What's Important?

on the Total Solar Eclipse and choosing story elements

Recently, my family and I, like millions of others, made the effort to travel to the zone of totality. I booked the hotel months in advance, making sure it was dog-friendly, and arranged for everyone to get away from work and school, since the eclipse would take place on a weekday. I looked forward to this trip with my family and was especially eager to experience the intense contrasts I knew would accompany the rare event: the brilliance of the sun’s corona around the circle of blackness, the wind that follows as the moon’s massive shadow sweeps across the land, the sudden change in ambient temperature, and the swift descent into twilight. An element of nostalgia further heightened the appeal of the eclipse for me, the chance to relive the epiphenomena I remembered so fondly from the partial eclipse of my childhood: those crescent shaped shadows, that eerie light. The eclipse turned out to be well worth experiencing, but a couple of incidents took place in my world in the preceding twenty-four hours that put its importance in perspective, distracted me from it and made me ask: Why do we seek out rarities? What makes things memorable? How does what’s memorable correlate with what's important?

One of the two events that sidelined my eclipse was profound: an unexpected death. I knew the person who died only by reputation, because of their dealings with a family member, but for this family member, the news of the death was terrible and haunting. For me, it was a strangely remote crisis. Who to cry for, exactly? Was it even mine to cry?

The second event was far more personal. I set out to walk our dog around Mirror Lake while scouting for places with clear views of the southwestern sky from which to view the eclipse. The leash looped around my pinky just as the dog spotted a passing squirrel. A lunge. A snap. A flash of pain. A surge of adrenaline. My finger lolled strangely to the side of my hand, swelled, turned pink, then purple, soon blue. I jammed my hand in a bank of crusty snow lining the road. The dog, oblivious, stopped to squat.

So there I was, anticipating the memorable experience of taking my family to see this total eclipse of the sun, a "lifetime event," as I'd written to one of my daughter's teachers, in justification, when excusing her from an important rehearsal for an upcoming school performance, and it turned out, the eclipse was the least of what stands out for me from that trip. We did watch it. Even the dog wore a pair of those special glasses. A dark crescent slid across the ball of fire. During the later partial phase, the shadows grew weirdly sharp and fingernail shaped bits light danced across the grass. Pink flashes of the solar chromosphere studded the ring of the corona at totality. The eclipse had been exactly as cool and strange as it was supposed to be, but it had been overshadowed, outstripped. 

I forewent a visit to the ER because the traffic would have been Hell and we had too much going on for me to shift the focus to myself. Instead, I taped the pinky gingerly to the adjacent ring finger and stayed by the side of my family member, who did not want hugs or conversation, but seemed to be at least a little consoled by this quiet companionship. 

Three things butted up against one another in the span of that overcrowded day, so dense with drama that none of the events could be given its due. Which was more important? How could I weigh against each other such different things: the cosmic, impersonal, eternal gyres of celestial bodies vs. the impact of one person’s actions and demise on another vs. the attention-grabbing physical experience of pain?

I've been thinking about whether a grouping of three such events could even make sense in a fictional narrative. Sometimes real life coincidences come off as implausible or merely irrelevant when rendered in fiction. There is such a thing as too much action. I don’t like the way the injury to the pinky finger trivializes the death or the death diminishes the awesome spectacle of the total eclipse to a banal act of tourism. And why group them, when the grouping is specific only to me, my lived experience? Why tell any of these events from my own point of view rather than my family member's, or the dead person's, or their family's — in all of which versions the dog-walking accident which intensely shaped my own experience would be so unimportant, so unseen, as not to exist? Do these three dramas meaningfully elucidate or illuminate one another? If I were to tell such a story, where in the arc ought each event go? Which was the inciting incident, the rising action, the denouement? And how far back to go in time? The planning of the trip, the unsuccessful training to heel of the dog, or the very first time I — or my family member — heard the name of the person who died? What about the long, boring drive home in post-eclipse traffic, me with my throbbing hand and the feeling of being an empty shell — was that an ending, a waypoint to some later, wiser perspective, a narrative pause, an opportunity for insight or reflection? 

How do storytellers decide what’s important? A story that begins with a bomb blast or a shell shock victim has a different effect from one that opens with a bouquet of flowers or a chat about the weather. Doesn't it? Which seemingly minor details may be essential to process the unspeakable? How should we arrange our catastrophes, in telling them, first to last, least to worst, mine to yours? Is there any way this story I’ve been thinking of telling could have a happy ending, even a faint glimmer of hope, or is it patently a tragedy?

The job of the writer is the selection and exclusion of possible narrative elements, their ordering, and of course to determine the tone with which they are delivered. The job of the writer is to interpret the world by making those calls, even if they are anything but objectively true, even if they may even be morally questionable. It may not be the best or most virtuous story, but there is a story — and it is mine — in which the pinky and the eerie afternoon twilight are important, along with the death. People’s lives have been changed immeasurably and forever by the vanishing of that human being who died. Their stories are important. But my story is a different one, the one where the dog barks in fear as I grope for my family’s hands in the semidarkness of totality, my wretched pinky thick, stiff and throbbing. I’m concerned about my family member more than anyone else’s, and I’m also worried I may never be able to depress the A of my keyboard again, because I know the finger should have been properly set, by a doctor, not just buddy-taped by me in the hotel room while I crunched Advil and put other people's psychic trauma before my bodily one. Then the weird half light changes, returns to the everyday, and I flex my knuckles slightly, letting the fourth finger carry the broken one along with it till the pain and swelling stop me.

The inflammation will subside in time. I looked up broken pinky, when self-diagnosing the fracture, so I also know that in few weeks, a bony callus will form, first soft, then hard, followed by an influx of osteocytes that will rebuild the matrix of bone that was destroyed. In the same search I learned that contrary to popular misconception, whether it ends up crooked or straight, the bone will not be stronger than before, when it’s finally knit back together. It will be exactly as strong — and exactly as vulnerable to harm — as ever.

My takeaway: Write about what seems urgent to you, whether it’s personal, world historical or galactic. Find the matrix that binds your urgencies together. Leave everything else behind, even if that means ditching exactly what everyone else finds most important. Forge your own importance.

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There are a few spots left in my 10-week summer prose workshop. It’s a generative, supportive and challenging online class where you can share and get feedback on up to 45 pages of either fiction or nonfiction. We’ll also talk about craft topics tailored to the interests of the writers in the group and read Percival Everett’s Erasure together. The Summer 2024 session will take place on Zoom over 10 Wednesday evenings 6:30-9 p.m. ET from June-August. Find out more here.

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