Sometimes I think about the distortions in our collective understanding of the world that come from all fiction writers being writers.
For better or worse, people learn a lot from the media—about social norms, about science-fictional technologies, about the lives of people very different from them. But writers aren’t randomly drawn from the population. And it seems like that might distort our view of everything.
Consider stories about creating media: novels about writing novels, musicals about being in musicals, movies about filming movies. I don’t mean to suggest that those stories are navel-gazey or self-centered or not worth telling, by any means. I love Stephen King’s writer protagonists. A Chorus Line left me fundamentally changed inside. I have seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang fifteen times because I keep discovering that people haven’t seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and then watching it with them so I can see their face about the finger scene.
Stories about making media speak deeply to the human condition. They can be about devotion and sacrifice and passion and love of something higher and greater than yourself. They can be about ambition and about fame and about wealth and about failure. They can be about coordinating hundreds of strangers to complete a high-stakes project that’s always on the verge of failure, about the clash of bigger-of-life personalities, about being trapped together with people you hate. They can—crucially—be about taking six weeks off to investigate The Horrors without a boss leaving you angry voicemail messages about how you’re going to be fired if you don’t show up to work.
But surely media-making jobs aren’t the only jobs that speak deeply to the human condition. Of course, the media is on top of doctors and lawyers and spies and police officers. But what if there is some profound insight into humanity contained in the profession of TV repairperson? We would have no idea! Our entire pop-cultural knowledge of the experiences of TV repairpeople comes from Lauren Hough’s I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America and, presumably, Larry the Cable Guy.
How many jobs are there that would be as rich a mine for stories as moviemaking or being a Broadway chorus girl—if anyone who wrote novels or TV shows knew anyone who worked them?
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