Truth in Fiction: Wealth is not an adequate plot device.

Let me offer you a common premise: ingenue meets twenty-something billionaire and, after a stormy romantic voyage, accessorized with luxury brand-name products and services, and pitted with weak-premised misunderstandings, missed opportunities, ecstatically successful sex – even when it’s entirely non-consensual – and totally groundless jealousies, ends in a happily ever after moment.

Last week, I wrote what must be the most scathing review I have ever offered a book. I don’t write many reviews and, when I do, it’s usually motivated by frustration. I’ve read a lot of bad erotica and written a lot about it, but I seldom encounter things I feel are evil. Yes, evil.

We, all of us, constantly live with the din of a fictional narrative that bombards us from every media platform. It’s not presented to us as fiction, but as marketing. If you buy this product, get this service, own this thing, you will be more attractive, your life will be happier, and you will be the envy of your peers. This message, in all its many forms, is so ubiquitous, so pervasive, that we cease to recognize it as a narrative. It slips into the brain unnoticed, adding to the mountains of previous fictional messages that are already filling it up.

I stand in the shower and read the label on my shower gel. It tells me – because I live in Asia, where, sadly, people want to hear these things –  that it will make my skin whiter and softer and more supple. I’ve been using it for 3 months and my skin (thank god) isn’t any whiter, or more supple. All that is total fiction. It just gets me a little cleaner. Strangely enough, nowhere on the bottle does it actually say it does the one thing it ACTUALLY does, and does perfectly well. Nowhere on the container does it promise to make my skin cleaner.

I really recommend you do this: just read the label of your shampoo. Does it do the things it says it does? No, of course it doesn’t. It just gets the dirt and oil off your hair. Period. And why should we demand or be promised that it will do more?

Yes, you say, but that’s marketing. Just shut up and live with it. It’s everywhere.

Fine. I do. Because I don’t produce shampoo or shower gel. I write stories. And yes, of course, I write fictional stories. So, since I already admit to selling ‘lies,’ I should be able to write as many lies as I like, right? After all, what harm is a little escapism?

Yet, I believe, ironically that I have an obligation to my readers to do as Hemingway advises: to write the truest sentence you know. This isn’t a matter of writing style, but a level of writing ethos. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set your stories in fictional places or create fictional characters. It doesn’t mean you can’t write impossible things, like a woman having sex with an octopus (yes, I did write about that). In fact, impossible things are often the site of the truest of metaphors.

What I think he meant was to write to the basic realities of our perceptions and emotions as humans. So please feel free to write about impossibly young billionaires, if you’ve done your research and you know any. I’ve met two. One had inherited the money from a tremendously corrupt father and was an immature, narcissistic freak who didn’t actually believe anyone else’s experience of reality was real. The other was self-made, by a fluke of the marketplace, and spent most of his time obsessing about losing it. Of course, he did end up losing most of it. There was nothing sexy about either of these men. In truth, neither of them were fully mature men at all. I slept with both of them and, I can assure you, there is nothing sexy about men who spend their life purchasing over-priced crap as a way of constructing their personalities. They were pitiable. Their wealth made them spoiled, immature adolescents. It blinkered their understanding of the world. They were surrounded by people who affirmed their uninformed, ignorant opinions. But, most importantly, their real moments of joy were few and far between, their unhappinesses many, and they were both lousy, selfish lovers. I don’t write about people like them – mostly because they’re boring.

In fact, the vast majority of wealthy men and women I have met have one thing in common: they’re all incredibly boring. Probably because their wealth has inured them to the sort of experiences in life that make a person interesting.

So, what has this to do with the fiction on my shower gel bottle?

In the same way my shower gel hype is lying, so does the mountain of brand-porn masquerading as steamy romance. And yes, you say, what is wrong with a little escapism? Well, I reply… the problem is that it isn’t a ‘little.’ It’s a lot. It’s fricking ubiquitous. It perpetuates unthruths about the world over and over again, so often that it becomes accepted as fact by dint of repetition. And it begins to breed a sort of aspirational envy, a sense of baseline dissatisfaction with any sort of a real life. Subtly, it repeats, over and over again, that real men who work hard and just about manage to feed their families are somehow ordinary, uninteresting, unsexy.

The world is mostly populated by non-rich people who struggle, and whose struggles are just as worth examining in fiction. And what’s more, the outcomes of their struggles affect their lives to a much greater degree, because they aren’t insulated from their failures with vast amounts of wealth. When normal people fail… they feel it. They can’t buy another car that would feed a whole village for a year as a distraction from their woes. They have to sigh and open a beer.

I’m not saying don’t ever write about rich people. Just keep it representative. There are about 1% of them.