details.

Referring to the Virginia shootings, a commentator on NPR said yesterday that "the narrative has already been written, it's just the details that need to be filled in."

The phrase took my breath away--momentarily-- and I've been thinking about it ever since. Initially it was the scope of the tragedy in Virginia, and the thought that a narrative encapsulating those horrors could be written. But then my mind dissected the phrase (as it tends to do), and I thought about it more broadly. Have all narratives been written? Has mine? Perhaps we simply go forth daily in a search or a stumble for details. I'm not sure I believe that, but it made me think. Who writes a real-life narrative-the character or the storyteller? Or, perhaps neither?