Putting people and places and things down on paper affirms that those people and places and things matter.
From Nicholas Boyle's, Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature:
Mattering...comes from the Spirit. A book becomes literature by using language for the purposeless purpose of enjoyment. But language is the medium of the Law, of the Word which tells us that everything matters, even the sparrows on the rooftops. By showing life as mattering, and thus sharing in the work of the Spirit, literature enables us to take pleasure in a truth about human existence: the truth that its constitution is inescapably moral...Representation affirms--more, it enacts--the worth to God of what is represented. However appalling or dispiriting, however low or laughable, the life that is represented, sinful life just as it is, serving no further purpose but just being there--life as it is for its Maker and Redeemer--is affirmed by the act of representation to be worth the labor and love and attention that go into the showing it (by the artist) and the recognizing it (by the audience)...[O]nly as a revelation that the world and existence matter eternally--matter so much that the God who made them died to restore them--is the phenomenon of literature possible.
From Flannery O'Connor's, Mystery and Manners
The Catholic writer, insofar as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for. But this should enlarge, not narrow, his field of vision.