Might God's creation be a fictional world?

Abstract: Samuel Lebens argues that we may understand God's act of creation by analogy with an author's creation of fictional characters. I argue that, in the relevant sense of "fictional characters" authors do not create such beings; rather, they invite us to imagine that such beings exist. I also argue that Leben's view would make authorship moral problematic in implausible ways. Along the way I briefly offer an account of the being of fictional characters and consider the relations between truth-in-fiction and truth.