Infusing Your Fiction With Real Culture the Reader Can Feel

I grew up in the City of Paramount (no relation to Hollywood’s Paramount Studios, believe me) in Los Angeles during the 1990s. When we went to backyard parties, the cement out back was the dance floor, the coal burned hot beneath the carne asada, and the stereo, cranked to play Santana’s “Oye Como Va,” rattled the speaker cabinets.

(5 Tips to Bring Your Culture and Heritage Into Your Story With Confidence.)

Santana’s version of “Oye Como Va” wasn’t a product of the 90s, but it came down through our parents’ generation as a song that gets the mood right. In that song, before any voice arrives, the only thing to hear is the rhythm, steady while the keys accent the beat. And, after all, the lyrics, “Oye Como Va, Mi Ritmo,” loosely translate to “listen to how it goes, my rhythm.” In other words, the song is “of what it’s about.”

Infusing your fiction with culture the reader can feel works this way, too. Representations of culture can merely accumulate, by amassing strategically chosen concrete details, sure. However, culture is most vibrant in fiction when the writing truly incorporates the culture.

In the following craft essay I hope to offer two concrete methods for infusing your fiction with culture the reader can feel, and one more abstract method of helping you see where the culture itself wants to shine.

Setting is important to culture, but I’m not addressing “setting,” or not “setting” alone, so much as I’m addressing the larger landscape of your culture’s representation in fiction. Dedicating my novel to my neighborhood is not what I’d call a technique, but it reveals something. I didn’t just want to establish “setting,” I wanted readers to think about how they’ve encountered my setting in novels and films before. I love crime fiction and film. And, being from where I’m from—novel and film characters who look like our brothers and sisters growing up are often melodramatic stereotypical villains—I’m very aware of the major flaws in other writers’ attempts to realize my culture.

Before you even sit down to write “culture,” you might read around the place where that culture flourishes. How have other authors within the culture represented their characters and their locales? Whose influence are you writing toward, and whose influence are you writing away from? Especially if you are writing while taking popular genre conventions into account, as I was when I was writing this crime novel, ask: Who are the heavy-hitters of Lit that have explored this culture in this genre before? There may be a lot of work you’ll have to do, and to undo.

There may be a lot that’s already been said—

—but is what’s been said really “a lot,” when it’s the same thing we’ve heard every time?

The natural series of your novel is the series of events that would take place naturally over the course of your characters’ lives. These are the community’s routines and rituals, their customs, and their jobs.

Important note: The natural series can be transitions between the dramatic scenes AND/OR they can serve as the settings of your dramatic scenes themselves. Knowing your natural series improves your plot, because it reduces melodrama and rounds out characters to set your dramatic scenes in the natural series of your characters’ lives.

For example, my novel begins with a narrator, Brenton, a neighborhood local on his way to work. He sees his old friend, our “main” character Junie, leaving the corner liquor store. But Junie is different somehow. Junie never drinks dark liquor during summer, and he never used to dress this way before he left town.

The suspense within the scene is provided from within the natural series of Brenton’s life, and so it avoids melodrama. Brenton can’t linger around to wonder, or to discover yet what the reader really wants to know (what’s Junie doing back here?) because Brenton’s on his way to work.

The worst kind of melodrama is just stereotype. The culture of “Los Angeles,” in movies and books, exists absurdly far from my curb.

In my novel, I wanted to write culture as closely as possible to how it really felt in the 90s (while understanding and challenging the conventions of crime fiction). To a lot of us, it’s only the eye of the storm that makes the big screen, while the real winds are blowing down the alleys, through the backyards, into the backdoors of homes and the halls of apartments. One of the ways I deliberately engage this relationship is by skirting the film industry or the upper classes of Los Angeles, the way we were forced to growing up. Instead, I show the neighborhood characters’ relationships to these mainstream societal focal-points as outsiders.

This first date, and June’s warning to Kiddy, foreshadow a later crime at the drive-in theater—it's not going to be a crime that would usually make it on the silver screen, let alone the news. Let the movies be the movies. Whisper to us from the brick wall when you weren’t allowed a ticket.

As Bill Withers says in his suspiciously strutting groove: “Who is he (and what is he to you?)”

In your natural series AND your dramatic series, we all know you need conflict. But where does conflict come from?

(Four Types of Conflict.)

Whether the conflict be internal or external to the characters, it often comes from the power dynamics in the characters’ culture. What options are they afforded within their community and without? How cramped or how free do they feel as a community, and as separate individuals? How at home or at odds do they feel in the only space they have to share?

The power dynamics I was exploring required that I represent several generations despite the plot’s centrality in the neighborhood’s youth. One of my characters, Walter, is an elderly apartment manager local to the neighborhood. Like many former dairy and hay towns turned into hybrid-industrial/suburban-sprawl, my L.A. neighborhood was quite diverse and had a history of related tensions.

When Walter assesses local tensions, he faults the neighborhood’s young men. But without Walter and his thoughts on the neighborhood, we don’t have the context for those young men and their conflicts.

What the previous generations think and say about the neighborhood’s workings must, and will, eventually meet with what the younger generations need from the wider world (and what they do to get it). Whether or not that meeting goes well, that’s what my book was investigating.

Every fictional roof needs two foundational columns of writing to rely on, and the third column can be the one for experimentation and play, the column of dust in light. For example, if you firmly establish plot and character to gain your readers’ trust, then you can rely more on their trust when you experiment with style.

This structural analogy of a roof and columns remains helpful when I ask myself how I’m infusing my fiction with culture. In our structural analogy:

In Word is Bone the third column was music. It was the music characters listened to while out cruising the neighborhood. It was the mixtapes and CDs they passed around, from Walkman, to boombox, to car stereo. Look it—it was the music, too, in their speech.

Check out Christopher David Rosales' Word Is Bone:

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Music is, also, the third column of this essay. I had to honor the songs that played like the Art Laboe radio show soundtrack to my life and local communities: Paramount, Compton, Long Beach, and so many more.

When Whiting Award-winning author Steven Dunn blurbed my book, he clocked the third column of Word is Bone instantly.

Ask your friends and your fellow writers about your fiction’s “third column.” In fiction about my community’s culture in a particular time and place, the third column was inside every word I wrote. Perhaps we need help to see it because it’s hidden itself in plain sight, not just if, but especially if, the culture we’re writing is our own.