What are your watershed years for major societal shifts you address in your writing?

[TarnishedPenny]

Unless it's SF-Fantasy, my stories tend to be set in the present day. Even my entries for the Detective Noire contests were set in the Now, which allowed the use of smart phones and such.

I have done a handful of tales set in part or in whole during Victorian times or the interwar period and spent a long time researching things as basic is average wages, clothing styles, social norms, etc. It was interesting, but I don't think I would have the energy to do a period novel.

 

[GrantBricksly]

If I am being honest, most of my stories (I say most, but I only have 9, plus my current work in progress) don't really mention much in the way of technology. As I said before, I considered mentioning the way my wife and I met (which is how my MCs met as well) which was by way of a bygone technology. But decided against it. I guess I may occasionally mention cell phones, but honestly, I'd have to go back and search through my stories to see if I actually do or not. My current work in progress does make use briefly of a laptop computer and a "video chat" and a "message" but I literally used those exact words. No mention of specific programs or how those actions were accomplished. Because it should be easy enough for a reader, even in the future if and when videochatting is long gone, to figure out from context what a video chat is. And a message...well, messages have been around since the invention of writing. The medium of delivery has changed, but thats it. I didn't mention if it was an email, IM, or anything else. I just said message. So again, I think it will stand the test of time.

I tend to focus more on trying to build the personal relationships. It's more about what happens with the characters when they are together physically. And thus far, I've not needed to use any sort of technological thing to drive the meeting of characters.

I'm sure someday my stories will be outdated. I'm also sure that they will likely not be considered important enough for anyone to be reading them by the time they are. But, IF, by some miracle, someone is reading my stories sometime in the future when they are outdated....I hope that the education system is better than today, and they will know enough about the past to pick up on whatever outdated things I have used, and understand it enough to enjoy my writings.

 

[TxRad]

Just don't drop a digital camera into a mid 60's story. Did that and didn't catch it until a reader pointed it out.

I've written from the sixties on up to a Star Trek episode. I love the sixties, all except the war. I don't remember much of the early 70's but that is a whole different story. For some reason the 90's didn't impress me much. The last twenty years cover a lot of my stories. Set it where it works best for you. Research can give you information but ends up lacking flavor.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

These are fantastic examples.

I'm curious how you research nuances outside of your personal experience? My process feels lacking the more and more social/pop culture the trait is.

It's amazing how much is available online now compared to 10 years ago about people's memories and feelings of events, from sites like Quora or Reddit and people asking "What was it like actually being at/living in xxxxx?" Obviously you have to weed through the answers and consider biases and possible trolls, but if you add that to the facts available on Wikipedia and other sources, you can find out one heck of a lot without even getting out of bed.

I have memories from the late 70s onwards so I can consider info about places and people in the light of that. I've gathered a lot of info from the late 60s to mid-80s from a fan community and written elsewhere a couple novellas set in the 80s (appreciated by about 150 people - the numbers of views I can get here are intoxicating in comparison...)

I tend not to mention much about hairstyles and clothes that can go out of fashion very quickly - characters often wear jeans or shorts, a T-shirt, brushed cotton shirt, long or short hair, that's about it. I was thinking that jeans were getting to be a sign of being rather dated, then saw the local teenagers heading to school on own clothes day, mostly in jeans, at least half in blue jeans. Baggy ripped ones versus skinny ones may indicate something, I don't know.

My characters tend to reference music I know and eat food I have in my house and watch TV shows I know, because then I know I'm getting the cultural nuances right even if no-one else notices.

 

[Euphony]

It's amazing how much is available online now compared to 10 years ago about people's memories and feelings of events, f

My characters tend to reference music I know and eat food I have in my house and watch TV shows I know, because then I know I'm getting the cultural nuances right even if no-one else notices.

Agree wholeheartedly that it's expanded by leaps and bounds but expectations have as well.

Where I could feel ok in the fuzzy before, now I'm often having to considered just *how* accessible an informational factoid is and how likely someone is to know it or track it down (with today's modest effort required)

I'm likely oversensitive but I remember the examples of authors really botching common sensie /look usable stuff and I would be mortified to do it in my own writing.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Agree wholeheartedly that it's expanded by leaps and bounds but expectations have as well.

Where I could feel ok in the fuzzy before, now I'm often having to considered just *how* accessible an informational factoid is and how likely someone is to know it or track it down (with today's modest effort required)

I'm likely oversensitive but I remember the examples of authors really botching common sensie /look usable stuff and I would be mortified to do it in my own writing.

I'm yet to have anyone on Lit complain about any factual details - someone complained once that the science in a lab seemed a bit 90s but there was nothing to say the story wasn't in the 90s - I replied saying the science was perfectly accurate for the early 2000s thank you, which it was!

I know of at least half a dozen anachronisms in my stories (most of which I knew when I published, but liked the references anyway), and so far no-one has mentioned any of them. I have avoided the US military, guns, and cars anywhere, which seem to have the most geeks who will notice details (and often correct wrongly, according to other posters here!), and all my locations and travel times are correct thanks to a slight obsession with such things, or made vague enough they don't matter - eg recent story I finished just before the Winter contest deadline, no time to figure out where in Scotland the couple might have been hiking, so implied the Cairngorms and carefully amended all references so it was left open. Plotting a plausible trip would have taken forever. "We arrived at the two-trains-a-day station in the middle of nowhere..."

At least with online text you could.correct errors immediately if needed, rather than needing to wait until the next print run.

 

[Voboy]

Agree wholeheartedly that it's expanded by leaps and bounds but expectations have as well.

Where I could feel ok in the fuzzy before, now I'm often having to considered just *how* accessible an informational factoid is and how likely someone is to know it or track it down (with today's modest effort required)

I'm likely oversensitive but I remember the examples of authors really botching common sensie /look usable stuff and I would be mortified to do it in my own writing.

You might be overthinking.

Or? Who knows. There might be one reader in a thousand that will hate your work because of that one botched factoid. But the other 999 won't care.

You can address these kinds of problems in a different way: write in FP and have the narrator say something like, "my memory about all this is kinda fuzzy, but..." Then just write whatever you want. If you mess up and claim that the iPhone exists in a story set in 2004 instead of 2007, BFD. The narrator fucked it up. No biggie.

I don't know that I've ever said explicitly what the year is in any of my contemporary stories. That's good advice, too.

 

[oggbashan]

I have written many stories set in different eras from post-Roman Britain, the war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda/Maud, the reign of William Rufus, the 14th century in France, the First and Second world wars (and after).

The only mistake I made was to include a DVD in a story set in the 1960s. Several people pointed that out politely. but one woman, born in the Mid West US in the 1980s said I was wrong to use a term in that story. I know I was right. The term had been use in the UK since the 1700s and was current in London in the 1960s. I knew because I was there as a sexually active Lit-legal adult at the time.

I don't mind queries such as:

1. Was Middle English spoken in London in the early 1400s? - Yes it was. Middle English didn't start to decline until the late 1400s with the advent of printing and the sort-of standardisation of spelling.

2. The range of Victorian 9.2 guns. I had assumed, but not stated, the Mark VIII which had a range of seven miles. The comment came from someone who had the later Mark IX nearby, which had a range of fifteen miles.

3. The use of OK in England in 1914. Yes, it was used and had been since the 1890s in England's upper classes because of the interaction bettwen England's nobility and the US rich classes. It was not in general use.

 

[grey228]

What are your watershed years for major societal shifts you address in your writing? Anything you fight to stay keenly aware of in your writing?

Common things such as:
Cell Phones
Dial up internet
Hi speed internet
Information explosion (so harder to sell net savvy youngsters who don't know sexual basics)
Car phones
Pagers
Proliferation of porn concepts/now common place sexual information
Album release windows/dates/charting (as I progress into the itunes era, I'm less inclined to claim popularity further from single releases)
Anything else you can think of (fashions, consumer products, etc.)

This is really a thought space for you to share timelines you work under (within a reality space) and where you sometimes accommodate for them.

I find myself pigeonholing to small windows of year(s) and want to play around with some of the shoulder times still keeping plausibility.

The telecommunications and information networking (and organization databases - not just for law enforcement) has thrown a wrench in a lot of older stories, plots, and plot believe-ability for me.

The internet, smart phone combination has allowed people to instantly research most things, so anything "confidence" wise has to be a lot smarter than the average CSI / Criminal Minds episodes. Take a look at the original 2006/2007/2008 Leverage and see if you can feel the age of some of their cons.

It just makes creative writing harder if everyone is jaded / a know-it-all.

It is true — I can probably guess (with 85% accuracy) what will happen / be said next when a situation comes up on TV or in a movie.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Another huge societal shift - I'm a child of the AIDS generation (came of age with the Tombstone ads, etc). It's very obvious in some of my stories, not just GM ones, with compulsive condom use.

People significantly older than me, say 20-30 years, won't have had it much on their radar; those 20 years younger can't remember a time before PreP and effective drugs.

 

[Duleigh]

I'm actually trying to avoid this kind of thing; my reasoning is that I would like future readers to look at my story and think it is relevant to their current time.

I will put in odd bits of forgotten technology to date a flashback - wall mounted phones with long cords to the handset, waiting for the TV to warm up, that kind of thing, but when writing about the today, I try to keep things that identify when today is out of the story.

 

[TadOverdon]

I've only written contemporary things, so it's hard to think of many times it comes up.

Not quite on topic, I've tried a couple of different ways of representing text messages in prose.

The last thing I wrote did involve finding out some specifics about a car manufactured in the 1990s, as well as what kind of home computer someone might use to build a webpage at about that same time. There's also a reference to a bad hairstyle. I do remember that era, but not with sharp clarity for details.

Where I almost made a mistake about the contemporary world: my days of casual recreational drug use ended more than a couple of minutes ago. I was in revisions on a book before I remembered that the legal status of marijuana now is a great deal more ambiguous and locally variable in the U.S. than it was even a decade past.

 

[KeithD]

For my GM stories, 1985 becomes a watershed year for me. If barebacking is important to my story, I often set the scene before that date, the year in which AIDS became public where I was at the time (Bangkok), and suddenly condoms became accepted as a necessity.

 

[Comshaw]

Anything you fight to stay keenly aware of in your writing?

Common things such as:
Cell Phones
Dial up internet
Hi speed internet
Information explosion (so harder to sell inet savvy youngsters who don't know sexual basics)
Car phones
Pagers
Proliferation of porn concepts/now common place sexual information
Album release windows/dates/charting (as I progress into the itunes era, I'm less inclined to claim popularity further from single releases)
Anything else you can think of (fashions, consumer products, etc.)

This is really a thought space for you to share timelines you work under (within a reality space) and where you sometimes accommodate for them.

I find myself pigeonholing to small windows of year(s) and want to play around with some of the shoulder times still keeping plausibility.

My stories cover several time periods. So far the farthest back happened in WWII and the newest in today's world. I do much better ( I suspect everyone does) if I stick to the times I have lived. One of those is the late 60's through the 70's with the Vietnam war and aftermath as a focal point. I'm in the process of writing one about a competitor in the 1996 Olympics. I remember how expensive cell phones and cell service were at the time, but I had to do a search to find out just how much. There was a reason we only had one at the time and it was a car bag phone.

I did write one based in the late 80's and included the specs for my first computer, a Tandy HX 1000 8088 processor running at 12 megahertz jacked out to 640 k memory (it only came with 384 k as standard) with two 3 1/2" 1.4 megabyte disk drives, a color graphics card, a sound card, a 2400 baud rate modem running DOS 2.0. I thought I was in heaven!

This is going to be one of those, "back in the day I walked up hill both ways to school" posts:
After I bought that computer, to get anything done, other than play a game or type up something (since there was no spell checker or grammar program it was REALLY slow going for me having to go back and check word by word with a dictionary) I had to learn to write batch files and some basic computing skills in the Basic computer language. Additionally, with a download rate of 2400 BPS, there were no picture downloads. I tried a couple of times, but it took hours to do, so wasn't worth the wait time.

Damn, I've strayed from the discussion back to it.

For me (and again I suspect everyone else) it's easier and I can concentrate on the interaction of the character if I don't have to do much research on the time frame and specifics of it, so I try to keep my stories in the time frame I remember, my lifetime.


Comshaw

 

[oggbashan]

Back in the early 1970s one of my colleagues went to South America to help install a radio communications mast at a jungle airstrip.

As they landed, the aircraft's tyres blew. The radio communciation was not operational so they had no way to tell anyone they needed new tyres before they could leave. The next plane was due in a month's time.

My colleague got out his experimental satellite phone, the size of a small briefcase, erected the dish and lined it up on the carrier wave of a satelitte.

He then phoned his office in London and asked them to contact the South American capital to fly in some new tyres. The tyres arrived 48 hours later.

The cost of his short call? £2,500 pounds.

 

[LupusDei]

One of my projects I'm sort of writing (but haven't looked at for about a year right now) is set in a never explicitly stated, but easily dated by inference night in 1995.

Namesdays are exact equivalent to dates, in conjunction with weekday the year can be set, even if I haven't mentioned Russian Orthodox Easter that was unusually late that year. Yet I use currency that went out of circulation in 1994 and visit a nightclub that (I believe) didn't open until 1996 just because I felt like mentioning those was fun and added to the historical setting even when constituted mostly deliberate slight anachronisms.

And yes, a rare cellphone features in slightly unlikely hands and I did in-deep research into possibility of that, to double check own memory, and it turned out to be as weird as wanted. Unthinkable in 1994 it wouldn't be a problem at all in 1996. We here really went from "only overly rich assholes carry brick sized mobile phones" to "nearly every school kid has a cellphone" in only slightly more than those two years. While pagers remained very niche and were almost completely lost in the middle.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Home Run is something of an oddity as it takes place in Japan a country that's usually an early adopter of media storage types and technology in general. (Laserdisc actually took off in Japan I suspect because, VHS film is notorious for not holding up to the local climate.) Yet at the same time they held onto their flip phones well into the 2010s because as far as they were concerned their Japan exclusive flip phones had the same functionality as a smartphone with a different user interface.

Other examples of Japan being weird, they got CDs WAAAY before any other country, with the first CD being the Japanese release of Billy Joel's 52nd street in 1982, roughly tied with the European release of an ABBA album in Europe the same year. America didn't get to buy CDs until 1984, a full two years later, and even then, Americans don't typically make the switch right away so it would take a few more years for CDs to be common place. Japan bought into CDs fast and they stuck with them, even as MP3s and streaming came around Japan hasn't fully moved on.

Home Run is made even weirder by Yuma being a bit of a hipster and Mika waxing nostalgic for the Twilight movies. Which holds up as people my age and a few years older are getting nostalgic for 2000s culture right now. Yuma’s taste in media being Billy Joel and the Seinfeld show has to do with him being an outsider with an interest in American culture from a young age, so his taste is whatever American media he would've been able to dig up in the second hand bin as a child in the early 2000s. Like that would've been his starting point. He also watches Modern Family and a lot of other sitcoms so it's not like the old shit is the only thing he's watching. Though he doesn't seem to like newer sitcoms like the big bang theory, as the jokes told in the show rely heavily on pop culture references in the place of punchlines.

I know I wanted Twitter to exist for plot reasons so depending on how Elon Musk handles things Home Run might become an accidental period piece.

In other stories sometimes I know I need phones to be rare or absent for plot in which case I'll specifically set it in a time frame where the absence of cellphones is feasible.

 

[Euphony]

Home Run is something of an oddity as it takes place in Japan a country that's usually an early adopter of media storage types and technology in general. (Laserdisc actually took off in Japan I suspect because, VHS film is notorious for not holding up to the local climate.) Yet at the same time they held onto their flip phones well into the 2010s because as far as they were concerned their Japan exclusive flip phones had the same functionality as a smartphone with a different user interface.

Other examples of Japan being weird, they got CDs WAAAY before any other country, with the first CD being the Japanese release of Billy Joel's 52nd street in 1982, roughly tied with the European release of an ABBA album in Europe the same year. America didn't get to buy CDs until 1984, a full two years later, and even then, Americans don't typically make the switch right away so it would take a few more years for CDs to be common place. Japan bought into CDs fast and they stuck with them, even as MP3s and streaming came around Japan hasn't fully moved on.

Home Run is made even weirder by Yuma being a bit of a hipster and Mika waxing nostalgic for the Twilight movies. Which holds up as people my age and a few years older are getting nostalgic for 2000s culture right now. Yuma’s taste in media being Billy Joel and the Seinfeld show has to do with him being an outsider to American culture from a young age so his taste is whatever American media he would've been able to dig up on the second hand bin as a child in the early 2000s. Like that would've been his starting point. He also watches Modern Family and a lot of other sitcoms so it's not like the old shit is the only thing he's watching. Though he doesn't seem to like newer sitcoms like the big bang theory, as the jokes told in the show rely heavily on pop culture references in the place of punchlines.

Fascinating knowledge share. I knew some of it but really enjoyed getting my neurons tickled.

I know I wanted Twitter to exist for plot reasons so depending on how Elon Musk handles things Home Run might become an accidental period piece.

In other stories sometimes I know I need phones to be rare or absent for plot in which case I'll specifically set it in a time frame where the absence of cellphones is feasible.

This and internet access/speeds have come to dominate my time period considerations. With easier communication comes fewer plausible conflicts. Also, kids being 18+ and sexually naive with a high speed information free for all makes for a lot more religious upbringings than I might usually employ.

So many 90s kids and stuck w/those subsets of names not because I have a fondness for the time period but b/c I struggle to feel plausibility much after 2005. (fine for now (age limits relative to now) but gets worse every passing day)

 

[Lady2020]

The current time period. Just think of how long you've lived.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Also, kids being 18+ and sexually naive with a high speed information free for all makes for a lot more religious upbringings than I might usually employ.

Depending on location sexual naivete might look different regardless of household religion. For example I have a character who previously assumed he was straight (or at the very least wasn't in a position to consider watching gay porn) be fucking clueless as to how gay sex works because Japan's sex ed is reportedly very heteronormative and in certain schools the sex ed is just bad across the board regardless of gender.

In America if the parents aren't teaching sex education and the school system is "abstinence only", a teen would learn everything from porn which makes them not clueless but frequently incorrect about how sex works. Expecting hairless women, not using condoms because pregnancy is the only concern (school didn't teach about STDs), little things like that.

 

[Euphony]

Depending on location sexual naivete might look different regardless of household religion. For example I have a character who previously assumed he was straight or at the very least wasn't in a position to consider watching gay porn be fucking clueless as to how gay sex works because Japan's sex ed is reportedly very heteronormative and in certain schools the sex ed is just bad across the board regardless of gender.

I've considered playing in that sandbox but am not currently comfortable with executing the nuance of the culture (esp. "insiders v. 'outsiders") I feel a Japan story really requires. I've lost days down the research rabbit hole. Enjoyable but not confident.

In America if the parents aren't teaching sex education and the school system is "abstinence only", a teen would learn everything from porn which makes them not clueless but frequently incorrect about how sex works. Expecting hairless women, not usung condoms because pregnancy is the only concern (school didn't teach about STDs), little things like that.

Of course everyone's journey, current place on the sexual spectrum, and character growth "point" differ greatly but, in my less challenging (to readers) work I like to stick solidly within reasonable lines.

1995 HS female v. 2005 HS female have different probabilities of knowing about/being comfortable asking for, say, cunnilingus even if on the individual level, 95 can be a sexual pioneer (due to limited access) and 2005 a biblical scholar. (with sexual communication tools more easily at the ready)

 

[Euphony]

(school didn't teach about STDs)

Literally, this is ALL my school taught. Drug education was all worst case scenario, ruining your life, you will die. Sex ed was every horrific STD outlier medical case photo they could cram in our eyeballs in a 1 hour class period.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Literally, this is ALL my school taught. Drug education was all worst case scenario, ruining your life, you will die. Sex ed was every horrific STD outlier medical case photo they could cram in our eyeballs in a 1 hour class period.

Really? My formal sex ed consisted not of photos but an ER nurse visiting and giving a talk that was very concerned about STDs but only taught abstinence as the sole method of avoiding them. Which gave the impression to those in my class that didn't have parent's progressive enough to teach them these things that STDs are really common and inevitable so you may as well have sex anyway.

I think maybe people older than me would have had condoms taught to them agressively due to the AIDs crisis being more fresh to that generations consciousness.

 

[Euphony]

Really? My formal sex ed consisted not of photos but an ER nurse visiting and giving a talk that was very concerned about STDs but only taught abstinence as the sole method of avoiding them. Which gave the impression to those in my class that didn't have parent's progressive enough to teach them these things that STDs are really common and inevitable so you may as well have sex anyway.

I think maybe people older than me would have had condoms taught to them agressively due to the AIDs crisis being more fresh to that generations consciousness.

I was post early AIDS "panic" pre internet proliferation in the American Bible Belt.

We saw unending photos of diseased genitals with abstinence being heavily favored but *only* a couple minute talk (no examples or rubbers in the room) of condoms being a thing.

Obv. boys and girls split but my school had attached health rooms (with kind of a heavy door "divider) so you could overhear the girls discussions if you were close and tuned your attention.

I learned more from eavesdropping on my fellow FEMALE classmates asking thoughtful questions on their side than I did anything on my side.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Obv. boys and girls split but my school had attached health rooms (with kind of a heavy door "divider) so you could overhear the girls discussions if you were close and tuned your attention.

Oh that's interesting because sex ed stopped being gender segregated by freshman year of highschool. The puberty talks of sex ed were segregated but everything else was mixed.