7 December, 2009 | Leave a Comment
In the opening chapters of my novel, the protagonist works for the editor of a teenage fashion magazine. She has a particular kind of job that I don’t want to mention. I based this on my own experiences in the New York magazine world. When I first wrote these opening chapters way back when, there was no Devil Wears Prada or Ugly Betty. In short, writing about magazines wasn’t a big cliche. I was writing with Plath’s The Bell Jar in mind, where she recounts her experiences working at Mademoiselle. For a feminist novelist, this is rich terrain, but sadly, it’s all been ruined by crappy ‘chick lit’ authors and Hollywood hacks. Still, I kept the magazine element in the book because it’s my novel and I wanted to be true to my vision. This is why I was quite surprised when yesterday, I suddenly realized that the magazine has to be cut from the book. Not just because it’s cliched territory, but more importantly, because print magazines don’t have a bright future. (Look at newspapers.) A couple of the magazines I used to write for, including the aforementioned Mademoiselle, no longer exist. And for the teen demographic, which is what I’m writing about in the early chapters, it’s even worse. This demographic wasn’t raised on print magazines as we were. They’ve been raised on internet porn instead.
The world has changed a lot in the ten years this novel has been part of my life. It’s changed in ways I never could have predicted. Having a magazine in the book will make it dated, so the magazine is gone. Instead of working for a magazine editor, my character will now work for the host of a television show. Television as we know it is changing as well, but I think it’s more relevant than print magazines. The job my character has can be transferred to TV pretty easily, though it won’t be the same as having the magazine in the book. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a wee bit brokenhearted.
Of course, if print is dead, what does that say about the future of novels?
Anglofille said @ 11:08 pm | literary | 18 Comments
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SpliceGirl Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 8:40 amWhy don’t you just have her work for an online magazine/beauty website. There are SO many of them. There are other sites too masquerading as “help” sites for women like Daily Candy and Splendora, though I don’t find those AS insidious as glamour magazines. Either way, internet writing IS the “now” and the future and nothing is going to replace it soon so it will stay valid for quite a number of years.
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SpliceGirl Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 8:43 amOh, and what I was going to say is it’s not like working for TV is a bad idea but I feel like there is a distinct separation in some of the forms of propaganda they use toward women on TV versus magazines/websites. And it seems more unseemly if people are paying or subscribing to a magazine or website instead of just flipping through channels they bought in a cable package.
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My problem is that the woman my character works for needs to have some star power. [I think you know who I'm modeling this on.] If she just had a website, I’m not sure she’d have such a devoted following of teen girls. I thought she could have a TV show and a website to go with it. I don’t know. Maybe I need to play up her web presence more, because I think it’s true that magazines (and perhaps websites) are used more for propaganda than a talk show would be. It’s all a big mess now that I can’t use the magazine, but I really feel that a print magazine is too dated. Maybe I should consider an online magazine instead. A lot of online magazines struggle to stay afloat, but perhaps if it’s an online mag for teen girls, it’d be filled with the rich advertisers who prey on that demographic, so the site could make a lot more money than something like Salon or Slate. I am going to have to think about this a bit more.
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Dorothy Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 3:45 pmNote that Belle de Jour’s blog made her a celebrity too, and that was “just” on the net as far as I know. I think the internet is indeed the most captivating medium one could think of.
Or maybe you could mould the editor into someone who’s just famous because she’s the daughter or heiress of someone famous (like Paris Hilton for example), who’s got a lot of people working for her as well of course, and who’s maybe much more as an editor part of this whole teen-manipulation-circle ? And of course, many of these damsels do come up with their own perfume or clothes – industries at some point of their boring lives, which turns them into someone who’s got some sort of chief-position with emplyoees as well.
Can’t think of anything else at the moment either. But I wouldn’t go for the TV show, to be honest, because TV is after all much less uncontrollable, it seems. -
Caroline Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 5:55 pmHaving worked in TV the last 15 years, I recommend you get an insider to look over your work closely for detail and verisimilitude if you go this route. TV has its own way of doing things that may not be “transferred very easily” from print. Plus TV is changing very fast now too in terms of ownership, technology and business models. It may be different world by the time you go to press.
Anglofille, why aim to be trendy? Why not just write what you know and care about? it is really hard to stay current today and I think most smart people — ideally, your readership — will understand that.
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SpliceGirl Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 6:24 pmI agree with Caroline in the sense that you should write what you know. I don’t think a magazine is too dated at all and will still hold up for quite a long time. There will always be teens buying SOME magazine, out of boredom or even if just to rip out pictures of Robert Pattinson for their walls. Why don’t you have a print magazine with a web division and throw in the mention of some online bloggers for the mag? Just mentioning that will plant it in the “now” for most people.
I think most people just need an acknowledgment of current technology or news to place their brain in the present. It’s really why all horror movies now have to have the requisite “I’m not getting any cell phone signal!” shot in the first five minutes before anything even happens. It’s totally obvious and I laugh every time the shot happens (it ALWAYS does, no matter the budget of the film) but it has to be done.
I go to the store, bookstore, downtown LA and there are still newsstands everywhere, packed with so many magazines I’ve never even heard of. I think because some of the mags YOU worked for are now defunct you forget there are still a ton of them around. I don’t think online fashion photography will ever replace Vogue and what it means to some women.
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jaimie Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 8:11 pmI agree with SpliceGirl; even if the printed newspaper is sacrificed to online media, ‘women’s magazines’, especially those intended for teen girls, will, I think, live on– or at least linger longer. Even if it’s in the process of ‘dying out’, right now it is still alive and certainly doesn’t seem to be perceived as irrelevant at all, definitely not as irrelevant as, say, setting a book in a library where there are still card catalogues.
I’m not sure if I belong to the generation you are speaking of or whether you meaning someone younger, but as a 20-year-old female (who cannot remember being both sentient and without a computer/internet) I can confidently say that I consumed teen magazines ravenously as a teenager and would not disdain picking one up again though I’d probably choose Elle or Glamour!
Personally, I think teen magazines will stay around at least for the next 10-15 years, if not longer, if only for the sensuality of the physical magazines themselves, where the focus on the body and beauty is close-up not simply in the written content of the magazines (skincare, weight loss, makeup advice, all telescoped in on the very cells and pores of teen girls) but in the visual content, which computer screens fail (for my eyes anyway) to represent. Then also you have to consider the very real cliche of girls ripping out pages from magazines to create aspirational artwork like collages or just putting them up on the wall as an exercise in self-loathing and longing. Even when/if teen print magazines are obsolete they will still be recognized, as a cultural artifact or as something that was once dominant, in the mind of the reader.
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Well, thanks for all your comments! I must admit I was doing a lot of writing today and it’s not as good without the magazine – not at all.
As I wrote in my post, there are two reasons I’ve backed away from using a print magazine. Most teen magazines have indeed gone out of business, so it is a dying field. Plus, I look at my own habits and I never buy magazines unless I am going on a plane or a long train ride. For me, it’s all internet. But for the novel, perhaps I could just work around this – magazines still exist and this novel is placed specifically from 2006 to 2009ish.
My other concern is just the cliched nature of writing about women’s magazines, because they are a staple of chick lit, not to mention TV shows like Ugly Betty and then of course there’s Devil Wears Prada. The magazine stuff comes right at the start of my novel – if it came later, I wouldn’t worry about it, but I fear that people will read the magazine stuff and not even want to read the rest of the novel because they’ll think it’s chick lit. I am doing something a bit subversive with the magazine angle, but you don’t learn that until later. But perhaps I am misjudging the situation. Perhaps the general reader will not have that reaction to a magazine being in the novel. Maybe I am overly sensitive to it because I feel that all these other authors ruined the experience of writing about magazines.
The job my character has is like a personal assistant to the magazine editor – it’s a unique thing she does and she does it from home. That’s why I thought I could switch it to TV. I’ve never worked in TV and wouldn’t want to write about it, but the character would not actually be working on a TV show, so I wouldn’t need to know the inner workings of it. However, writing about TV, even from an outsider’s perspective, is also rife with cliche, as I’ve discovered over the past couple days. Writing about the media and celebrity is just a minefield of cliches.
All right, I think I might change it back to a print magazine and perhaps play up the online presence of it a bit more. Crap – now I just wasted two days of writing!
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Dorothy Says:
December 9th, 2009 at 1:21 amI just wondered whether this editor of your novel is a man or a woman? I don’t know why, but I unconsciously assumed it was a woman, and a horrible one too. From your recent post, I rather think it’s a man now.
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No, it’s a horrible woman!
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Jan Says:
December 9th, 2009 at 8:02 pmThe book is not going to be “dated” because it has a magazine. Think Elle, Cosmo, Vogue, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, all that stuff. They may have a website as well, but they are printed and more glamorous than any website. Do not drop the magazine. Sure, people read the news online, but if you are into fashion shots and makeup and all that, youd go for the glossy thing.
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Yeah, I’m keeping the magazine. I’ve edited those sections today – made some changes. I think it’s stronger now.
BTW, today I received a copy of Dubravka Ugresic’s “In the Jaws of Life.” Was not easy to find! I had to get a used copy on Amazon. I can’t start reading it right away, because I have another novel to finish, but it looks interesting – very experimental in its form.
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Jan Says:
December 10th, 2009 at 12:13 amHer other books (and especially articles) are often about the war/politics and gender – mostly applied to the Balkans. She has one on literary / publishing world, and one about the US seen through European’s eyes. All of good literary standard.
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Dorothy Says:
December 10th, 2009 at 1:17 amI think many of your potential readership will have grown up in times when magazines used to be very present anyway, so they will like that, and would probably feel uncomfortable if there were too many hyper-modern things in there. I’m in my mid-twenties and I’ve also, in terms of media, still grown up with mainly magazines and would therefore definitly feel at home in a book that is set into an “infrastructure” I’m familiar with.
Or is your novel actually aimed at teens? (which I can’t really imagine) -
Lucette Says:
December 10th, 2009 at 3:33 amIn the old tv comedies, the characters either worked on TV or advertising (think Betwitched the Dick Van Dyke show). They just needed some kind of job which allowed the story to continue without taking away from the major story.
The person you are writing about needs a job and a boss with some star power. A Magazine served that purpose, but other things can as well.
Maybe what you need to do is focus on what qualities the job needs to have and what qualities the boss needs to have. After you do that, the choice that fits your purposes will do.
You can go vintage (ie Flintstone) or futuristic (ie the Jetsons) as far as the job goes. However, first it would be important to figure out what niche adds most to the rest of your plot. Think of the job as a plot device – something that enhances the rest of the story.
Don’t worry about the future – whether people will buy papers or use kindle – and what people will put on the bottom of the cage for their pet to poop in if no one sold news papers any more. These things seem to move you away from your major story.
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Lucette Says:
December 10th, 2009 at 3:43 amRe cliche. JKr stole the phone booth that she used to get into St Mungos from Get Smart – Get Smart stole it from Superman. How many phone booths do you see around these days.
JKR stole the idea for Ford Angela from Herbie the Love Bug and Christine the killer car (I had a theory that they were Ford Angela’s parents who was at her wedding when she married Sirius Black’s Motor bike). How many of these cars do you see around these days? Do you think that Stephen King should update his book so that a newer car is used?
What about the movie Cars? How many of those cars do you see around?
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Dorothy, no, it’s not a teen novel. I think teen girls would like it though. My character works with teen girls in a certain capacity, but she is 33 when the book starts.
Lucette, that’s true, I forgot about all the characters from those 60s sitcoms who worked on TV. TV is probably a bigger cliche than magazines. I think for me, I’m just paranoid about that “chick lit” label. Of course, with all the killing and bombing in my novel, no one could mistake it for chick lit. But you have to get past the first 100 pages first.
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william Says:
December 10th, 2009 at 4:41 pmGlad to hear you are sticking with the magazine.
