Daisy Jones & the Six and How to Create Art in Fiction

Literary MacGuffins and Gams

Mar 23, 2023

Thursday Writing Advice: Literary MacGuffins

I’m still searching for the perfect term for it, but a concept that’s become an obsession of mine is a specific type of storytelling device in literature that, as far as I know, doesn’t have an official name. It is somewhat related to the famous Hitchcock-invented term “MacGuffin,” which connotes an object or device that’s simply there to advance the plot, but doesn’t necessarily mean anything to the story itself. For example, in No Country for Old Men the suitcase full of cash is a traditional MacGuffin—it drives a lot of the action and motivation but functionally doesn’t serve any other purpose, it doesn’t have a rich history or unique backstory.

A few years ago the idea dawned on me for a newly defined kind of literary MacGuffin device when I was reading the novel The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. So maybe we can call this new term a Krauss (which rhymes with “mouse,” in case you’re wondering). The History of Love is the name of a fictional book in the novel The History of Love. It is a magical and purportedly amazing book that’s passed around and connects different characters across time and space. And throughout the story we hear about the wonders of about this book, The History of Love.

In this instance, and frustratingly so to me at least, The History of Love is more of a traditional MacGuffin, as we never get to read a passage from the book or really ever have a sense of what it is about (as far as I can recall). At the time, this felt evasive and unfair to the reader—it’s one thing to insert into a story an object of pure desire like a suitcase full of cash, but another to dangle an artistic object that the characters have an actual relationship with and then never get to look at it ourselves as readers. This is where the literary MacGuffin—the Krauss—differs from Hitchcock’s idea, a Krauss is a piece of art that serves as a plot driver but actually has to be shown and explained to make the novel effective. A Krauss is a MacGuffin-like element in a novel that is an actual piece of art and therefore has to be rendered on the page (Or, in the case of The History of Love, should have been rendered).

Daisy Jones

I’ve been thinking about Krausses (maybe I shouldn’t have chosen a word that ends in “s” for this made-up term) lately because of the Amazon adaptation of the wildly popular novel Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. The book and show are about a fictional band in the 70s that is heavily inspired by Fleetwood Mac. In creating a novel about a fictional band, Reid gave herself the task of creating a fictional music and lyrics. Songs are Daisy Jones’ Krauss. Like with The History of Love, but to an even greater degree, it would be unsatisfying if the author just kept writing “Daisy Jones & The Six sounded amazing and their lyrics were super deep.”

Music in a book is actually not the most difficult Krauss a writer can attempt, because you don’t actually have to recreate the sound of a great band, you can simply translate into words how the musical elements and overall sound make you feel. Sure, lyrics are part of the task, too. But you can’t tell how good lyrics are just by reading them. Even Bernie Taupin, longtime songwriter for Elton John, and one of the greatest lyricists of all time, has said that Elton is a genius musician that make Bernie’s often poetic and abstract lyrics into masterpieces. Like music on paper, lyrics on paper also benefit from being read and not heard. It’s therefore not impossible to write at least passable lyrics for a novel. It’s really hard to tell the difference between any lyrics that are above average on the two-dimensional surface of the page (if they’re bad, you can always tell—think a lot of corny rhyming). I am ashamed to say that I have not read Daisy Jones the book, yet, to gauge how she pulls off this off.

However, in a television show or film the bar for this type of Krauss is much, much higher. In those mediums, you have to face the music and show the music, on screen with full sound. There’s no hiding or hedging. The music in the Daisy Jones television show ended up being pretty passable. People seem to genuinely like the songs and the album and a few singles even charted on some iTunes and Billboard rankings. That’s an accomplishment given the task, but the music is still nowhere close—because how could it be?—to any of Fleetwood Mac’s actual gems. It is particularly, painfully obvious when the show plays other real 70s rock classics, even at low volume in the background of a scene, just how much the fictional music pales in comparison.

With the impossible task of recreating truly great music, knowing no matter what you make will come up short, the other parts of the show have to be damn near perfect to compensate. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Music aside, Daisy Jones the show suffers mostly from a lack of attitude and risk-taking in terms of how they portray the time period and a rock band in that time period. If the actors collectively had enough charisma—frustratingly, the lead actress who plays Daisy Jones, Riley Keough, certainly does, but the same can’t be said of the other band members—or enough messiness and ego the so-so songs would be enough to carry an interesting character study. As-is, the show feels sanitized and bit too safe; the characters’ interactions at times are closer to the Partridge Family than Fleetwood.

Unlike a MacGuffin, which is a hollow tool for plotting, a Krauss is always an ambitious artistic choice, one that raises the bar much higher for the creator. That’s why, perhaps someone should create a music show and reverse engineer it. A writer should start with a great catalog of music—Fleetwood Mac, The Ramones, Talking Heads—and recreate the band’s story from scratch, pretending as if the real band didn’t exist. It’s a little alternative history, but that way the music would be flawless and you could make the story more interesting than the formulaic rise to fame, drug addiction, and band breakup.

A Krauss Gone Right

To find an excellent example of a Krause, once again we return to Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a book that’s been mentioned a few times on Dear Head of Mine. In this novel the piece of art that acts as a plot driver is not typically what you see in novels: video games. The most amazing part, to me, is the way the author Gabrielle Zevin pulls off creating fictional video games that both stand on their own and are integral to the plotting and characterization of the novel.

(Semi-spoiler ahead) The main game the characters create to rise to fame in Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is called Ichigo, and it perfectly considers the limitations of game designers in that era (the 90s) and figures out how to match the narrative of the game to a gameplay structure that feels real. Zevin is able to nail what is timeless about games like Super Mario or Donkey Kong—simple games with enduring mechanics and characters—and make her fictional Ichigo sit alongside them without ever feeling like she’s copying anything outright. It’s an extraordinary feat of fiction. It would be like someone putting a great novel inside a video game that players actually stopped to read, which I am nearly positive has never happened. The payoff is immensely satisfying as a reader.

Although it’s a tall task for a writer to pull off, a Krauss lends a level of credibility and excitement because it’s outside of the normal bounds of traditional storytelling. This technique opens a new door of imagination for the reader: What if the best book about love ever written was lost to history? What other kinds of masterpieces—songs, games, paintings—could have existed alongside the cultural artifacts we know and love?

A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic

Progress: Days 55, Pages 297

Always Be Game to Gam

This week we’ve learned more about what’s actually happening on the Pequod than for many chapters running. First of all, we’re in the Atlantic Ocean, which I had not known for some previous 250 pages despite that, as I understand it, navigation is very important in the ocean. Frankly, it’s not as far as I thought we were. More importantly, Ismael/Melville extolled an important lesson in these chapters: always Gam if you have the opportunity. The term “Gam”, a word whose archaic definition is probably only kept alive by Moby-Dick, describes when two whaling ships pass each other in the ocean and stop and talk to each other. A gam is how we learn of the Town-Ho, a whaling boat that encounters Moby Dick and has a mutinous rebellion on board. If Melville’s foreshadowing is as heavy-handed as his chapter titles, I suspect that this is what might be in store for the Pequod and crew. This vital information, which could have saved Ismael & co. (but I doubt will), is just one instance where it is important to always be game to gam. Don’t pass another ship without stopping to learn what they have to say is advice applicable to any walk or swim of life. Even though whalers are in competition with each other at some level—and that’s why captains as part of a gam are forced to show their manliness by standing upright in the boat no matter how rough the sea is as they row over to the other ship, haha—it is much more important to share and learn information rather than let pride get the best of you. You may learn, for instance, that Moby Dick is not to be messed with and that encounters with him may result in unrelated mutiny. If there’s one thing that we can take away from reading half of Moby-Dick, it is to always gam.

Whale Art

Earlier in the book we got the full catalog of whales. Now, Melville has illuminated the very important side note about the state of whale art in the 18^th century and its inaccuracies. Another newsletter got there first, so all credit to them (back then, newslettesr were called blogs), but here is all the art mentioned by Ismael in Moby-Dick. I have to agree with Ismael, these are travesties as far as accurate representations of whales go, but I still don’t understand his argument that it’s impossible to sketch one because the artists observe them dead outside the water and not inside the water. It just seems like some bad penmanship or lack of artistic vision to me. Here’s some whale art. Pick your favorite.