How to Write Fake Pop Culture (and Make it Seem Real)
The secrets to crafting fictional pop songs, TV shows and more.
Did you know that the members of the Ministry of Pop Culture are all authors? Which means pop culture is a mainstay of all our books. My friends apply the most rigorous of journalistic standards in reporting on beloved films and TV shows.
As for me? I simply make it all up. Which I can do since I’m a novelist.
As a pop culture superfan who writes novels, I get a lot of pleasure from dreaming up fictional TV series, movies, celebrities and music. I’d like to think there’s an art to creating fake pop culture, because there has to be some grounding to make the fictional pop culture feel real.
Here’s a glimpse into my creative process as well as that of acclaimed author Dawnie Walton (The Final Revival of Opal & Nev), and how we weaved our love of pop culture into our novels … by expertly faking it.
Advika and the Hollywood Wives and Dava Shastri’s Last Day (my novels)
For one of my novels, I used my love of a reality show to create a fictional version of it for my book. And for the other, I had zero experience with writing a pop song … and wrote one anyway.
In Advika and the Hollywood Wives, my protagonist Advika binge watches an entire season of Luxury Wives, an obvious takeoff on the Real Housewives series. Her reason for watching? Advika is married to a much older man, and his third ex-wife stars on the show. She can’t resist getting a glimpse of her husband’s previous marriage through the lens of reality TV.
As a longtime Bravo fan (with caveats), I’m super familiar with the conventions of the franchise. I created my fake show by including the elements Housewives is known for — a cast of women jockeying for stardom, their ostentatious displays of wealth, and a queen bee her castmates either want to ally with or take down — along with a trope that devoted fans would recognize.
That trope would be the vow renewal ceremony, which on Real Housewives can be the death knell for marriages. If a Housewife renews her vows with her spouse on camera, the likelihood is high they will eventually divorce. Since reality TV already invites a kind of voyeurism, I granted Advika the squeamish opportunity to watch her husband renew his vows with his soon-to-be-ex, and imbued the event with foreshadowing that the marriage was soon to fail.
By incorporating the known elements of a piece of pop culture along with some of the deep cut references only diehards would know, I created a (hopefully) realistic facsimile of a reality show you might actually see on TV.
Creating fake pop culture can be fun, but it also can be really daunting when you’re trying to depict something you have no experience with yourself. In my debut novel, Dava Shastri’s Last Day, there is a song called “Dava” named for the main character. Not only is it a No. 2 Billboard hit, “Dava” wins the Oscar for best original song.
And for plot purposes, I needed the lyrics for “Dava” to appear in my novel. I’m no poet or lyricist, and yet I had set myself the insane challenge of writing a song that was supposed to win the Academy Award?1
“Dava” was meant to be a song about yearning and heartbreak, and I thought about how great pop songs are a magic trick of specificity and universality. Their details are vivid and memorable (think of the scarf in Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well,”) but the emotions expressed are enormously relatable.
I wrote the lyrics in a stream of consciousness way with minimal editing. What really helped was that I was teaching myself the ukulele while writing the novel, and in writing the lyrics, I came up with a melody for the song’s chorus. I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I recorded myself playing “Dava” on the ukulele.
Dare I say it was actually pretty catchy? And so when the novel got published, I was presented with the most incredible opportunity: the audiobook producers turned my lyrics and melody into an ACTUAL SONG.2
And I can’t believe that my ukulele video — complete with off-key singing — was played for a national audience on Good Morning America.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, Dawnie Walton
Songs also play an integral role in the award-winning novel Opal & Nev, which uses the oral history format to relay the story of an iconic rock duo through their rise, fall and potential reunion. Walton, a former Entertainment Weekly editor, tapped into her pop culture expertise for her novel, particularly the music from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the period when Opal and Nev are at their career peak.
Opal is a Black American woman and Nev is a white British man, and each brings their own sensibilities and influences to their musical collaborations. Walton modeled her characters’ songwriting on a real-life musical duo you might have heard of: Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
Walton was inspired by her “interest in what made a Paul song vs. a John song” when demonstrating the difference between Nev and Opal’s lyrics: Nev, like Paul, favors “a character-driven story-song,” while Opal, like John, is a “give-zero-fucks provocative.”
When a shocking death occurs during one of Opal & Nev’s concerts, the tragedy propels them to write more overtly political songs, starting with “Who's the N----- Now.” Walton based it on several real songs, though with one important distinction.
“I imagined the song and its lyrics to be highly questionable, in the vein of other 1970s rock & roll songs that have used that word (here I'm thinking about “Woman Is the N----- of the World” by John and Yoko, and “Rock N Roll N----” by Patti Smith) — with the key difference being that as a Black artist, Opal reserves the right to use and reclaim that word.”
The novel includes snippets of the pair’s lyrics, including “Who’s the N----- Now,” so readers can get a sense of how Opal and Nev’s songwriting styles diverged over the course of their brief career. As Walton notes, “The evolution of the lyrics is a function of the novel's characterization, conflict, and plot.”
Opal & Nev is also so rich in period-specific details that as you read the novel, you feel like you’re reading about a real musical partnership, not characters born out of Walton’s imagination. Much of that is due to how Walton weaves real pop culture into her fiction.
After parting ways with Nev, Opal reluctantly accepts a role in a B-movie called Any Witch Way.3 Even though the movie is made up, Walton sprinkles in several true-life details that makes Opal’s career low point feel like a flick you’d find on basic cable.
“The star of the movie was Christina Applegate as Becky, a teenage girl coming into her witchy powers, and Opal played the mouthiest of three fairy-godmother-type mentors (the others being Penelope Ann Miller and Swoozie Kurtz) who help Becky rule her school.”
“Like, I could SEE this movie,” Walton added. “[It’s] the fake pop culture that made me giggle the most.”
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In the mood to read fictional pop culture? Check out these novels:
For fans of Saturday Night Live (and romcoms):
Romantic Comedy, Curtis Sittenfeld
For fans of millennial teen shows — and their myriad TV revivals and reunions:
The Daydreams, Laura Hankin; Reboot, Justin Taylor
If you enjoy historical sagas set in classic Hollywood:
Siren Queen, Nghi Vo; Did You Hear About Kitty Karr, Crystal Smith Paul
And if you enjoy reading about the dramatic highs and lows of playing in a band:
Daisy Jones and the Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid; Utopia Avenue, David Mitchell
✨ An exciting opportunity to help a worthy cause! ✨
Several of us are participating in the fifth annual Authors for Voices of Color online auction to benefit We Need Diverse Books, which starts today. Check out our offerings (in addition to great prizes from Kevin Kwan, Bonnie Garmus, Curtis Sittenfeld, and many others), which also happen to make great holiday gifts!
A signed and annotated copy of Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s New York Times bestseller Seinfeldia.
A signed advance reader copy of Kirthana Ramisetti’s forthcoming The Other Lata and the chance to name a character in her next book.
A signed and annotated copy of Saul Austerlitz’s book about Anchorman, Kind of a Big Deal.
The auction concludes Tuesday, December 10 at 9 pm EST, so make sure to get your bids in before then!
Jennifer told me she and her partner call this “the Black Swan problem,” for when “the fake pop culture is supposed to be excellent.” Named for the Natalie Portman movie in which “the dance performance is supposed to be stunning, but it’s very hard for people who are actors, not dancers, to do, so we have to kind of just take everyone’s word for it that it's great.” On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are shows like Smash: a very flawed and often bonkers TV series, but its fictional musical Bombshell was truly great. And coming to Broadway next year!
I should note that my lyric writing abilities are hilariously limited. The producer told me my second verse had to be excluded from the produced song because it “didn’t fit into the time signature, and I couldn’t force it without fundamentally changing the lyrics.”
How isn’t this already a movie we watch every October alongside Practical Magic and Hocus Pocus?
In my feelings listening to the chorus of "Dava"! <3 This is such a fascinating read and this paragraph just *nails* the specific wonder of great pop songs:
"I thought about how great pop songs are a magic trick of specificity and universality. Their details are vivid and memorable (think of the scarf in Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well,”) but the emotions expressed are enormously relatable."
I love the detail about vow-renewal ceremonies, especially because I don't watch these shows enough to have known this was a thing!