Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction

Pop Culture

Pop Culture I’m a hypocrite. I warn my students against using pop culture references in their fiction, citing for them stories from the early twentieth century that are unreadable now because we don’t recognize the pop culture references in them. Even recent stories will include meaningful winks at one-hit wonders that have already vanished from our memories. Culturally speaking, we have short attention spans, and if in fifteen years your story needs footnotes—hell, let’s say five years—you may have a problem. Worse, if you can’t recognize pop culture references in your own story a few years after you’ve written it, you’re really in trouble. The issue, I tell my students, isn’t writing for posterity, which is out of your hands. The issue is accessibility, which is something you can control. But, as I say, I’m a hypocrite. My own work is flush with pop culture references . In my novels and stories, you’ll find Peter Frampton, KISS, Styx, Journey, Cheap Trick, Planet of the Apes, The Chinese Connection, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Buster and Billie, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Walking Tall, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Enter the Dragon, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Evel Knievel, Yes’s “Roundabout,” The Doors’s “Light My Fire,” Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick,” Farrah Fawcett-Majors, W. C. Fields, Olivia Newton-John, the Gong Show, and even Edgar Bergen ’s ventriloquist doll, Mortimer Snerd. Whenever I decide to use a pop culture reference in my own fiction, though, I ask myself three questions: 1. Does it make sense in the context of the moment, or is it simply there for the sake of being there? In other words, is it an organic part of the scene, or is it doing nothing more than evoking a time 100 pop culture period? For me, when a pop culture reference works best, it needs to be a part of the larger fabric of the scene. That’s not to say that I’m not guilty of trying to evoke a specific time period with a reference , but I try to avoid it, and if I catch myself putting in a detail simply for wallpaper, I’ll take it out. 2. Where is the reference coming from—the consciousness of the character or the author? I’m always writing in the margins of my students’ stories “authorial, authorial, authorial,” by which I mean that the reference is coming from the author and not, as it should be, the narrator’s consciousness. It’s too easy to be authorial, just as it’s always easier to stand above something and look down on it. It’s much harder to submerge yourself into the consciousness of a point-of-view character and ask yourself, over and over, these questions : Is this something the character would actually think? Is this faithful to who this character is, to the very particular and idiosyncratic galaxy of stuff (for lack of a better word) that comprises this character’s life, or am I just being clever here? It’s really a question of accuracy. It’s what John Gardner might have called “intellectual honesty.” 3. Finally, there’s tone to consider. You’re unlikely to find Cormac McCarthy referencing the Planet of the Apes franchise. Why? Because such a reference would throw the tone of his books out of whack. Imagine, if you will, a reference to the watermelonsmashing comedian Gallagher in the latest Doris Lessing novel. And yet, such a reference wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in a short story by Lorrie Moore. Tone is almost always interlocked with the writer’s vision—that elusive thing we call worldview that often defines for us a writer’s entire body of work—and since my younger students haven’t yet discovered what their worldview is (or haven’t yet mastered controlling it), I will not infrequently find pop culture references sneaking in at the wrong moments, derailing scenes that were tonally heading one way until the appearance of a jarring pop culture reference left readers scratching their heads. pop culture 101 These three questions are all related to the artistic aspect of writing, but there is also another one that may be the most important question of all: is my work inviting readers inside, or am I excluding large...