Pluto, Outer Space

To explain what happened, first choose what to believe (and other thoughts on writer's block)

I’ve been forced to defend my reality lately. Since November, I’ve been stuck in a storytelling freeze, suspended in too much information and not enough sunlight. As I wallow in a puddle of my own making, the water keeps rising; I keep asking questions instead of making sense of what is in front of me. Instead of navigating the story of what happened, I am distracted by theoretical non-sequiturs, demands for definitions, and more feedback than I ever expected. The only way out is through. I simply have to tell myself a story to make it all make sense.

I’m referring, of course, to my experience at last year’s Atlanta Writers Conference, the weekend just before the presidential election. I made the rookie mistake of pitching a still-unfinished manuscript to editors and agents in hopes of gleaning some early feedback. My book is still a messy V1.2 draft of old Substacks, excerpts from various classes and workshops, and unrevised ramblings cobbled together. And though I feel confident in the story I’m writing — I lived it, after all — the feedback and questions I received felt bigger and more important than I was prepared to answer. The main question agencies and publishers want to know is: where would this sit on a bookshelf? Is this a retelling of true events or a story of what happened? Is it fiction or nonfiction? What really happened?

These questions of genre are tedious and unnecessary at this point, having only a first pass at unedited prose (most of which, I’m sure, will be cut or significantly rewritten). Non-fiction books are literal, researched, and do not necessarily follow a narrative order. Fiction books have a narrative arc and follow the story of invented people. But non-fiction is still shaped into a story by the author’s opinions about what to include, and fiction, even the most fantastical ideas, draw from the author’s reality. Memoir, the most eye-rolling of terms I’m confronted with, is fickle enough to require the truth while requiring a suspension of disbelief that every conversation occurred with the exact words and tone as it happened in real life. I’m not sure a non-fiction story can exist without artistic interpretation, or that fiction can exist without being grounded in truth. It’s much more complicated to decipher what “happened,” even if you lived it yourself.

Since that conference, and everything else that happened in November, I've been unable to tell the story of what happened, too bogged down by possibilities. Many people in this country have tried to make sense of our collective reality since the election. Pundits and talking heads have been churning out storylines for months: It’s the leftists who didn’t back the Democrats enough; it’s the Democrats' weak messaging on economic issues; it’s you; it’s me; et cetera. Meanwhile, the election truthers, previously life-consumingly concerned with the idea of a stolen election four years prior, have abandoned overnight their search for “what happened,” now satisfied with the story. We create narratives to make sense of the world around us — and tell those stories to shape it.

One way to explain what’s happening in this country is to blame the heavens. Pluto moved into Aquarius on January 20th, the day of the inauguration. Pluto, the Roman god of the Underworld, represents transformation, death and rebirth, and secrets of the subconscious. Pluto, the dwarf planet, is slow, taking 248 years to orbit the Earth. As it makes its way around, it passes through each of the twelve zodiac signs like a clock hand circulating the hours, and every time it enters a new one, it kicks open the door and forces an upset of each sign’s most important values. For instance, the last time Pluto moved into a new sign was 2008, when it breached Capricorn, a sign that represents hierarchical structure, hardworking discipline, and financial ambition. A month later, Bear Stearns collapsed, forever destabilizing the economic stability of the average American. Capricorn’s strengths – structure, discipline, etc – were thrown into disarray. This time, Pluto has just moved into Aquarius, a sign that represents technology, intellectual freedom, and egalitarian community. As tech billionaires and information oligarchs transform the concept of reality right before our eyes (oops how’d that last one get in there), the story of this chaos begins to make more sense to me through this framework of the stars.

For thousands of years, humans have tracked cycles of movement in the sky in a Sisyphean effort to understand the randomness around us. If nothing else makes sense, at least the planets move in a predictable and meaningful pattern — and humans have decided that that pattern means something.

This isn’t quite what you were expecting, was it? Maybe you know me from my travel writing for the Washington Post, or maybe you’ve seen my community reporting in Atlanta Magazine. Either way, I fear I’ve lost some of you around the mention of a planet that no serious person still considers a planet. But at the core of most of my storytelling here on Substack, and at the heart of my mid-draft book, is an impossible quest to find answers in created narratives. It is deciding what is important in a sea of possible truths.

The relationship between reality and narrative is determined both by the person writing it and the person reading it. In memoir, capturing the emotional truth of a conversation is more important than recalling every word exactly. In astrology, coincidences and patterns are extrapolated for meaning. Some Christians interpret the stories of the Bible as moral parables while some believe they are literally eating the literal body of Christ when taking communion. Politics has perfected the narrative spin, rebranding opponents’ ideas to discredit them, or worse, to elicit emotion from us. That’s not to say that creating narrative is inherently deceptive — it’s merely a condition of the human experience that some choose to exploit.

Right-wing politics and its audience have become comfortable weaponizing the truth to create a narrative. In 2012, the first year Trump attended CPAC, he went on an unhinged Twitter rant claiming the election Obama won by 5 million votes was a “sham” and that “we are not a democracy.” He then claimed in 2016 that Senator Ted Cruz stole the Iowa Caucus from him, based on quite literally no evidence, strengthening a narrative that any loss he suffers must have been taken from him. Like crafting stories from disparate stars, the right-wing think tank Heritage Project has been “tracking cases” of election fraud to form a clear picture – but even of the 1,465 reported cases (not enough to swing any vote, not even the Iowa Caucus), they’ve chosen to skip over details, like how these cases are from over a decades-long period. This slightly deeper analysis supports the opposite narrative: there have been so few instances, in fact, that the data indicates no significant trend of election fraud.¹ While I don’t expect every single political statement to come with a footnote, all it took was a curious mind and a quick Google search to find how distorted these numbers were. Isn’t that what they’re always telling us? To “do your own research?” When someone believes a falsehood from a politician, both the person creating the narrative and the person receiving the narrative are to blame: One pulled the threads together, the other nodded along. Neither is concerned with “what really happened.” They just want a story that already makes sense.

We all make up stories every day to explain the world around us. We also regularly accept the created narratives around us, like believing your boss when the promotion is just around the corner, again, or that your cheating ex has changed. When people — publishers, constituents, curious bystanders — ask you what happened, do not become more fixated on convincing your audience that you modify your reality to suit a clean story. Because at the end of the day, they’re either going to believe your narrative, or they’re not, no matter how truthful you were. They care that the story makes sense. Better yet, they care if your story sells.

Astrology tells us that Pluto last entered Aquarius in 1777. History tells us that the average age of an empire is 250 years. America celebrates its semi-quincentennial next year. What’s easier to believe: That a dwarf planet 3 billion miles away says it’s time for the government to collapse? Or that a billionaire would cheat, exploit, and intimidate his way into a position of absolute power at the expense of a nation? Will the dissolution of democracy in America have been predicted, or self-fulfilled? If you don’t believe in it, these are just patterns of a non-planet moving in the sky. Astrology isn’t real, it’s just a story I tell myself to make sense of what is real.

1. “These may sound like big numbers, however, they must be examined in context. The findings encompass more than a decade of data during which, nationally, hundreds of millions of votes have been cast. For instance, in Texas, Heritage found 103 cases of confirmed election fraud. However, those 103 ranged from 2005 to 2022 during which time over 107 million ballots were cast. There were 11 million ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election alone. The fraud in Texas amounted to 0.000096% of all ballots cast — hardly evidence of a fundamentally corrupt system.” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/widespread-election-fraud-claims-by-republicans-dont-match-the-evidence/