Name-dropping

I read this the other day, and it has been bubbling around in my head since then. Ignoring the second half of the article, which seems to be focused on novels being about the internet in our lives, and going back to the internet appearing in stories about other things, I’m not sure I agree with the idea that writers avoid it out of fear of seeming too dated or frivolous.

For one thing, for all the hand-waving about how the internet is “changing our lives”, I think the article was completely correct in saying that since TV is somewhat passive, it doesn’t make for something exciting to include directly. Do I personally want to read about someone watching TV? Hell no. I’d rather read about something slaying dragons or racing after their partner through an old warehouse or fist-fighting with a vampire. Same thing goes for reading about someone looking at lolcats or reading webcomics. I do it, lots of people do it, the characters can certainly do it off-screen, but it’s not an exciting thing to watch (read) it happen.

That said, if someone would receive an email giving directions to where the dragon-slaying is going down, I think that’s an absolutely perfect use of the internet, and I think plenty of contemporary novels do that. The internet is great as either scene-setting, like what someone’s doing when interrupted, or a catalyst to the action. As for the internet being the scene of the action, like a treasure hunt for clues buried in forum archives or something–I’m not sure. I’ve read some examples that were tortuous to the extreme because there was a lot of time spent on things like “He typed in his password. He pushed the link to sign on. The computer processed it, and the home page popped up.” DUH.

The places where I’ve encountered the worst examples of that agonizing process description were books that were a little older, so they were describing what was at the time a new process that many of the readers wouldn’t be familiar with. I read a mystery once where the central clue was hidden on a computer tape, and while the hijinks with hiding it in a musical cassette tape box were quaint, the descriptions of how the computer read the code from the tape and displayed a program made my eyes bleed from boredom.

What I took from that for my own writing is that if some part of your characters’ daily life is so new and awesome you have to explain how it works to your readers, you may be heading for trouble, because that explanation will decay rapidly. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have new and awesome things in the story, just that you let them be in context, and not explain them much.

Then again, by personal choice, I steer away from too much brand name-dropping. I’ve encountered people at writing workshops that argue quite strenuously that if you’re writing in a contemporary setting you should absolutely litter the page with brand names. The argument is that each brand name carries with it a quick and easy set of connotations about the person using it. “She zoomed around the corner in her Ford Escort” versus “She zoomed around the corner in her Porsche 911”. You can see how the brand name warped even the shade of meaning of the “zoomed” into something ironic in the Escort’s case. It doesn’t matter if it gets outdated, they argue, because doesn’t everything get outdated? We still read about gaslights perfectly well in things written in the nineteenth century. I agree in theory (though one can quibble about people having different connotations–I might read the Porsche one and think “jackass!” you might read it and think “rich and awesome”), but I think there’s a world of difference between stable-name-dropping, and technology-name-dropping.

Stable name dropping is anything that has some longevity to both the product and the brand. Jeans, for example. Everyone wears jeans, jeans have been around forever, and there is no reason to think they won’t be around for a long time to come. This extends to Levi’s. Same deal for Coke, McDonald’s, and at this point probably Starbucks. What the longevity means is that their connotations are generally fairly settled, and don’t change much over time.

Technology-name-dropping, on the other hand, has a very steep trajectory of connotation decay. Think about it–I remember when AOL first came on the scene. If I’d written “She logged into AOL.” at that time, my expected connotation might be something like her being pretty hip, and maybe not a technie nerd, but certainly an early adopter. Take that forward a few years, and suddenly that same sentence carries something of a negative edge. That character’s a little dumb, letting the big corporation spoon-fed her the internet, rather than learning to use it herself. If I wrote that now, my readers might assume that the character was a hopeless dinosaur, barely one step up from a luddite, but clinging desperately to a time in the past when she understood what was going on.

That’s a gigantic freaking jump. If that was my character, and I’d intended her to be hip, and suddenly she was hopelessly uncool, I’d be pretty frustrated. Given many, many decades, you reach a point where the concept is so quaintly out-dated that it’s like the gaslights, and since they reader will have no connotation of their own, it will be easier to cast their mind back in time and try to reconstruct what the original connotation should have been. AOL was cool for a while, right? The trouble is, will your book even be in print at that point?

Then again, at the end of the day, people in my writing rarely drink Coke or eat McDonald’s either. The people I mentioned above who like brand names would accuse me of running the risk of being too general, but I disagree. I simply build in my connotations directly, rather than trusting to luck and timing to convey the right ones. Say I secretly like McDonald’s and I want to convey a connotation of guilty pleasure. Rather than “He opened the McDonald’s bag.” I might say “He opened the fast food bag and the scent of french fries made his mouth water.” Or maybe I’m going for the fatty and gross connotation, so I’d say “He opened the fast food bag and stared in frustration at the grease slick already spreading on the paper bottom.” Even if McDonald’s goes bankrupt tomorrow, people will still get guilty pleasure or grossness conveyed years from now. That’s pretty specific, but with considerably less decay.