Others, significant

As a writer, I find myself growing more and more concerned with significance. Not merely my own, but within the worlds and actions of my characters. The notion of meaningful action and influence is like an itch I can't scratch away.

Please note here my distinction between significance and prominence, professionally and fictionally. Our culture has an unhealthy habit of assuming the former in the latter, to our personal and general detriment. Prominence is given and taken away externally. Significance is ours to create.

Here is an unfiltered shot of our campus amphitheater, The Greek. Like most
first drafts, it has promise but needs some work to reproduce what I saw.

What is most interesting me, then, in relation to significance is the way in which I'm searching for it in the small moments of "small" lives. When I think about my characters, I want all of them - even the most static and instrumental - to operate in the paradigm that every moment carries the possibility of significance and that true tragedy is to live otherwise.

Finding the significance in the lives of main character is easy. But what about the guy cleaning the taco shop's drink machines? The woman selling phony skincare products to friends? The motorist who drives on rather than offer assistance?  

And here's an altered version of the original that went through several
digital drafts to finally approximate the colors and the contrast my limited
human eyes saw as I walked to my car at the end of the day.

This is why we revise and revise and revise. We work like the photo editing program I used to work on the picture above. On the left is the first draft, if you will. On the right, the "same" photo with layer upon layer of filters and contrast shifts and tint correction until what I wanted to hold the eye is better designed to do so. 

In essence, this is how I want to treat the small characters who do not, in their own right, seem significant. But, and maybe most significantly, these are the characters most like us. They live, they breathe, and they have the chance to do more for the world than the most "significant" among us.  

And that is the beauty of story. Unlike life, in which moments and people are gone long before we see what we could have done to make them matter or what they have done to impact our narrative, fiction allows me a space where I am forced to see that every moment and person is of consequence. I have limited time and my readers have limited attention. As a result, the real estate of the page is precious and not to be squandered.

And increasingly, this is the way I'm trying to live off the page. I find myself increasingly agitated by wasted time (and I've always been one to feel guilty for not making the most of my decreasing store of minutes in this place). I've always been a pilgrim in search of significance.

But now, I want to redefine my terms and stop substituting perception for human response, in my stories and my daily life.