A mash-up is a fusion. The term is often used to describe movies, music and websites that bring multiple data sets together. In the publishing industry, people frequently introduce books as mashups—the latest bestseller might be pitched as Possession meets Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (That's a book I'd like to read!) It's a way of evoking novelty and familiarity, at once. Living things, of course, make mash-ups every time they sexually reproduce. Writers do mash-ups all the time, too, drawing bit and parts from multiple real world people and combining them to generate unique fictional characters (who hopefully cannot be identified with the human beings that inspired them).

There's a surprising diversity among writers in how they regard this practice. Some seem to find it distasteful, or to consider it a dirty secret, or they claim to be above it; many others acknowledge the practice as a helpful tool. I fall into the latter camp and suspect that, in truth, everyone does it, even the abjurers. Those who say they don't mash up are still doing it — just subconsciously. Mash-ups are one of those things in the world that persist but go in and out of style. Sometimes people see them as debased and derivative, while in other periods, they call them hybrids and consider them edgy or avant-garde.

I was surprised to find that the 1994 compact print edition of the OED that I received as a wedding gift, does not list the word mash-up. There's nothing but a tiny strip of white space between Mashona and mashy. And the fourth meaning of mash in my OED, "To mix, mingle," is actually marked with a dagger, indicating that it is obsolete. Mash up does appear as a verb form, a figurative use of the third meaning of mash ("to reduce to a homogenous mass, esp. in the preparation of food"). The citation for that meaning —" I can clear the ground better now by mashing up my old work ... with new matter" — is from Walter Scott and he uses it explicitly to describe combining things in the process of writing. I thank Project Gutenberg for enabling me to find the context, in his journals:

March 28 — I set doggedly to work with Bonaparte, who had fallen a little into arrear. I can clear the ground better now by mashing up my old work in the Edinburgh Register with my new matter, a species of colcannen, where cold potatoes are mixed with hot cabbage. After all, I think Ballantyne is right, and that I have some talents for history-writing after all. [...] I finished five pages, but with additions from Register they will run to more than double I hope; like Puff in the Critic, be luxuriant.

There's a healthy debate among prominent 20th and 21st century writers in English about whether they use mashups when conceiving of characters. It was widely used by Tolstoy in War and Peace, sometimes with only a thin veiling. One model for Prince Andrei Bolkonksy was a cousin of Tolstoys called Volkonsky; the other was Tolstoy himself. And, in a kind of inversion, a cleavage of separation, not joining, Tolstoy divided attributes of his own persona between Prince Andrei and the dissolute but idealistic Pierre.

Funny thing is, despite being out of the dictionary, the idea of the mash-up was always there. It still is. Writers and all of us have always mixed and mingled things. It’s as natural to writers as sexual reproduction is to life.

PROMPT:

Summon up a character, either a new one or one you've been trying to refine, make more specific, detailed and real. Now, isolate two attributes of that character: I suggest you make one of these attributes sensory. Go for a sound, a smell, a texture, even a taste. For the second, choose something more active: a tic, habit, a way of being, or possibly some sort of artifact that might function metonymically as a "funny hat” that identifies and epitomizes the character (The "funny hat trick" is especially useful for secondary or tertiary characters because it can enable a reader more easily to recognize them despite the fact that they don't get a lot of words in your manuscript.

Then draw details for each of these two attributes from two separate, quite different, real individuals whom you know or have observed. A nice thing about mashups is that they can help you hide the real-life inspiration for your characters. The vain boyfriend won't recognize himself if you give him foul breath and a weak chin.

That's the power of a mash-up.

© Elizabeth Gaffney April 2021