In my 1890 edition of Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics, the great economist defines economics as “a study of man’s actions in the ordinary business of life.”
Too often we only see the highlights: the pivotal conversations, the dramatic turns, the “act breaks.” Characters are curated versions of lives, stripped of all the laundry folding, bill paying, sitting in traffic, and waiting for the kettle to boil—the ordinary business of life.
In real life, the mundane is the majority. But here’s the twist:
Even the most “ordinary” days contain the raw material of a great story, the quiet motivations, subtle conflicts, small kindnesses, hidden fears. If a novelist were writing you, they’d zoom in on the moments that reveal who you are, the burdens you carry, what you care about.
David Foster Wallace put it eloquently: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t good art.”
The world is a complicated place and life is a complicated process. We need to abstract and simplify to get a picture of the whole, but meaning is found in the little “pieces of time” (title of my new book of short stories) that pass by almost without notice.
Where economics looks for patterns and history looks outward at how ordinary actions accumulate into change, fiction looks inward. There’s a whole tradition of fiction built around the idea that ordinary life is dramatic, that routine is where identity, desire, and conflict simmer.
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway a single day in London, buying flowers and preparing for a party, generates memory, trauma, and mortality with every errand. Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party shows us how the ordinary business of life is always happening at the same time as everything else, joy and suffering, privilege and deprivation, life and death. In Giovanni’s Room James Baldwin does something quietly radical. He takes the everyday rhythms of life (romance, work, meals, domestic spaces) and reveals that those ordinary moments are where a person’s deepest shame, desire, love, and identity collide.
“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.” James Baldwin
The ordinary isn’t the absence of story, it’s the soil from which stories grow. Great economists know this as do great historians. They use stories to make their major points.
Economists use case studies (supply and demand), hypotheticals (Alfred Marshall’s partial equilibrium analysis), parables (the tragedy of the commons), and metaphors (Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”). Economists study behavior which is inherently narrative. Pure numbers don’t explain why people make choices, stories persuade them. People don’t respond emotionally to equations. They respond to stories.
History is time and meaning. Without a story it’s just a list of dates. Stories make sense of causation (why things happened), consequence (what changed) and morality (what matters). Stories let historians say not only what happened, but why that matters now.
When I started Think in the Morning I wrote lots of stories about the Sea Gull, a bar and restaurant I owned in Mendocino during the 70s and 80s. As time went on, I wrote more and more about current events, history, politics, and things that seemed important at the time. Then I surprised myself by writing a novel (Behind the Locked Door) and most recently a book of short stories (Pieces of Time).
Looking back, I realize that Alfred Marshall’s “ordinary business of life” is what I’ve been doing, thinking about, writing about, and living from the very beginning. That’s a story still to come. Maybe. Stay tuned.
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