One of the reasons I love writing fiction is that I can pull from other sources to enrich the texture of my narrative. But I’ve had to learn restraint.
I was poking through the attic the other day and unearthed some ancient fiction I wrote during my one year at Columbia University (my “junior year abroad”). There was a long fragment, possibly the beginning of a novel, in which the character–coincidentally a young male student in New York–was powerfully affected by hearing Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.” To reveal this, I quoted the entire song.
It was a mistake. Why? Because it didn’t blend in. As apt as it may have been, because in its entirety, “Masters of War” stood powerfully tall on its own, and would have drawn attention away from the story, nullifying the very reason I wanted to use it in the first place.
By contrast, a fragment would have played nicely, as a component of the whole.
The danger is that, dropping in complete songs, poems, entries from diaries, even dreams look like an anthology entries.
You don’t want a story element to look like an anthology entry, dropped in whole and undigested. So quote away, but selectively; that’s where the power lies for your novel.
PS
Click here for another, maybe even more compelling reason not to quote an entire Bob Dylan song,
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