“Since Alex was born with a hole in his heart; there’s a good reason they didn’t fix it, I’d like the dentist to start giving him antibiotics before his visits: if a bacteria gets in when his gums bleed, the infection can go straight through his bloodstream to his brain.” ~ My son’s pediatric cardiologist, today.
Daily Archives: April 16, 2014
N is for … News
I got to thinking about time periods in fiction and how certain events, depending on how close to the story line they happen, can be a dead giveaway for when the story takes place. This can be tricky when writing a piece that takes place in the future. For instance George Orwell’s 1984 or Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – both major works of art in literature, and yet now that we know better they tend to lose a miniscule amount of merit.
It can be even worse if the story takes place in the present, because what might be huge news today, unless it’s a major event, might be a non-issue in the future when your readers are reading it. How about this blast from the past: The L.A. Times announces McDonald’s big news! Read all about it!
My novel takes place in about the present – meaning I don’t really know. In trying to get the days of the week straight with the date, I put it about two years ago, but then again, I’m not sure anyone will really notice but me. But it’s difficult not to put some kind of time frame on a story. My characters obviously won’t be going to a Michael Jackson concert, nor will they be taking the next shuttle to the moon. These kinds of events place my story in the approximate now. They do, however, go to see Aerosmith, unless I write that scene out in the edits. What if, by the time my novel is published Aerosmith stops touring altogether? This will stick my novel in the past, whether I like it or not.
News can also be extremely inspiring, and sometimes it’s tempting to want to write current events into a story. It can even creep in when you’re least expecting it, in my experience anyway. How? Because some point in time everything is news, and there’s someone out there who is bound to remember it AS news, and by that I mean they’re going to remember when it happened.
Unless your story is fantasy–even more so than Lord of the Rings, which was based on World War II–there’s no getting around a time frame in the real world. It’s a tricky thing.
Illustrative fiction is this way –> http://lindaghillfiction.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/n-is-for-nexus/
lindaghill.com 