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desperanceWhile I'm being grumpy:
That whole Tuckerisation "See Your Name In My Novel!" thing? It raises much money for charity, which is a good; it raises warm feelings in individuals, which is a good. M'wife has been Tuckerised quite often, and is entirely cheerful about it. It's not a thing I do, any more than I write actual people into my books under other names than theirs; I'm just not interested in that kind of Venn-diagram overlapping between my fiction and my life. But I never knew I had anything against it, until.
I'm reading Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and interleaving simple enjoyment with wishing-it-was-better, as I do - and then suddenly he introduces a couple of NPCs, new recruits called Gaiman and McKean. I'm sure he thoroughly enjoyed doing that; maybe they enjoyed it too. Me? I came crashing off the page and out of the book so hard, I had to put it down and go do something else for a while.
I guess there is a spectrum of the self-referential, from the nudge-nudge in-jokes to the entire oeuvre of film criticism (NB, that may be utterly unfair; I know nothing of film criticism. But I spent a dinner once with a tableful of film-studies academics, who spent the entire meal talking movies, and it was all "this scene is so reminiscent of that other scene in that other movie fifty years earlier"; and I spent an evening once with Quentin Tarantino, and he was just the same; and I kind of wanted to knock all their heads together and ask if they'd noticed that there was a world outside the movie theatre, and suggest gently that art might want eventually to relate to something outside itself).
So, yeah. I don't want to deprecate an entire spectrum, though the temptation is there; but I might like to make a rule that you should never Tuckerise people whose names are better known than your own. Honestly, I think it's disrespectful to the book. It doesn't need stardust; it really doesn't need an authorial elbow nudging into readerly ribs, all "see what I did there? see? are you giggling, or what...?"
That whole Tuckerisation "See Your Name In My Novel!" thing? It raises much money for charity, which is a good; it raises warm feelings in individuals, which is a good. M'wife has been Tuckerised quite often, and is entirely cheerful about it. It's not a thing I do, any more than I write actual people into my books under other names than theirs; I'm just not interested in that kind of Venn-diagram overlapping between my fiction and my life. But I never knew I had anything against it, until.
I'm reading Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and interleaving simple enjoyment with wishing-it-was-better, as I do - and then suddenly he introduces a couple of NPCs, new recruits called Gaiman and McKean. I'm sure he thoroughly enjoyed doing that; maybe they enjoyed it too. Me? I came crashing off the page and out of the book so hard, I had to put it down and go do something else for a while.
I guess there is a spectrum of the self-referential, from the nudge-nudge in-jokes to the entire oeuvre of film criticism (NB, that may be utterly unfair; I know nothing of film criticism. But I spent a dinner once with a tableful of film-studies academics, who spent the entire meal talking movies, and it was all "this scene is so reminiscent of that other scene in that other movie fifty years earlier"; and I spent an evening once with Quentin Tarantino, and he was just the same; and I kind of wanted to knock all their heads together and ask if they'd noticed that there was a world outside the movie theatre, and suggest gently that art might want eventually to relate to something outside itself).
So, yeah. I don't want to deprecate an entire spectrum, though the temptation is there; but I might like to make a rule that you should never Tuckerise people whose names are better known than your own. Honestly, I think it's disrespectful to the book. It doesn't need stardust; it really doesn't need an authorial elbow nudging into readerly ribs, all "see what I did there? see? are you giggling, or what...?"