One of the things that has always nagged me about my love of storytelling is that writing stories by its fundamental nature is an impractical activity. I mean, as a Christian, especially, I always thought that I could never use this passion to bring glory for God. As I have matured in my walk, I have come to see that this is wrong. In today's day and age, we need theologians to set forth right doctrine, but we also need writers of imagination like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to remind us that we are made in the image of an imaginative God who is the great author of our stories, and it is a natural thing for humans in his image to create stories of our own.
Now, how did I arrive at this conclusion? The first part of this answer is that I read the stories of other Christian writers who wrestled with these things. One of the books that has shaped my understanding of why I write is Surprised By Joy, C.S. Lewis's account of his early life prior to conversion. In the book, he talks about how he grew out of imaginative storytelling as a child, only to rediscover it after his conversion in the works of writers like George Mac Donald. This was my first clue that there was some compatibility between Christianity and imaginative writing. As a side note, when I read Surprised By Joy in 2020, that was what provided the impetus to start taking my writing more seriously. The genesis of the Comedy could be said to be from that time.
I still had not arrived at some of my more radical views about theology, and making art. The next clue came sometime later after my great-grandmother died, and I was visiting a friend who lived out of state for his thesis defense. At his house, I read a quote in one of the books he used for his thesis, which was written by J.R.R. Tolkien. "Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker." So now I had more to go on. Tolkien is saying here that making is not just something we humans do for entertainment, it is something we do because we are made in the image of God. This led me to the conclusion that if we write stories that glorify God, then it is honoring to him and a means of glorification.
So how does all of this relate to the Fantastic Comedy? The Fantastic Comedy is my attempt to embody what might be considered a "theology of making" In other words I want to apply Tolkien's counsel about our acts of making being a reflection of God in us. The world of the Dreaming is not a one for one analogy to Christ's plan, but it does imperfectly reflect the truth. That is why we write. Our imperfect imaginings can be used to point people to the spiritual reality behind those imagines. So this was the answer to my question. We write to reach the souls that could not be reached any other way. That is the importance of imaginative "image bearing" writing.