“Creativity – like human life itself – begins in darkness.” –Julia Cameron
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April 8, 2024 The date of the great eclipse when a wide swath of the United States will be darkened as the sun and moon perform a heavenly pas de deux.
Memphis will see only a 98% covering, so my husband and I plan to travel with some friends to Arkansas to experience the full beauty of the show.
This will not be the first time we’ve observed a total eclipse. Way back in 1970, there was a total eclipse in my hometown of Savannah, Ga. I remember the experience well, but not for the reason you may think.
Unfortunately, the day was cloudy, but as the moon moved between the Earth and the sun, the clouds would occasionally break and give us a series of snapshots of the phenomenon. When the moment of totality arrived, the clouds once again opened, and we saw the black disk, then the bright flash of light as the moon moved on to continue its course. But that still wasn’t what astonished me.
It was the darkness.
Standing on the front lawn of my parents’ home, I looked down the street and saw a wall of black shadow racing toward us. It wasn’t like a cloud that covered the sun. It was a dark, menacing presence, rushing forward to devour the light in its path until it overtook us, and suddenly all was night.
Even though we understood what was happening, I had a sense of primordial awe that I have never forgotten.
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Authors of mystery, suspense, and thrillers are well acquainted with darkness. It’s a symbol of the unknown, and that usually means fear, anxiety, loneliness, or panic will grip the main character and get the reader’s heart pumping a little harder.
“All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.” –John Ruskin
A character walks out into a black night and senses a presence that he can’t see, or comes face-to-face with his own demons in the dark night of the soul when all appears lost. That heart-stopping look into the abyss rivets the attention and keeps the reader turning pages.
Here are a few examples.
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We probably all studied Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven in high school. Fear and doubt consume the poet as he contemplates his own loneliness late at night. Then he hears a sound and thinks it’s a visitor knocking. He opens the door and sees … nothing.
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”
The murky setting on the moors gave Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles a sense of mystery and foreboding.
“As if in answer to his words there rose suddenly out of the vast gloom of the moor that strange cry which I had already heard upon the borders of the great Grimpen Mire. It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild, and menacing. The baronet caught my sleeve and his face glimmered white through the darkness. ‘My God, what’s that, Watson?’”
A sense of impending doom in Dean Koontz’s Midnight builds as a woman goes for a run on the beach in the middle of the night.
“Suddenly, as she was passing a pair of forty-foot, twisted cypresses that had grown in the middle of the beach, halfway between the hills and the waterline, Janice was sure she was not alone in the night and fog. She saw no movement, and she was unaware of any sound other than her own footsteps, raspy breathing, and thudding heartbeat; only instinct told her that she had company.”
Last week Kris introduced us to the Edgar finalists in her post. The first sentence of All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby hints of a violent past returning to haunt a small town.
“Charon County was founded in bloodshed and darkness.”
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So, TKZers, there you have it. The Art of Darkness. How do you represent darkness in your books? Do you have any examples from the works of others that illustrate either physical or metaphorical darkness? Have you ever seen a total eclipse of the sun?
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I don’t know how much access I’ll have to TKZ during the day, but I’ll respond to comments whenever I can.
“Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” –Yousuf Karsh
Private pilot Cassie Deakin has a lot of opportunity to develop character while she hunts a killer.
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From The Perils of Tenirax : Mad Poet of Zaragoza:
Slowly, the implications of being in the hands of a torturer who got paid by the day sank into Tenirax’s mind and body. He began to shake all over.
“Well, nighty-night.” Bungorolo plunged the last torch into the sand and left, carrying his candle. “Hasta mañana,” he called out, his resonant basso echoing from the stairwell.
The torturer’s oversize shadow flickered slowly up the stone stairway until Tenirax found himself in total darkness. “Hasta mañana,” he whispered.
From A True Map of the City: The claustrophobic Horus Blassingame is in the dark, stranding between two doors only 12″ apart, He has locked the door in front of him to remove the key.
“I tried reaching behind me and to my left to get at the second lock, but there wasn’t enough room; my back was touching the door behind me, and it was also impossible to get my right arm past my paunch.
“I had a clever idea. If my right hand couldn’t reach the second lock, I’d use my left. I raised both arms and passed the key over my head from my right hand to my left. As I did so, I realized: I’m locked in here, sandwiched between these doors, unable to bend down. If I drop the key, I am a dead man. Worse than a dead man.
“I shuddered and dropped the key.”
Great mood in those two excerpts, JG. I especially like the scene with the key. I could feel it coming.
As for writing fiction, any time I write a nighttime scene, I will check the weather at the specific time and place – making sure I know the time for sunset and sunrise, the average and limit temperatures, and the precipitation. I may include a tiny bit of the information, or simply make sure the conditions reflect it, but it helps me settle into the right mood for the scene, because all those factors affect us in real life: a scene of a man riding a motorcycle down a New Hampshire road in the late fall at 10PM is very different if there is a full moon in the sky or if it is pitch black.
I like your attention to detail, Alicia.
“it helps me settle into the right mood for the scene,” So true. If the writer can get into the mood, it’s easier to convey it to the reader.
Yes, I, too, have sunrise/sunset tables. And tide tables, and a phase of the moon table/calculator (dating back to 1985, somehow). These are readily available on the Internerd, and I’d provide the link, but links here have been known to send replies to the link clink.
Wow, Kay, I’ve never seen a total eclipse but, from your description, I felt as if I were there.
In prehistoric times, if someone wandered into the darkness away from the light of the fire, a tiger might eat them. Maybe that ingrained primal fear is still hardwired into humans.
Have a safe trip and hope the clouds stay away.
Good morning, Debbie.
Thank goodness there aren’t any tigers in Arkansas. 🙂 But I’m going to stay close to the car just in case.
Have a bright and beautiful day in that gorgeous state of Montana.
The best eclipse I’ve even seen occurred several years ago. My husband and I went to the lake to spend the day relaxing, reading, and sunbathing. When the moon passed over the sun, the beach darkened. One of the seasonal locals passed out 3D glasses to the regular beachgoers, including us. Amazing experience.
Sounds like a wonderful experience , Sue. Like no other.
Good morning, Kay! I’m excited to hear you and your husband will be in the path of totality for today’s eclipse. In 2017, I didn’t make it to totality, but watched from 98% as the crescent shadows from leaves spread across the ground and the sky darkened. In 1979 I was in the path of totality here, but, being February (and a Monday), it was overcast. Still, I played truant from high school for an hour to watch as the darkness swept over us.
As an avid stargazer, darkness has a different meaning for me, letting the starshine in, and in the case of today’s eclipse, showing Comet Pons-Brooks, which will be a faint fuzziness with a fainter tail just below Jupiter, which will be shining above and to the right of the eclipsed sun.
In my own works, my heroes often need to go underground or into a metaphorical labyrinth where darkness. They must pass through that darkness, facing fears and danger.
Loved this delve into darkness today. Enjoy the splendor at totality!
Morning, Dale. We’re in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas. The weather is clear so I’ll be looking for the comet. It’s still a few hours until showtime.
I seriously thought about driving to Little Rock today, but circumstances prevented it. In 2017 I was in the 95% of totality and it was such an eerie feeling for the sky to darken to twilight in the middle of the day.
I hope the clouds clear away by this afternoon and I can get a few photos of our partial eclipse.
Wish you were here, Patricia. The sky is clear and it should be quite a show.
This is sad, Kay, but I actually don’t remember if I’ve ever seen a solar eclipse. Up here in WA State, I don’t think we get to see much.
Not to toot my own horn, but I like the title of my 2nd novel for an illustration of darkness. Or is it light? Might be either depending on your POV, I guess.
No Tomorrows
What say all of you? Darkness or light?
Hi Deb. No Tomorrows sounds dark to me. Was that your intention?
Until I wrote the ending, Kay. It was a surprise to me.
Endings that surprise the writer are the best.
Sorry for the late comment. We’ve had so much rain that I needed to get some work done this morning while it was dry.
We watched the solar eclipse from our front yard this afternoon at 3:00 pm. Two old people standing in their yard with welding helmets. It was beautiful. The last eclipse I saw was a partial solar eclipse in the early 1990s.
Portraying darkness in my books: Writing fantasy provides many options. In my first book darkness was one end of the spectrum of “The Strata,” a world where everything was a shade of gray. In the second book, the villain spent her life washing the DNA code of the tetra-chrome spiral skyway.
I hope you had a good time in Arkansas.
So glad you got to see the eclipse. Also happy for you that you viewed it from your front yard!
Fantasy is a good genre to use the element of darkness. I love the idea of “The Strata” where everything was a shade of gray.
Have a great week, Steve.