Faking It: Inventing Fictional Media for Your Novel
Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem; Spinal Tap; Put That Thing Back Where It Came From, or So Help Me; Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime; Southwest General; The Crows Have Eyes III: The Crowening; Angels with Filthy Souls: What these bands, musicals, TV shows, and movies have in common is that they were all invented to appear in another piece of media.
(How to Write Lovable Assholes.)
But while they might be fake, they’re absolutely necessary for the work where they appear. If you don’t buy that a single by The Wonders could play on the radio after The Beatles, then the entire foundation of That Thing You Do! crumbles.
When I sat down to write my book Bad Reputation, I faced a dilemma. The premise I had sold to my editor was this: A Hollywood himbo hopes his role on a historical romance series will jump-start his career when he finds himself falling for the show’s new intimacy coordinator.
It sounds good. But if I was going to explore the filming of a fake show, then I had to map out its characters and the plot, as well as the characters and plot of my book. How on earth did I even approach that task?
The first romance novel I encountered that attempted to do this was Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s Again. The female protagonist, Jenny, is the head writer of a Regency-era soap opera called My Lady’s Chamber. She’s dating one of the actors, though their relationship is on the rocks, when Alec joins the cast as the new villain. Jenny and Alec have an immediate spark, but the book takes its time, showing us how they develop their friendship before their romance. Interspersed throughout are snippets of the show’s scripts, and these comment on the main plot in wonderfully indirect ways. The world-building is utterly convincing.
That is also the case for Kennedy Ryan’s Reel. Broadway understudy Neevah is looking for her big break when she’s cast in a biopic about Harlem Renaissance figure Dessi Blue. During filming, Neevah falls for Canon, the movie’s dreamboat director. In reader discussion materials on her website, Ryan writes that she based Blue on real-life performers such as “Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, and Adelaide Hall.” Indeed, when I started reading Reel, I ran to YouTube to watch some clips of Blue. Upon discovering that the singer was fictional and Ryan had invented her, I was in awe of Ryan’s achievement.
Fake media can also add hilarity. My friend Olivia Dade created not simply a television show—Gods of the Gates, inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid—but also movies and fan fiction for her Spoiler Alert series. Her invented media fills out her characters’ resumes and their hard drives and A03 accounts. Oh yes, the series contains dozens of short fanfics, and amazingly, the writing in those is different from Dade’s own narration. It’s hard enough to develop a recognizable authorial voice for yourself, but Dade accomplishes that multiple times in each of the series’ three entries. The mind boggles.
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So how was I going to do it? First, I had to figure out what exactly my invented media needed to do inside the structure of Bad Reputation. Because so much of my book’s plot revolved around filming, I wasn’t going to be able to get away with broad strokes. And indeed, what I learned from Seidel, Ryan, and Dade was that I didn’t have to keep things vague, and in fact, if I was detailed, my invented show might be more believable to the reader.
Now you can certainly create a fictional version of something that the reader will recognize. For example, in the Winner Bakes All series, Alexis Hall’s characters appear on Bake Expectations, a competition cooking show that shares some elements with The Great British Bake Off. The interplay between the invented Bake Expectations and the real GBBO was delicious fun for me as a reader. I just about fell off my couch when a character baked a phallic-shaped bread.
In this vein, I knew readers would compare the show within my book to Outlander and Bridgerton, both of which are adaptations. So I decided that my show should be inspired by a classic novel, though I wanted to utilize something in the public domain.
I remembered Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, one of which I had read many years ago. I picked five books from his series and wrote a two- to three-sentence pitch for each season of Waverley, my brand-new invented show. I then selected the book I wanted to focus on in Bad Reputation—I went with The Heart of Midlothian—and I broke it into a nine-episode season. I went so far as to develop several paragraphs of description for each episode.
This level of detail was necessary because I wanted to argue that on-screen steamy scenes can be an important component of characterization and plot. In other words, the characters in Bad Reputation firmly believe that sex on screen can be a vital and cinematic subject. In order to convince the reader of that, I had to understand how and why those steamy scenes were in the script for Waverley.
Needless to say, in doing so, I added some events that aren’t in Scott’s original book. But as I made adaptational choices, I considered how today’s movie and television fashion classic novels into pieces that will be appealing to modern audiences. I ended up with an outline that felt like a passable fake show, and one that was detailed enough for Bad Reputation’s requirements.
By the time I finished writing, Waverley felt real to me. Alas, it remains only in my head (and in summary as a bonus in the back of Bad Reputation). It will have to join the ranks of so many other fake TV shows that we only wish we could binge—which is an accomplishment in and of itself.
Check out Emma Barry’s Bad Reputation here:
(WD uses