Storytellersunplugged

Every aspiring writer of speculative fiction should, I think, put in some time working in a bookstore. And I’m not talking about a cozy, snug used bookstore whose real purpose is to accumulate enough literature in one place to create a verbiage singularity that will let the hobbits out of wherever they’ve been hiding and into our universe, a place where each and every volume has been lovingly frosted with pixie dust and given the benediction of the King of the Cats, who drowses nobly in the front window as a living advertisement of how massively winsome the place is. Not that I have a problem with that sort of bookstore, mind you, no, not at all. They get a surprising percentage of each of my paychecks, and I’m happy to keep it that way. But they’re not what I’m talking about here.

Oh, no. I mean a bookstore, emphasis on the store, one with store classifications and frequent saver cards that you have to pimp every twenty-seven-point-six transactions lest your immortal soul be cast into retail peril. You know the ones I’m talking about here - the McBookMegaWorldMarts that have sprung up in every mall with the strength of purpose to have outbuildings, or inside every one that has room for them. The ones where every book placement is precisely laid out and paid for - the term “shelf runner” does not mean what you think it might mean, but it does cost a lot more than you’d think - and books are very clearly a commodity.

Working in a store like that is, in every sense, an education. There are a lot of things one picks up, ranging from a keen appreciation of how the average customer picks out a book to the basic idea that there are a hell of a lot of books out there, and that no matter how many you write, your total output is still going to be a drop in the ocean. It’s humbling and intriguing and surprisingly germane to writing, and I’ll no doubt ramble on about the particulars another time. This month, however, I want to focus on one particular piece of knowledge that working in a bookstore can bring, and the somewhat unorthodox method by which I learned it.

The bookstore I worked in was a Waldenbooks, tucked into an odd corner of an odder mall in Dedham, Massachusetts. The place was dimly lit and thinly trafficked, and my interview for a bookseller position had summarily metamorphosed into a therapy session for the assistant manager, who spent our entire conversation explaining to me how awful the place was and why she was quitting. Then, she offered me the job.

I took it, of course. I was in grad school, I’d just had my funding pulled, and I needed a source of cheap books like Wimpy needed cheeseburgers. The words “employee discount” were precisely the shot of spinach, if I may stretch the Popeye metaphor a little further, my academic efforts needed, and besides, it was a bookstore. What more rapturous place could there be for someone pounding towards an M.A. in Lit? What better employment could a budding litweenie ask for, than to be surrounded by books and to get paid for it. Apart from the miniscule pay, the necessity of flogging Frequent Reader cards every time someone bought so much as a comic book, the strange mating dance that my weekly schedule did with my class schedule and the lengthy trek to Dedham itself, the job was perfect. The cute girl working at the Mrs. Fields next door who slipped me a free cookie every now and again? A bonus.

Like most of the bookstores of my acquaintance, the place was staffed with devout readers, specifically, science fiction fans. Apart from the manager, who was a befuddled but kindly avuncular type in the best Dickensian tradition, and the freckled physical therapy major who’d signed on in search of victims to practice on, we were all speculative fiction nerds to the nth degree. What this meant in daily terms is that there was a constant, vicious struggle over who got to shelve and maintain the science fiction section, and that we pretty much ignored learning anything about the other 94% of the store if we could help it. While our tastes were not identical, they were damn near congruent, and so many happy hours were spent on the shop floor debating the merits of Heinlein versus Herbert, whether the Dragonriders of Pern were science fiction or fantasy, and most importantly, why other folks Just Didn’t Get How Brilliant All This Stuff Was. Sure, we’d sell customers books from the other departments, but we were really only interested in the ones who bought the stuff that we liked, and all that we read was the stuff we recommended around the circle to one another. We were a happy, unchallenging little cabal, which may have had its benefits, but I don’t think we were even aware how limited our boundaries were, or how tightly we set our horizons.

For my part, I was an early casualty in the struggle for SciFi shelving. Instead, I made a dignified retreat into taking care of the Horror section, along with True Crime, Occult, History, and Bibles. Occult and Bibles, incidentally, were located right smack dab next to each other, a circumstance that led to more patrons eyeing one another uneasily than you’d get in your average well-lit XXX theater. But I digress.

You see, I was perfectly happy after losing out on the chance to shelve the weekly influx of space opera and mightily-thewed barbarians. After all, I didn’t get stuck with Romance. The Romance section was big. The Romance section was scary. The Romance section got more books in every Thursday morning than any three other sections put together, and God help you if you didn’t get the latest and greatest out on the shelves before opening, especially on the third Thursday of every month. That was when one particular line of romance novels would come in, you see.

That was when we’d get the nuns.

I didn’t know about the nuns when I took the job, and the first couple of months I worked it I had no idea there was anything to know about them. Every so often I’d see them as I straightened Bibles, surreptitiously planted Thomas Ligotti books on empty spots on endcaps, and generally went about my duties. They were always there Thursday mornings, especially the third one of every month, and I had a vague notion that they’d taken a van in from a convent somewhere in the vicinity of south Jamaica Plain. There were eight or ten of them, as I recall, friendly little old ladies who zipped around the store like the ghosts in an amped-up Pac-Man machine. None were more than four and a half feet tall, at least in my memory, and they all looked as if they’d been freeze-dried sometime around the War of the Spanish Succession. Think Yoda in a habit, and you’d get the right idea.

Needless to say, they weren’t the slightest bit interested in anything in any of my sections. For one thing, they already had all the Bibles they needed, and as for the rest of it, I got the feeling that it wasn’t their thing. So I’d wave, say hi, do the employee manual-mandated shuffle of “Is there anything I can help you find today?” and watch them scoot off. Clearly, they knew where they were going and what they wanted, and they didn’t need a freshly scrubbed clerk with his nametag on upside down trying to “help.” I’d only slow them down.

That’s where the lesson was, mind you, not that I noticed it at the time. Fortunately, I’d get another chance.

I didn’t really understand what was going on there until after I became one of the hallowed keyholders. This was a responsibility that meant that I could open or close the store without the manager present, and that I could nominally be said to be “in charge” when nobody more senior was around. This, in turn, let the manager sleep in on occasion, which made him much happier, and allowed those of us lucky enough to have keys to revel in our Al Haig-like quasi-authority.

Thus, I was in charge and practically alone in the store one fateful Thursday. We’d gotten a particularly large shipment that day, as I recall, and the bulk of it was romance novels. Not just any romance novels, either - the third Thursday was when the steamy, sweaty, smutty ones came in. The ones with titles like “Acapulco Sauna Surprise” and “Penetrating Passion”. The ones whose cover art consisted of an artfully photographed yet shapely female buttock pressed up against the steamy glass of a shower door, a splayed hand posed suspiciously nearby. Those romance novels.

I thought nothing of this at the time. I opened the boxes, checked them in against the manifest, threw them onto the shelves as best I could, and generally got the store ready for our 10 AM opening.

At a quarter after, the nuns arrived. They swept into the store like a well-mannered, devout tornado, and through a series of complex, well-rehearsed maneuvers, made their way to the back.

Specifically, the back left, which is to say, the corner where the romance novels were shelved.

“That’s interesting,” I thought. “They’re over by the children’s books.” And they were, mind you, as the same Mensa candidate who’d placed my sections next to one another had placed kiddie lit and Romance right next to one another. Then I shrugged and went back to the cash register, the special order alerts, and all of the other desperately important tasks that a junior keyholder at a chain bookstore needs to busy himself with.

They next thing I knew, they were there. All of them, lined up neatly in front of the register and bearing stacks of freshly uncrated romance novels. Right on top of the pile that the nun at the front of the line held was Acapulco Whatchamacallit.

I swear, the damn thing was staring at me. Not the nun - the buttock on the cover.

I gulped. Forced myself to make eye contact with the smut-carrying nun in question. Smiled nervously as she put the pile of books down on the front desk and shoved it toward me with the universal gesture that means “Please ring me up so I can get the heck out of here.”

“Sister,” I said, and picked up the first book, half expecting it to squirm out of grip and run away while shouting “Unclean! Unclean!” I cleared my throat, stared at the book and tried again. “Sister, I don’t know how to say this, but I’m Jewish, and I don’t feel right selling you these books.”

She smiled at me, a big, beatific smile, and reached out to pat my hand reassuringly. “You’re very sweet,” she said. “Here’s my Frequent Reader card. I’m a lifetime member.”

So, I did the only thing I could. I shut up and sold her the books. I sold her the books, and I sold the nun after her the books, and I sold every last one of them every last book they wanted, regardless of what my rather sheltered moral sense said was “appropriate” or my even more undeveloped literary sense said was “good.” Those were the books they wanted. Those where the books they liked. I’d just come face to face with an army of militant readers who knew what they wanted and who would never, ever read the stuff I liked.

(Well, judging from what they’d just bought they might, but only if it had spicy bits. Then again, that’s another digression.)

That was the lesson, of course. Whilst the staff had been squabbling over which Mercedes Lackey novels deserved faceouts and which ones didn’t, a great many people whom we’d had no interest in had come into our store, bought books we’d most likely never heard of, and been perfectly content with their purchases. They were reading - drum roll please - stuff that they liked. Not the stuff that we liked. Not the stuff that we wanted to push on them, because gosh darnit, everyone ought to be reading the stuff we thought was good. Nope, they were perfectly content with their own taste, as well they should have been.

That, then, was the lesson that the encounter taught to me, the seemingly basic notion that not everyone had read what I had read or liked what I liked. I couldn’t assume my taste and experience were anything but that - my taste and my experience - and that I’d do well to take an interest in what other folks were into instead of constantly trying to drag them into my little literary pup tent. The borders, if you’ll pardon the pun, needed to be expanded. Not necessarily to the steamy bits of Acapulco, mind you, but stretched out into other areas.

In other words, other people like other stuff, and that’s just fine. Until then, it had always been possible to sit on my tiny ivory throne and sneer at those who “didn’t get it” or refused to make a pilgrimage onto the sacred territory of Stuff I Liked. After all, they were just professors or fellow students or whoever - people I had context for, and whose resistance to my obviously superior taste I could rationalize away. But when that tiny, cheerful nun shoved that pile of books across the counter, that made it a whole new ballgame. It made it clear that there were a lot of other people out there who clearly had no ulterior motive for not sharing my taste and my reading history, and that it was arrogant to think that my particular preferences were all that there were.

It is, I think, a valuable lesson, and not necessarily an intuitive one. The act of writing professionally is in certain ways a deeply egotistical one, a way of saying my words are worth your time, and with that comes an easy temptation to get wrapped up in the known and safe. To realize, however, that your taste is not automatically superior to anyone else’s just because you like specfic or Civil War historical fiction or, God forbid, soggy-in-the-shorts romance novels, is to understand that there is a audience of readers than exists that is wider than you and the people just like you. Once you’re aware of that, it’s impossible to go back to the parochialism that insists you’re reading the only good stuff, and nobody else’s picks are valid. From there, it’s an easy step to checking out some of that other taste, to broadening your own likes and possibilities, and maybe, just maybe, using that to inform your writing. Otherwise, you’re just writing to an audience of you and your dopplegangers, and that doesn’t go as far as you might think.

Maybe you knew that already. Maybe you learned it somewhere else. Me, I picked it up working in a bookstore, selling naughty books to nuns. If you get the chance, I highly recommend the experience.

Working in a bookstore, that is. The bit with the nuns, well, I’ll let you decide that one on your own.