In the process of writing a story and it's occurring to me that to a lot of people it's not going to seem like it's happening in the present day. Basically just because it's me writing it.
For one thing the main character comes home and calls his semi-estranged girlfriend. Could have done that from anywhere, right? And everyone says now that you don't call someone out of the blue, text them first. But from a drama and scene-setting vantage point, texting lacks something for me.
For the same reason I'm more likely to write someone channel surfing than just selecting what they want on Netflix or what have you. The latter seems to me to close off more storytelling possibilities than it opens.
In part I guess this is a function of age, but not just that. Kit Reed, who wrote in science fiction and a number of related areas, was born in 1932. She passed on in 2017, but up until that time she was very savvy about young people and their relationship to technology. Different people have different gifts.
2 comments:
I don't know what the story you're writing is about but I do understand the problems in dealing with contemporary situations in narrative fiction.
Having read and enjoyed a fair number of mysteries it's sadly amusing to imagine a detective consulting wikipedia in order to determine which make of gun a particular bullet had been fired from, or doing a mapquest to find a suspect's address (the man who said 'The map* is not the territory' was not wrong). What bothers me is that, reliant as they've become on technology, too many people nowadays are willing to accept abstraction over reality.
For example, we watched the first season of the very popular 'Sherlock' and found its amusement value in using tech to solve modern versions of the stories soon paled when compared to the short stories of Arthur Conan Doyle while the best filmed versions, ie, the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce series were far superior in every way. Purging the visceral aspects of life makes a lackluster mockery of existence.
You're right that storytelling possibilities are shrunken when too much artifice, either social or electronic, is required to fulfill expectations. Nevertheless, I believe there is an audience for the stories you prefer to write.
* “I have rivers but no water; forests but no trees; cities but no buildings. What am I?”
Of course writing about the contemporary world different people will be fed by different experiences. But it does seem to me that getting hung up on entirely artificial distractions has become not only prevalent, but encouraged.
Some people prefer their map to the actual territory. Maybe there's something to that. Oh well, good luck to them in any case. But yes. I mean, in truth there's probably always been some poetic license in the treatment of the detection process in mystery stories. And I feel you really need to tap into that poetic license now if you're going to avoid the depressingly routine.
I enjoyed the first two series of Sherlock. Cumberbatch and Freeman feel true to the characters, even as they look quite a bit different from the way we expect those characters. But maybe there is a limit to how far you can go with the third millenniumization of the source material. The actors don't seem that eager to get back to it.
"Mountains but you cannot climb." Good riddle. I had to check to see if it was from Tolkien.
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