Yours, Mine, Ours

I read an article awhile back in which Stephen King recounted the beginning of the Gunslinger series. I’m heavily paraphrasing here, but it went something like this, “I started getting heat from my publisher to follow up the first Gunslinger because the fans were really agitating for it and I thought, ‘Fuck them, it’s my story and I’ll decide when to write it.’”

Or something like that. The point he made, that the story was his and fans had no business intruding on his decision making process, hit me sort of hard because I’ve always believed that when a man starts a business it’s his company to do with as he wishes, but when he hires employees it becomes something else. There are people depending on his decisions then. It’s not their company precisely, but it’s not really 100% his anymore, either.

The same goes for story. When a writer writes a story, it’s his. When he sends it out into the world, it becomes not public property but something not entirely his.

So, who owns story? Many people may lay claim; publishers, agents, readers, scholars. Oh, and the writer. I always leaned toward the readers having the greatest ownership (in the cosmic sense) because they invest more emotionally than anyone apart from the writer and there are more them than there are of him.

And then I read King’s new book, Lisey’s Story.

Watching Lisey Landon fight off the swarms of scholarly locusts and overzealous fans that feel entitled to her dead husband’s work was a real eye opener – mostly because I had never looked at it from the author’s point of view before. Or the author's family. After all, now that the author is gone, all they have left of him are his stories.

I still don’t have a definitive answer that would split out ownership by percentages. And, of course, I’m talking about cosmic ownership rather than financial which is well covered under the law.

But, it’s fascinating to me that these constructs of pure whimsy take on such real gravity when they enter the mainstream and travel down to the myth pool where we all go to drink once in a while. I've spoken before about the crushing emotional loss of a show canceled before its time (mostly with Firefly) and the feeling of loss when you get to the last page of the last book in a longer series. Through our emotional investment, these fictions become a part of our reality -- sometimes the better part.

The book is excellent, by the way. Recommended.