Managed to get another book read this month despite the vision challenges, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & the Six. When I saw Amy at the beginning of March, she recommended the book to me because she’d enjoyed it (she may have also been watching the Amazon series; I can’t remember). She said things about the story reminded her of characters or situations in my old Rock and Roll Soap Operas, as I called them. This actually made me less inclined to read the book, since those old R&RSOs are the foundation for the series I’ve been working on since 2019.
Why? It’s not so much that I fear being influenced by another writer’s work. It’s because I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve created completely out of my brain, in my attempt to flesh out my characters, what is for me new and original writing. Then I’ll read some artist’s biography or memoir and find something from their real lives that’s eerily similar. Timothy, among others, cautions me not to let it bother me, as there’s “nothing new under the sun.” But the possibility that anyone would think I plundered artists’ or celebrities’ lives for my fiction has a real “ick” factor for me. I started writing these stories when I was thirteen, and I’m significantly older than that now. The characters have grown and changed, as have I. It would be impossible for even me to find anyone I’ve known or known about who’d be their prototypes.
In deciding whether I wanted to read the novel, I read about it first, and readers kept mentioning that it was loosely based on Fleetwood Mac. Then I found out Lynne had read it, mentioned that, and she said she didn’t see parallels to Fleetwood Mac (other than the obvious; they’re in the music business). She had a copy (I couldn’t find it as an e-book, and right now, it’s easier on my eyes to read print books anyway) and loaned it to me. And like her, while reading it, I didn’t get a Fleetwood Mac vibe, though the author has been very clear that she loves and is inspired by Fleetwood Mac.
I must remember that people see/read/assume/judge whatever fits their narrative. I learned, when I (either alone or with my writing partners) had books published, that people read through the lenses of their own experiences, fears, hopes, losses, joys. It’s satisfying when someone tells me what they enjoyed about something I wrote, but I’d rather not know their analysis of how it’s their story, or their relative’s story, or even what they believe is my own personal story. My characters are too real to me, as they are, to be reflections of me or anyone else. Lynne and I first created them as inspired by our musician crushes. Decades later, not a single one of those real-life inspirations has lived a life anything like the lives I’ve written.
So when I finally sat down and read Daisy Jones & the Six, I enjoyed it for the stories and characters it offered. It was wonderful to be lost enough in the story to laugh, cry, and worry. I could sometimes see where Reid’s research coincided with my own, but I totally accepted her novel as a work of fiction born of her imagination, and I liked both her narrative choices and her characters (including the unlikable ones).
FAR more disturbing than anything else is that the book’s genre is listed as historical fiction. Yikes! I think of historical fiction as being from the 1800s or earlier. Does this mean that by my writing a series stretching from the 1950s to sometime in the 1980s, I have become a relic? Am I just a few pages away from telling people to get off my lawn? Or…
