keep your brand outta my fiction*

Ed has a fantastic and absolutely spot on post about one of my least favorite things in writing: product placement, brand names, etc. (Some of you are nodding into your coffee, I bet, having gotten notes on this from me in the past.) He uses Tricia Sullivan's Maul as a jumping off point. I haven't read it, but have heard good things. (Here's a link to a Guardian review by kick-ass hard science fiction writer Justina Robson, whose book Natural History is out now and her first to be pubbed in America. Read it.)

Last year there was a lengthy thread in response to one of Carrie's posts that became partly about the use of brands in fiction, when it works and when it doesn't and the danger of dating your prose**.

Like anything, there are times when it works and is appropriate and times when it rips me from the story. Mostly, I find it to be a lazy sort of shorthand, particularly for character and setting. I think maybe the reason it's jarring is that consumer culture is so present in the rest of life that I resent its intrusion into fiction. I want to at least preserve the illusion that whatever I'm reading is tapping into levels below that shiny surface.

Again, this isn't to say it can't work. I don't find if nearly as upsetting when a name or discussion of a film or book is inserted, as a rule, but spare me from details on toothpaste brand or what kind of white wine it is. In general, I can do a more resonant job of filling in my own details there based on more generic (or specific in their own way) identifiers.

Some books*** -- many of them science fiction -- need to take on consumer culture and all it entails, including brands. Whenever I bitch about this, Christopher points out that William Gibson has done it with great success. But I, now at this moment, mostly prefer made up brands if they are necessary to the story. Real ones have all sorts of baggage and perhaps that's the problem -- the associations the reader brings are from life experience and so heavy that they intrude on our unfolding experience of the narrative. They feel easy and manipulative. A lesson in how one word (one capped, TMed word) can color, shade, tilt a story off kilter for a reader. Writer beware.

*Overstating, of course...

**As in temporal, not smoochy, smoochy.

***Recommendation along these lines: MT Anderson's Feed and Scott Westerfeld's So Yesterday

worm "Carry Me Ohio" Sun Kil Moon

UPDATE: There's an interesting discussion going on in the comments. Join in.