Personal Units · 5:59pm Mar 11th, 2023
From Chuck Palahniuk, Consider This: Moments in my writing life after which everything was different (Hachette 2020):
When I’d first started writing, Writer’s Digest reported that Playgirl magazine paid three thousand dollars for short fiction. That magazine seemed like the best market for a story I’d written called “Negative Reinforcement.” At the same time a new building had been completed in downtown Portland, Oregon, the KOIN Tower, the new home of KOIN television and the many floors of luxury condominiums that rose above the broadcast studios. They were the swankiest address in town and each cost three hundred thousand dollars, so I did the math.
If Playgirl bought my story and ninety-nine more, I could afford a ritzy condo.
My point is that people measure stuff—money, strength, time, weight—in very personal ways. A city isn’t so many miles from another city, it’s so many songs on the radio. Two hundred pounds isn’t two hundred pounds, it’s that dumbbell at the gym that no one touched and that seemed like a sword-in-the-stone joke until the day a stranger took it off the rack and started doing single-arm rows with it.
As Katherine Dunn put it, “No two people ever walk into the same room.”
It's not just units. People remember "personal" better because being closer means it's more likely to matter in their life.