“Lacquer”, as a story, has a couple of big problems. In posting it to this blog I edited heavily to reduce those problems. But, of course, their footprints remain. They’re too enmeshed with the structure.

What “Lacquer” taught me as a writer is that, much like in a game of cards, you need to show your hand or fold.

The first problem of this story is that I left far too much implicit in the original draft. This is one of my worst habits; the assumption that an audience shares my assumptions, and will connect the dots I present in the way I meant for them to connect, even if I leave half of them unnumbered.

Fundamentally, “Lacquer” is about what life looks like in a dysfunctional society. This leads to problem number two: I injected too many big concepts about the brand of that dysfunction for a short story. There’s a lot to keep track of, and before I added a page to the ‘final’ draft, none of it got explored enough.

While we only see her for the equivalent of one novel chapter, Ms. Williams’s life is laid bare to us. She’s a smart woman who is all too aware of her limited opportunities. She curbs her desires, squeezing herself into a tighter and tighter box, flinching from the scrape of the sides. Unable to access reliable news—the paywalls, ads, and data limits hampering her being a familiar problem of our times taken to an onerous conclusion—her information-gathering is restricted to social media. Knowing that good jobs have all but vanished for the masses, she chooses to not pursue higher education to avoid incurring significant debt.

The other thing we learn about Ms. Williams is that she’s a prosocial person. She has deep bonds to people she loves; her concern for her mother drives most of the narrative. Moreover, she wants to do what society expects of her. Abandoning her duties entirely, when she’s underpaid and abused, with her franchise’s HR stooges demonstrating slick callousness towards her family emergency, is an inevitable decision— But she has to spend an hour psyching herself up for it, and she can’t get there without thinking of how her family will benefit.

In short, I don’t think Ms. Williams would make a very good protagonist in a longer story. She seeks stability, and her primary concern is fulfilling a role by serving others. She’s not the kind of hero who can venture forth to take a stand against injustice. Any ambition in her heart is readily tempered by the pressure of the many demands placed upon her, and she would be unmoored without those bonds.

She wants to fit in. She wants to help others. She’s willing to take some amount of abuse and show forbearance, keeping any bile to herself. She’s completely competent in executing her job duties, even when those duties do not challenge or fulfill her in the slightest.

She’s the perfect worker. Throwing her away is a terrible, costly mistake on her company’s part, but one made inevitable by its priorities. This is something that was not obvious enough in the first version of “Lacquer” and is hopefully clearer now. The fundamental problem with this almost-familiar world is that the structure of society has warped itself to disregard the needs of the people who compose it.

There is an unraveling of infrastructure. Bridges collapse as a matter of course—and yet emergency responders are unprepared and unable to face what seems to be a common occurrence. Public information is completely commercialized. A bureaucratic system forces Ms. Williams’s mother on a long journey across that faulty bridge for a life-sustaining medical procedure, and the family has no recourse to plead their case. Gross invasions of privacy are taken for granted, the price of working a job that can’t even provide an adequate standard of living. Ms. Williams is functionally a manager; she oversees machines serving hundreds of customers a day, likely turning a tidy profit—of which she sees a bare fragment.

(This reality dawned on me when I taught middle school in Dallas, Texas. Two of my students collectively had three parents who were ‘managers’, working at a fast food restaurant and a high-end lakeside resort. Their pay? Minimum wage. Benefits? Absolutely not. Their responsibilities? Manifold and arduous, often keeping them away from their children all evening, despite their overall inadequate hours. They were the definition of exploited workers.)

In “Lacquer”, much like in American life, the social safety net in place has gaping holes. Ms. Williams may not worry about starving, but a monthly cash infusion isn’t an adequate replacement for functioning infrastructure. Think of all the services that once seemed uncontroversial: parks, libraries, highways, public education, municipal water, fire departments. I’ve seen calls for each of these services to be dismantled and privatized in recent years. Even assuming attempts to totally defund tax-paid programs for public good fail, I think we’re all familiar with the growing problems caused by underfunding. What would our country look like if we let a few more decades slip by without repairing that slow erosion?

(My spouse once told the story of the time Oslo attempted to privatize their garbage pickup. Their fleet of trucks was sold off. Contracts for waste management were won by bid. In less than a month, the streets were choked with refuse. Alleys were piled high with garbage and scavengers swarmed. The private companies that were supposed to supplant city waste not only couldn’t turn a profit, but they couldn’t manage a fraction of the workload stipulated by their contract.

This was an expensive mistake for the city to make. Setting aside public health consequences and the costly cleanup, all that infrastructure and equipment had to be repurchased, and the personnel rehired.)

Assume libraries and parks are spread thin, if they exist at all. Assume the death knell of the middle class took down the venues and businesses catering to them as well. After Ms. Williams quits, where can she go? On rideshare or foot to a disaster site to rescue her mother. And then home to their subsidized apartment. I think the interesting parts of her story end with her decision to abandon that restaurant, the last public sphere accessible to her. Ms. Williams is meant to be average in a world that supposes the average person lacks enough power for real agency.

We live in an era where a tiny, ultra-rich class has captured our national priorities. In 2017, the Federal Reserve reported that the top 1% of Americans owned almost 40% of the nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, we hear every day that there aren’t enough teachers, that housing is too expensive, that children are going hungry, and medical care is virtually unattainable for millions and overpriced for the rest. The money is not going to where it can do the most good. It’s become controversial in some circles to even assert that money should be used for public good.

I won’t pretend to be an expert on this phenomenon, which has been going on since before I was born and only worsening in recent years. But it’s easy to imagine that leadership brutally unwilling to address societal needs can be part of the problem. As well as a disenfranchised workforce at the mercy of ubiquitous corporate systems, with limited protections in place.

Ultimately, this situation is way too complicated for me to depict it adequately in a short story. In terms of exploring a world, I may have bitten off more than I could chew with “Lacquer”. If the problems faced by Ms. Williams aren’t familiar to you already, the exaggerated versions in the narrative probably ring hollow. I’m not sure if the story stands on its own, or if it needs to be informed by a particular social milieu to remain comprehensible.

I am sure that I’m not done exploring these concepts. Even in drawing from the well of fantasy, I use the tools of observation and experience, and the problems faced by Ms. Williams hew closely to my own. But I’m ready to shelve “Lacquer” as an experiment and move on to what comes next.

EDIT: Ironically, this blog post about how I need to learn to make story details more explicit was up for over a month before I realized I never said that Lacquer is set in south DC. The Anacostia river flows into the Potomac. I was trying to frame a picture in which not even the nation’s capital is insulated from ruin, but if that’s lost on most readers then I didn’t do a very good job.