Is a Story a Toaster?

I’m greatly disturbed by things I’ve read lately. That’s the point, though, right? Aren’t we supposed to be disturbed? Or changed in some way? Don’t we expect to open our minds and let someone else’s ideas in? And of course, once your mind is open, it’s hard to close it again.

I have been reading the theory of story as commercial product, readers as consumers of a product manufactured for sale, and we buy and sell and this interaction is governed by the rules and behaviors of commercial transactions. I have always thought of fiction as different, not a commercial product. I buy books not for the value of the paper and ink, but for the ideas inside, the potential for those ideas to change me. And while we set a dollar amount on those ideas, their value is not monetary, but in their potential. Their potential to change the world. This is a problematic idea at the moment, in the excitable culture we live in.

I decided to think this idea through to clarify my thinking. I want to make sure I know what I’m doing, and why, and if I’m deluding myself for some reason, what is that reason? It’s quite possible for me to be wrong. It’s happened before, and usually when I’m wrong, the reason rests squarely with myself. So I do not enter this discussion assuming I’m right. I am going to use the toaster for comparison, because I’m thinking about toasters this morning.

Specifically, where is the toaster? I have unpacked all the boxes marked ‘kitchen’ and the toaster has not appeared. And I have bagels! I do not plan, however, to write to the Cuisinart people and accuse them of making a disappearing toaster. My guess is it is in a box marked ‘books’.

Is a story art, or is it a toaster? I think back to the books I read as a teenager. Hundreds of them, of the genre known as Regency Romance. What I remember now, forty years later, is this: A) they took me out of myself when I needed an escape. B) after several years, they started to piss me off because they were not telling the truth, and I was looking to them for some truth. C) Several of them taught me something I remember to this day—Georgette Heyer would write characters that were both smart and incredibly stupid and blind to themselves. I cannot tell you how relieved I was! Even handsome brilliant wealthy Dukes could screw everything up! Victoria Holt taught me that nothing is as painful as betrayal by a close friend. And we can still love that person, even after the betrayal. I still remember the way that understanding bloomed across the heroine’s mind, and mine, at the same time. These books, the two or three I remember out of the two or three hundred, or thousand I read, were not toasters. I don’t know that the others were, either. What I think now is those writers were afraid to write the truth, or they hadn’t yet learned the truth. Maybe what they were writing was the truth for them, at that time. Or maybe they believed they were writing a product, for a consumer market.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Pablo Picasso

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
Oscar Wilde

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
James Whistler

Art is the proper task of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Anais Nin

I believe fiction is art. I do not believe there is any difference between genre fiction and literary fiction. The intention is the same, or should be. It’s the IDEA. When we write a story, that’s 50% of the exchange of an idea. When someone reads our story, the other 50% is brought to bear, and the ideas of our mind enter your heads, and maybe they change you. Like those ideas changed us, writing about them. The way ideas resonate across the world is more powerful than any force ever invented or built or constructed in a factory.

So for me, this is not a commercial transaction. You are not the consumers of a product I am selling. I’m on a boat, rocking on the wild seas, and I am inviting you to step onto my boat. Let’s take a ride together. Either one of us could get a face full of cold salt water at any moment, or we could flounder and sink, but we might just figure out how to work that sail. Maybe we will fly across the waves, or fly across the moon. Anything is possible. I think it’s worth that chance or I would not be writing.

I don’t have a money-back policy if the toaster doesn’t work for you. And frankly, I could make more money selling blood than selling books. I have a job that is work-for-money. Writing is something different. It’s something more. And even if I could support my family on the revenues of writing, for me it will always be something more.

It’s a gamble, I admit. A gamble for me, to expose myself to this degree. It’s a gamble for you, to put your money down for an idea, and see if that story, that idea, resonates in your brain in such a way that it makes beautiful music. Maybe the tones will be flat and dull in your lovely brain. Maybe it’s me and maybe it’s you! I’m not selling you a toaster. I am selling you a chance to change the world, one story at a time. That’s what I’m trying to do, when I write a story. Change the world.

Now, where have I packed that toaster?