How to show the time period? Early 90s

[CoffeeWithMonkeys]

I'm working on a newish story. Something I wrote the synopsis of a year ago and I wanted to start fluffing the whole story out.

A lot of the beginning is set in 1990-95ish, any ideas on how to show what the era is without saying it's 1990?

Obviously we don't have cell phones like people do now, but I really can't remember technology and stuff from 30 years ago.

 

[Inkhorn]

Reference music and news of the time in the story. The trick is to do it subtly.

 

[MelissaBaby]

They could go to the movies.

"I was wondering. I wanted to go see Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Want to go with me?"

"When?"

"Saturday? I was thinking, you kind of look a little like Keanu Reeves, don't you think?"

"Not really. Isn't he Hawaiian or something?"

"I don't know. I guess. So, do you want to go?"

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

Reference music and news of the time in the story. The trick is to do it subtly.

Completely agree. I think it typically comes off as clunky and awkward to make expository note of the time and date in Lit stories (e.g., “The year is 1992...” or “Hey did you see the new...”).

I did similar research for all of the time periods of my novella series, because it has tertiary characters that lived decades before the story, and part of the novella has flashback scenes to 1995, 1996 and 2002. I used commercial references—stores, fashion and haircuts, electronics brands, music, books and TV shows—and politics, books and celebrities to make subtle inferences. For example, my protagonists read a book that was an award-winning children’s book in 1998 and shortly after reading the book, the grandfather references the Clinton impeachment and Citizens United bill going before congress. For me, the subtler the reference, the better, because then they can be weaved together without seeming forced—I think it’s unlikely that one reference alone will give enough insight to the year/date.

 

[RetroFan]

I write a lot of works set in the 1990s, so think I can offer you some good advice.

Technology is a good way of setting your stories in this era or indeed any era. For example, in one story a girl is at her summer job in 1994 and signs onto her computer using DOS, and in the same story the family get their photos developed at a 1 hour photo booth and use a VCR. In another story set in 1992, a teenager and her boyfriend discuss mobile phones and how big and bulky they are.

Referencing political figures is another good way of setting your story in the past, for example in the 1994 story the father listens to a speech by Bill Clinton over the radio. Having characters work in jobs now largely gone is another, in one story my young female narrator has a part time job as a video store clerk.

Foreshadowing is another of my favored tactics. In one of my 1994 stories a girl laments that her parents forgot her 18th birthday but she does say that in her defense that her birth date of 11 September isn't a memorable date. In another story set in 1991, a mother whose toddler son loves dinosaurs says that she wishes that there was a kids show on TV featuring a friendly dinosaur as the main character.

Music is another good strategy. In a story set in 1993, a grumpy father laments his daughter's love of grunge, saying that if he made grunge music he would get a gun and shoot himself in the head, foreshadowing a major event in this music genre the next year. Or characters could just listen to groups and musical artists popular at the time.

Clothes are another good way of setting your stories in a time period. Put female characters in patched jeans, stirrup pant leggings, colored pantyhose, long floral skirts, acid wash denim and the like, with equivalent male fashion for the boys.

Good luck with your 1990s story - I hope it goes well for you. Check out my stories if you wish, those set in the '90s are tagged 1990s.

 

[Jada59]

Computers had CRT monitors, TVs were not flat screen, cordless phones had an antenna.

 

[UsuallyPresent]

Pagers instead of cell phones for the business folk

Starbucks had ~140 locations in early 90s, and its IPO

What kind of environments are you writing in? Malls? Homes? Businesses? Take each and google to see what was introduced in which year/location

For instance googling ‘best 1993 toy’ found this list of toys - pick your areas & research. Fashion, work, food, entertainment are all options

 

[Hypoxia]

Audience matters. Will yours catch subtle references? Mention certain media or events -- LIT readers worldwide may be mystified. E.g. I skipped much Anglophone pop culture after 1990 so my best index marks there are probably the birth of the WWWeb or the first Saddam war.

 

[SimonDoom]

Music: grunge music, hop hop, Guns N Roses, Celine Dion, Garth Brooks. You can do an online search for Billboard lists from that era

Movies: Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump. Again, it's easy to search for movies that were popular

TV Shows: Cheers, Frasier, Friends.

In the early 1990s, business casual had not become universal yet, so people were more likely to wear suits in professional offices. Clothing styles and hair styles varied a lot, more than in previous eras.

Smart phones didn't exist. Cell phones were bigger and had fewer features.

The early-mid 1990s saw the birth of the internet. It was new and very primitive compared to now. Access was via dialup, and the connection made a distinctive screeching sound. Download speeds by today's standards were very slow, so you often waited for something.

There was no Google, no Amazon, no Facebook. AOL was very popular.

Nobody streamed movies or music. It didn't exist. You rented movies from video stores. People listened to music on CDs.

The Soviet Union collapsed and the cold war was over. At least for a while.

 

[jaF0]

Obviously we don't have cell phones like people do now, but I really can't remember technology and stuff from 30 years ago.

Nobody had cell phones then (unless they were Zack Morris). I got my first one in 96 or so and it was a bag phone that plugged into a cigarette lighter socket..

 

[Polyacrylate]

As most people here said, show it as you would any other time period: haircuts, fashion, music, current events, etc. Be careful about anachronisms with pop culture, real world events, and tech. You've got a little bit more wiggle room with fashion and social cues.

I was a young teenager in the early 90s. Pop culture and culture in general felt very different between 1990 and 1995.

 

[MelissaBaby]

As most people here said, show it as you would any other time period: haircuts, fashion, music, current events, etc. Be careful about anachronisms with pop culture, real world events, and tech. You've got a little bit more wiggle room with fashion and social cues.

I was a young teenager in the early 90s. Pop culture and culture in general felt very different between 1990 and 1995.

We could see the greatest movie of all time, and my husband would walk out saying "They couldn't have listened to that song in the summer, it didn't come out until the autumn of that year." So, yeah, even a minor anachronism can take some people right out of your story.

 

[Hypoxia]

@Simon: Your cultural items are fairly localized. Garth Brooks and the Jurassics don't immediately signal 1990s to me. Big cellphones; infant Internet; Soviet collapse -- and looser airport security, burgeoning HIV epidemic -- those trigger my mental images, let me align in spacetime.

How would I write of the period? Maybe a throwaway line about it being a decade before that 9/11 crap, which is a great index mark. But I rather just explicitly date-stamp chapter or episode headers, as:

***** Easter 1991, Boston *****​

Get that out of the way and proceed with storytelling. If time and place are significant, say so. Then all else falls in line, and readers can retrieve their own memories of then and there.

 

[Inkhorn]

@Simon: Your cultural items are fairly localized. Garth Brooks and the Jurassics don't immediately signal 1990s to me. Big cellphones; infant Internet; Soviet collapse -- and looser airport security, burgeoning HIV epidemic -- those trigger my mental images, let me align in spacetime.

How would I write of the period? Maybe a throwaway line about it being a decade before that 9/11 crap, which is a great index mark. But I rather just explicitly date-stamp chapter or episode headers, as:

***** Easter 1991, Boston *****​

Get that out of the way and proceed with storytelling. If time and place are significant, say so. Then all else falls in line, and readers can retrieve their own memories of then and there.

I personally don’t like seeing time stamps like that. As someone else mentioned, it feels clunky. But the real reason (for me) is that many authors do a time stamp... and then nothing in the story justifies it. No other mention or reference is made in the story itself to support the time stamp or to prove why the year it takes place is relevant.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I personally don’t like seeing time stamps like that. As someone else mentioned, it feels clunky. But the real reason (for me) is that many authors do a time stamp... and then nothing in the story justifies it. No other mention or reference is made in the story itself to support the time stamp or to prove why the year it takes place is relevant.

Every story should be an enjoyable or edifying journey. Why take shortcuts?

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

@Simon: Your cultural items are fairly localized. Garth Brooks and the Jurassics don't immediately signal 1990s to me. Big cellphones; infant Internet; Soviet collapse -- and looser airport security, burgeoning HIV epidemic -- those trigger my mental images, let me align in spacetime.

How would I write of the period? Maybe a throwaway line about it being a decade before that 9/11 crap, which is a great index mark. But I rather just explicitly date-stamp chapter or episode headers, as:

***** Easter 1991, Boston *****​

Get that out of the way and proceed with storytelling. If time and place are significant, say so. Then all else falls in line, and readers can retrieve their own memories of then and there.

I agree that localization is worth considering. Time is not only relative (I’m a 90s baby; some of the foreshadowing examples didn’t have much meaning to me) but also culturally, economically, socially based etc. I think the subtle effect Inkhorn mentioned is more likely to come across when you have a sufficient cross-current of references—someone may have no idea who Garth Brooks is, but may instead get the reference to Full House, and tie in with reading about the Clintons (or Trumps? Wouldn’t that actually suggest early 90s?) and perhaps the reader would start to get the picture.

Date, time, location surely seems the clearest way around this dilemma. But I’m with Inkhorn and MelissaBaby. I stop reading when I see such inserts. May be a very personal hangup, but that immediately pulls me out of a Lit story.

 

[CoffeeWithMonkeys]

So many great ideas, thanks everyone, I'll read over them in a bit. I haven't slept since like Sunday night and I'm starting to hallucinate...so I'm off to try to nap a bit.
But such awesome stuff THANKS!!

And yeah not really like a timestamp and I won't litter these ideas all over the story, it's just when I was reading over the first chapter and MC was heading to a diner to write, she grabs some notebooks and pens, says something about her boyfriend's typewriter not being very portable.
And at one point she's wondering when her boyfriend will be home and entertains the idea of trying to track him down, but doesn't want to spend an hour calling his friends.
Really other than those two small things I was thinking people who read it will be thinking, why doesn't she just call him on his cell phone?
I was hoping to add a few subtle things so people would understand, oh yeah they didn't have cell phones then.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Get that out of the way and proceed with storytelling. If time and place are significant, say so. Then all else falls in line, and readers can retrieve their own memories of then and there.

If I'm back-setting, I tend to write it how I remember it, but don't go out of my way to "set it up" for readers. They either keep up or they don't - and I certainly don't stop to explain stuff to twenty-five years olds who weren't even a twinkle in their father's eye when a story is set "back then". I managed to cope with history when I was twenty-five and reading books set before I was born, so I expect current day readers to cope also.

Besides, mine are mostly all set in Australia, and that confuses the hell out of most northern hemispherians anyway, so a bit of period dislocation makes no difference.

 

[BrokenSpokes]

I can’t believe no one’s mentioned the Captain Marvel movie in this thread yet.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Audience matters. Will yours catch subtle references? Mention certain media or events -- LIT readers worldwide may be mystified. E.g. I skipped much Anglophone pop culture after 1990 so my best index marks there are probably the birth of the WWWeb or the first Saddam war.

Bingo!

Consider that even for people in their 20s and 30s, the following are things they only heard about in school: Watergate, the Vietnam war and the first moon landing (all half a century ago, more or less). The first (brick-sized) cell phone didn't come out until 1983. The movies ET, Ghostbusters and The Karate Kid were all released in the 1980s. Even 9/11 is just ancient history to some people old enough to vote.

To put that into perspective, if you were born in 1960, think of World War II, the assassination of Huey Long, the release of movies like Wings or Grand Hotel (Oscar winners from 1928 and 1932) and the introduction of the DC-4 airliner. Yes, we heard of these things, but expecting us to recognize a date or even a decade from them is asking a lot.

Sometimes you have to just bite the bullet. If the date is important, you might actually have to work the date in somehow and not tap-dance around it in hopes people will pick up on it.

 

[Hypoxia]

If Heinlein and Shakespeare can date-stamp, so can I.

But of course, beware anachronisms.

Forget Caesar's cellfone.

Meanwhile, I thought our goal was to entertain readers by producing imagery for their inner eyes. Authors are performers, same as organ grinders' monkeys. The little guy hops and waves, flips up his loincloth to flash the audience, then demands coins in his cup. Same thing here minus the coins. Okay, so date-stamping is just flap-flipping, flashing the crowd, providing them focus. Hey, it works!

PS: Another spacetime-stamp that worked:

It was the third of June
Another sleepy, dusty Delta day​

 

[UsuallyPresent]

One clever way to put explicit dates in I’ve seen I forget where is to quote official correspondence or a news anchor giving the date, maybe something like:

Piet opened the official-looking envelope. The single sheet inside read:

Dieter, Hanscomb and Squirrel
Attorneys at Law​

22 Feb 1992

Mr. Bester,
It is my honor to...

 

[KeithD]

I don't avoid directly grounding the time period somehow. I don't want the reader's attention going to that rather than the plotline.

 

[jaF0]

If the audience is so detail aware, it could be something so simple and subtle as a famous tag line from a celebrity or newscaster

.... And so it goes.

 

[Hypoxia]

If the audience is so detail aware, it could be something so simple and subtle as a famous tag line from a celebrity or newscaster

.... And so it goes.

Is that meaningful to others than USAnians of certain ages and status? I'm not even sure of the reference. Murrow, Cronkite, Chevy Chase, or Madonna? Sure, including catch phrases will flavor a story but they're not much to depend on for setting. A late-1960s USA setting might see UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERFUCKERS and KEEP ON TRUCKIN'. Just for flavor.