Every Story Needs a Utility Bill

Our house in Surulere got a light bill for eleven thousand naira the month our transformer was down for three weeks. Nobody had read the meter. Somebody in an office had estimated it, and the estimate assumed we had been living normally, which we had not, because we had no power to live normally with.

My father wrote a letter. He kept a copy. He walked it to the district office twice before anyone looked at it, and the second time he brought the meter's actual photographed reading, because a description of a number is not the number. That letter is more useful to me as a novelist than most craft books I owned that year, because it taught me that every recurring marvel in a household has an owner, a rate, and a dispute procedure, and if a story does not know those three things it has not actually built the marvel. It has only mentioned it.

The tariff sheet

I keep what I call a tariff sheet for any invented resource that a story returns to more than twice: the portal, the forge, the airship route, the healing well. Four lines, no more.

• Who owns the resource, meaning who can shut it off.
• Who is billed for using it, and whether that person is also the owner.
• What the rate is, and whether it is fixed or can be raised without warning.
• What happens on non-payment: rationing, disconnection, a debt that moves to the next generation.

Most drafts never fill in the fourth line, and it is the one that generates plot without your help.

Here is a paragraph before the tariff sheet existed, from an early draft of a novella about a city built on a cliff, reached only by a cable elevator:

The elevator carried them up through the fog, past the terraces, into the light of the upper city. Adaeze had ridden it a hundred times and still found it wondrous.

Pleasant, and empty. Here is the same beat once I had answered the four lines: the elevator is owned by a consortium of terrace families, billed per ride to whoever is riding, the rate triples between five and seven in the morning because that is when the upper city's staff commute down, and missing three payments gets your card voided at the turnstile, no appeal until the end of the month.

The elevator carried them up through the fog. Adaeze tapped her card twice before the light went green, the second tap the surcharge for the morning window, and did not look at the woman behind her whose card had gone red and who would be walking the switchback stairs again, for the fourth day this month.

The second version is not longer by much. It has a person in it who is not a passenger, she is a debtor, and she exists because the tariff sheet made her necessary. The wonder of the elevator survives. It has simply stopped being free.

The obvious objection

You could say this turns awe into paperwork, that a reader wants to feel the cliff city, not audit it. That is a fair complaint against a writer who puts the tariff sheet on the page. I do not. The sheet lives in my notebook, not the manuscript. What reaches the reader is one tapped card, one red light, one woman on the stairs. The billing logic never gets explained in the prose. It only gets to decide who is standing where when the scene starts, which is a smaller footprint than an explanation and a heavier one in practice, because the reader supplies the mechanism themselves from the detail you gave them.

There is a cost I will not pretend away. A tariff sheet for every resource in a long novel is a lot of bookkeeping before you have written a scene, and for a short story it is often more infrastructure than the story needs. I use it only past the second recurrence of a marvel. The first time something appears, it is allowed to simply be wondrous. The second time, it needs an owner.

What the bill buys you later

Billing disputes are, structurally, the cheapest conflict engine available to a writer, because they require no villain. Nobody in my Surulere story was evil. An estimate was wrong, a system defaulted to assuming normal use, and a family had to prove a negative. Fantasy and science fiction are unusually bad at this kind of conflict because they tend to install villains for everything, and a villain has to be written, staffed, motivated, defeated. A billing error just has to exist, and it will produce its own antagonist out of whichever bureaucrat is enforcing it that day, who may be perfectly reasonable and still be the obstacle.

Write the tariff sheet before you write the wonder a third time. The wonder will survive being priced. What will not survive is a reader's patience for a marvel that has been used four times and never once cost anyone anything.