Fiction.

In reading Chip Delany's About Writing, I came across the following provocative sentence:

"One way or the other, directly or indirectly, good fiction tends to be about money."

I think (hope?) what Chip is referring to is not money per se, but its effects on people -- in their circumstances, in having or not having it, in the pursuit of it, and in the effects it has on peoples' emotions.

It's a great way to force you to think about fiction from a different angle, but I think it's overstated. (I imagine Chip would be the first to agree.) He's also left himself a couple of outs, through the qualifiers "good" (no one is going to always agree with you about what constitutes "good" fiction) and "tends to be about" (which allows for exceptions).

Money of course is representative of various aspects of both our survival (food, shelter, etc.), which motivates fictions both complex (Les Miserables) and simple (any Road Runner cartoon), and our aspirations: achieved, thwarted, gained but to no good end, and even (in the case of a book like Siddhartha) rejected. (Money is such a ubiquitous part of human existence that you could just as easily say that most good fiction tends to be about clothes. After all, we all wear 'em.)

Equally interesting, Chip says that you pretty much can't write fiction without establishing your characters' financial circumstances. Fascinating and true. But again, I think we do this in order to provide context for the characters' emotions and behaviors.

Money, in the long run, is just paper and metal. Even in the real world, it's basically symbolic. Personally, I think fiction -- most fiction -- good, bad or indifferent fiction -- is about only one thing:

Something stands in the way of what I want.

The "something" may be an antagonist, or circumstances, or myself -- and ideally it's a combination of all three. This too is an over-generalization, and is considerably more simple-minded than Chip's statement -- but I think it comes fairly close to describing the essence of storytelling, for what it's worth.