What I've learned about writing this week...

When is a story not a story?

This is what happened to me a few days ago:

I waited in all morning, from 8-1, for a heating engineer to service my boiler (and, no, that isn't a euphemism).  At 2:00, he hadn't turned up and I needed to go to work.  I also had a bad cough so I didn't really want to phone up the company (Homeserve), so I spent about twenty minutes trying the Live Chat facility on the website before realising that I had to talk to someone directly.  It took ten minutes to get through to the right person and just as he was about to sort things out for me, my phone's battery went dead.  It was the landline phone which I had placed beside me at the computer all morning so I could work without having to get up when the engineer phoned me to tell me he was on his way (yes, I'm lazy).  Eventually, Homeserve agreed to pay us £30 compensation for their failure to show up, and I managed to make another appointment.

That same evening, we discovered that the radiator in our downstairs toilet was leaking, so my partner range Homeserve and they organised an appointment for Friday morning, two days later, when an engineer would come round to investigate. He turned up this time, fiddled with the radiator, gave us some unconvincing story about how radiators degrade much more quickly in toilets than elsewhere (?), and failed to get the faulty radiator on the top floor working. He said we needed a replacement radiator in the toilet and he put in an order for one and told us it would be delivered and installed in the next few days. He also said we could turn the central heating back on.

An hour after he left, we found that a much bigger leak from the same radiator had now ruined our recently fitted carpet. Rusty streaks of water festooned the tasteful cream, and using the toilet was like sitting on a tree trunk in a marsh in your bedroom slippers. Smelled much the same too.  So my partner, now incandescent with fury (he's a mild-mannered bloke and I'm not used to seeing him lose his temper so it was quite a shock), rang Homeserve yet again and demanded they send round an emergency engineer immediately.  

The engineer arrived at ten o'clock that evening.  We both had terrible colds. We also had our five year old great-nephew staying with us.  We had taken him to Macdonalds for his tea (we see our role as being to fill him up with empty calories, buy him stuff he doesn't need but really wants, then take him home), but we hate Macdonalds ourselves so we hadn't eaten yet.  Nephew wouldn't go to bed til he'd seen the engineer. In fact, he kept asking 'What IS an engineer?', which is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. So it was a wearing evening.

Anyway, a few days later they fitted us a new radiator and the carpet dried out and we are, apparently, going to get some sort of compensation.

Now, this IS a story.  It has a beginning, a middle and an end.  It has a problem, a conflict, a resolution. It has a kind of foregrounding subplot (The Boiler Service That Never Was), which is resolved but then the story takes on further complexity (The Tale Of The Incompetent Heating Engineer), and events that complicate the situation further, before it reaches a final conclusion.  

But basically, if we're honest, it isn't really a good story, is it?  It's barely more than an anecdote, the kind of thing your best friend might spend half an hour telling you about over coffee in the garden centre, and you'd listen politely, nodding in pseudo-outrage, because, although you feel you'd welcome euthanasia, she is your best friend, after all.  

It's a story that might well be dramatic and 'an emotional rollercoaster' to you - a tale of betrayal, loss, disappointment, wrath and injustice. But to anyone who didn't experience it, it's just another everyday story of mundane incompetence and domestic bad luck, isn't it?

You can imagine a really clever writer making it into a cracking comic story, if they used a great deal of artistic license, or maybe it could be transformed into a dark post-modern reflection on Johnson's Britain told by the Competent Heating Engineer.  Or a weird child's fantasy about the mysterious 'engineer', a person with magical powers and a boiler suit.  But let's be honest, as it stands, for most of us this isn't going to cut it as a story people might actually want to read.

So, what I've learned this week is that not all stories are good stories, and no readers want to read about other people's plumbing problems (and that isn't a euphemism, either).