Finding the Unusual

Over the past few posts I have mentioned about how things have been changing in my life. In a way, I feel like I live in some kind of Bizarro world where everything is reversed - night is day, good is bad, etc. - but at the end of it all, I am still on the same planet, same country, same little patch of real estate. The only difference is I am seeing it from a different angle. That being said, during this adjustment I saw an opportunity to try and understand the differences in this same world and figure out just why it felt so weird even though it was no different in the bigger picture.

It all hit me last night at about 11:20 pm, when I stepped outside. The clouds were moving in, but for a happy little minute I got to see the peak of the partial lunar eclipse. They said it was about 96% coverage in my territory, which meant the moon was just a sliver of light, slightly rounded, peaking out from behind the shadow of our planet. It was not as impressive as a solar eclipse, with temperatures dropping, birds freaking out, and real stubborn people staring at it then saying, "Why do my eyes hurt so much?" However, there it was - a near-total lunar eclipse, and I witnessed it before the clouds buried it away. 

Now, what exactly hit me at that moment? Well, first off, it was 11:20 pm and I was wide awake, in a strange location I was still getting accustomed to. I was out by my car, which I still have to look for in the parking lot and remind myself it's mine as opposed to the one I drove for eleven years. I was in my Bizarro world, but yet things still went on. Clouds appeared and disappeared, the weather changed, and yes, the occasional lunar eclipse came by to draw the eyes of many spectators. The world was both different and the same.

That last sentence is the important part to me as a writer. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, your mission is to take the reader from their comfy chair in the living room and drop them smack-dab into the middle of a new world. This new land doesn't have to be some fantasy world to be new - you can drop them into Manhattan and start from there. And yes, I mean Manhattan, New York, or Manhattan, Illinois, or Manhattan, Kansas - you are placing them into a space they are not familiar with and creating the world around them. Even if you write about something very familiar to many people, you need to give it the new appearance. I always note how my golfing buddy Saul Bellow (inside joke) wrote very passionately about Chicago, and even Ukrainian Village, where I lived for six years. I knew the landmarks he mentioned, I walked the streets of his characters. However, seeing Division Street through his character's eyes, through that new perspective, made it a fresh and exciting environment for me to experience. (Read Humboldt's Gift for reference.)

So, your job as a writer is not to offer up an accounting of the territory making up the story's background, but to give it the unique flavor and texture to make it seem different, special, even unique, but still very relateable. Give the reader elements they can connect to, even if those things have nothing to do with the reader's own lives. Make the observations things they can associate with, even if it's something as simple as looking up at the moon.