to do the monologue and was so well received that he came on for almost every episode afterwards. However, it was the only time he interacted with the story's characters.
The Are You Afraid Of The Dark episode "Tale of the Dream Machine".
Xena: Warrior Princess episode "The Quill Is Mightier...".
Stephen Colbert thinks he can do this with The Other Wiki, creating "Wikiality".
- Fans immediately created Wikiality.com, where Colbert's word really is law.
Used for comic purposes in the Goon Show episode "Six Charlies in Search of an Author".
The second season of Big Bad Beetleborgs concerned the Big Bad using the evil brother of the creator of the Beetleborg comic to create/summon Mooks.
The X Files episode Milagro features a serial killer spawned from a story written by Mulder's next-door neighbor.
Clive Barker's Masters Of Horror episode "Valerie on the Stairs" is about a Round Robin story which, unbeknownst to its authors, was causing real people to be murdered. Eventually, the story's characters broke from the script and killed the authors.
In Doctor Who, "The Mind Robber," the Doctor and his companions wind up in the Land of Fiction, populated entirely by characters who are fictional (even within the world of Doctor Who) or mythical—e.g. Medusa, Rapunzel, Gulliver. The Land is controlled by the Master of the Land of Fiction (not to be confused with recurring villain The Master), a prolific hack writer who somehow wound up in this place. He makes everything happen by writing it. The Doctor finds a typewriter in the villain's castle and they have a Rewriting Reality showdown. (Also, the Doctor's companions are temporarily turned into fiction.)
- The Master of the Land of Fiction is explicitly indicated to be the author of 'The Adventures of Jack Harkaway', published in Ensign magazine. Both are real, as is their writer. What trope is that?
The 2009 Red Dwarf three-part special used this when the characters were sucked into another dimension in which they were fictional characters. After tracking down and killing their creator, they were bemused to find that they didn't die, and that it wasn't necessary for Lister to keep typing for them to continue to do anything. Funny, though.
In Star Trek TNG episode "Elementary, dear Data" a character of one a holodeck simulation gets the possibility to control the simulation he is in; thus he can rewrite his own reality.
A recurring sketch on The Carol Burnett Show featured a writer struggling to write a scene while we saw the characters acting out what he wrote and frantically trying to adjust to their shifting reality as the writer changed his mind and rewrote events as he went. Sometimes the humor came from ambiguous text passages being brought to life, as when a woman was giving multiple births in a life raft awaiting rescue: "It's a boy! It's a girl! It's a submarine!"

Tabletop Games

The Advanced Dungeons And Dragons sourcebook The Book of Artifacts introduces Kuroth's Quill, a magical pen that can grant wishes (as always, with a twist) or even alter reality by writing things down.
Commodore Guff from Magic The Gathering possibly has this ability.

Theatre

Prospero the sorcerer in The Tempest has the ability to rewrite reality. (Don't recall what, if any, limits it had.)

Video Games

In the Myst series, entire worlds, called "Ages", seem to be literally created by writing descriptions of them in books, and they can then be traveled to through the book. This becomes an important plot point in the novelizations and in later games in the series, however; canonically, a version of the Many Worlds theory is true and the other universes already exist, and the Descriptive Books act as a search engine to find the right one.
- It works both ways. A Descriptive Book, once linked to a (pre-existing) world, can be rewritten to effect changes in it. However, significant changes to a Descriptive Book can result in a link to a different world entirely.
- 'Ought also be noted that the 'search engine' is notoriously difficult to handle. The described world is sought out, yes, however it may only link to the moment during which a world existed as described. Instabilities, shoddy, lazy, or poor description, can lead to destabilisation of an 'age', sometimes from the moment of linking, sometimes over time. The culture that created the linking techniques had an entire guild dedicated solely to making certain that linked worlds were safe to visit, often employing suits capable of surviving a couple of seconds inside a supernova. Oh and Earth was linked to like this from the dying D'ni homeworld, and is considered one of the greatest works ever created.
The Sacred Tome in Makai Kingdom fulfils the wishes written upon it, but this comes with a hefty price in mana... Also, damaging the book or its writings inflicts the same on whatever was created by that particular line of text, so needless to say doing so is usually a spectacularly bad idea — especially if your entire netherworld is written down in it. It goes without saying that Zetta does it anyway.
- However, when writing something into the book, the book's spirit has to accept the wish before it becomes reality. This explains why King Drake III's wish for Zetta to yield control of his Netherworld to him (Zetta -> Drake, that is) continues to disappear when it is written down. Pram reprimands him on it after being tipped off by Trenia. That's how she knew about that function, too - Trenia was the spirit of the Sacred Tome before Zetta confined himself inside it.
- It also happens in-game, too. If a curative spell is cast on the Sacred Tome, it affects everything on the map, ally or enemy. Likewise, if the Tome ever gets damaged by anything (accidentally or not), everything on the map suffers Massive Damage, and you're not allowed to run away from that particular battle.
Used in the Neverwinter Nights expansion Shadows of Undrentide. A certain library has two books that the player can enter, and later rewrite to end happily.
The titular Cosmic Forge of Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge is a pen that allows the one who holds it to literally write reality-what one writes with it, happens. However, although the Cosmic Forge always fulfills the writer's instructions to the letter, it also has a nasty habit of interpreting those instructions rather differently than the writer intends...
Namine can manipulate memories via drawings.
This is a major gameplay element in Avalon Code. Your hero can use the Book of Prophecy to scan objects, and by switching around their inherent "codes", you can change their properties. For instance, adding a "Copper" code to a blank Sword template grants you a Copper Sword.
In Scribblenauts, Maxwell has a magic notpad that he (that is, you) can write in to summon damn near anything that can be expressed as a noun.
Trevor Pearlharbor from Killer7 thinks he can do this with the manga books he writes, but it's actually all rigged, and Trevor is killed by his "creations"; the Handsome Men.
A Zork fan-made game plays this for laughs as the solution to a puzzle: At one point, the Player Character is transported to the room of the game's writer and rewrites the game to remove an impenetrable wall. When returned to the world of the game, the wall is gone.
System Shock 2. Oddly, when SHODAN does get control temporarily, her pocket of personal reality looks suspiciously similar to virtual reality of the first game.

Web Comics

Dresden Codak possesses a writer who has the power to alter reality by writing it. However, he has a few rules about it.
The Celestial Files in Misfile tell the world what it should be. For example, put a boy's file in the "girl" file and Hilarity Ensues.
This is the job and hobby of Sarda from 8-bit theater. Also apparently the reason why the comic never had a character called "Bard".
- Most of what he does is reality warping, but he did rewrite a speech balloon once.

Web Original

In the first episode of Ashen's Tech Dump, Dr. Ashen interviews a researcher who has cracked the "source code" used by God to create the universe and wrote a program to access its functions with simple keywords. To Ashen's dismay, rather than use this power for anything noble, he was more interested in using it to start booty parties.
It is implied that this is how low magic works in Adylheim, with the caster's using various words of power (among other things) to cast spells.

Western Animation

Extreme Ghostbusters had a story involving a horror writer who was kidnapped by his own creations, who were using him to write out their ultimate victory.
GI Joe featured an episode that had a Mac Guffin Device (literally named this) that caused the owner's imaginings to come to life. Shipwreck was retelling Cinderella (with himself as the tormented main character) to orphans whose home he had accidentally burnt down; his annoying allies were rebuilding the place (Shipwreck is the focus of a LOT of weirdness in the series). Cue parody versions of Shipwreck's allies beating the tar out of attacking Cobra forces.
The Danny Phantom episode, "The Fright Before Christmas".
Jackie Chan Adventures once featured a plot about the "Book of Ages," a book in which history was magically recorded. However, human intervention is possible by just writing on the next available page of the book, thus offsetting anything previously written and enabling the writer to change history.
- Shendu posseses Jackie and writes it so that all the demons were never sealed away. Humans are slaves to the demons now, and technology is outlawed. Nobody remembers what it was like in the original continuity, except Jade, who ripped her page out so Shendu couldn't overwrite it.
- Jade and Paco have some fun with this at the end, with Jade beefing up Jackie, and Paco beefing up El Toro, and then contuing to one up each other until Uncle puts the page that Jade ripped out, restoring the timeline.
Fairly Odd Parents has a neat variation. Changing the text of a non-fiction book changes the reality it describes. Altering a biography on the last President to say he was a foot shorter? His bodyguards will be happier. And, on the show, Hilarity Ensues when Cosmo gets his wand on a physics textbook.