Alma Alexander

Epiphanies are odd things.

There I was, mumble thousand miles above the planet, laterally squished in my window seat by a fellow passenger with a well-endowed caboose which kept spilling into my space, staring out of the window, waiting for the flight to end (ladies and gentlemen, I love being in new places, but I loathe the getting there. Scotty, please invent that transporter thing already…)

And there below me, a long, long way below, lay mountains and fields and rivers and roads and little smudges of towns clustered around intersections or river bends. And between me and the ground… were the clouds.

Now, I was above the clouds, and I could see them clearly from my vantage point for what they were – wispy, insubstantial, many of them practically see-through, their edges ragged and unravelled, beautiful in their near-chaos, making sense to eye and mind on an aesthetic level as well as the purely physical stuff I knew about clouds from high school science classes. In molecular terms they barely existed – they were mist and promise, a fleeting congregation of water vapour and air and mystery, quickly formed, quickly gone, quickly forgotten or mistaken for others just like themselves. Beautiful, but hard to grip, hard to come to terms with, hard to describe, nebulous (that very word defines what they are – insubstantial, “cloud-like”). They are stories spun from nothing, they are made of nothing, a plane can fly through one without even noticing it is there. And yet you can look at one and know what kind of story it contains – a thunderhead, a snow-cloud, one of those puffy white jobs that dot summer skies so that the blue won’t get boring.

And then my eye slipped down, through, below. And these wispy insubstantial, hard-to-grasp things floating in mid-air… cast shadows on the ground.

And the shadows were nothing like the thing they reflected.The shadows were not wispy, insubstantial, unravelling at the periphery. The shadows were sharp – there was an edge to them, a line, and on this side of the line it was dark, and on that side of the line it was light. Down on the ground, it was uncompromising, clear, unequivocal. The ground did not know clouds like I knew clouds – it could not look at them from above and know what the true story was. It only knew what the clouds chose to tell – that they were present, or they were absent. What happened next, the ground found out for itself, the hard way. No prescience. No visual clues except the clarity of the dividing line between shadow and light.

And thus, the epiphany.

Stories are like this. When the writer first finds them, they’re hanging in the air like clouds do. They are drifty, pervasive, beautiful; their true nature is easier to see, because they are laid out below the writer’s eye and there are no secrets there. But the reader – the reader has to have the secrets. The reader also has to have a clarity of vision which enables those secrets to be understood. The writer’s job is to render the hard-to-grasp nebulosity of the story/cloud into the sharp clarity and understanding of the story/groundshadow, something that gives the reader a clear and comprehensible insight into the tale the writer is spinning, without ONCE letting go of the idea that the clouds THEMSELVES are still there, that there is a story beyond the story, that the writer needs to be bigger than their universe and see it all and understand it all and then give enough to the reader to give them the capability of understanding that part of it that the writer has seen fit to to show them, the particular shadow, the edge of shadow, in which a story lives.

The story is what the writer makes the reader THINK they are seeing – the sharp shadow on the ground – rather than everything possible that the story can be – the drifting cloud in the sky.

So, then. Which cloud carries YOUR story…?