My story is set in the 1980s... but should it be?

Discussion in 'Setting Development' started by ashtonelias, Apr 26, 2018.

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  1. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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  2. S A Lee

    S A Lee Contributor Contributor

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    If you feel that this story works best in the 80s, then that's a good enough a reason.

    I'm not old enough to remember the 80s (I was born in 88) but as long as it flows right the setting time-wise can be whatever you want.

    If anything, I think stories set in a pre smartphone era should be mandatory reading. I started working in a secondary school and the kids here don't remember what it was like before social networks and smart phones.

    ...

    Jeez writing that made me feel old and I'm not thirty... yet...
     
  3. graveleye

    graveleye Senior Member

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    Oh dear I must have missed all the dreadful stuff in the 80s. I was in my teens and early twenties, playing in a rock band, stoned and partying and having the time of my life.
    Politics and world affairs be damned. I had a great time back then.

    And that it what I choose to write about.
     
  4. peachalulu

    peachalulu Member Reviewer Contributor

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    I love the 80s.
    I plan on writing a couple books featuring this decade -- Moonlight, my Advantage (when I get around to it ... I'm definitely going to have to go back to that location just to jog my memory -- haven't been there in thirty years). I think if you're going to use a decade it should be relevant to your purpose. Tone, mood, nostalgia, logic whatever, but the reader should have a clue that yes this story couldn't have taken place at any other time or it wouldn't have been as good or made as much sense.

    My plan is for mood & nostalgia -- the danger stranger era versus the contrariwise block parent era.
    Even my WIP has some ideas I've slipped that I recall from the 80s like boys making Chinese throwing stars from pop cans.
     
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  5. The Dapper Hooligan

    The Dapper Hooligan (V) ( ;,,;) (v) Contributor

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    This isn't exclusive to the 80's. I remember doing it in the 80's, my sister's kid was doing it in the 2000's, and my other sister's boys were doing it just a couple of years ago.

    Yeah, I have a somewhat different experiences with the decade. I wasn't really that old, but it was not a good time. The town where my family was at back then was (and still is) pretty back woods and got hit pretty hard with recession. Not only that, but the area was pretty much dependent on forestry as an industry, and that took a pretty huge hit with the softwood lumber disputes back then, too. I'm not saying it was all bad, but it was a pretty stressful time for a number of reasons. Most of the best memories I have of the decade are all fishing, camping, and baseball, with a maybe a few memories of heading over to a schoolmates place to play Mario 2.
     
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  6. DeeDee

    DeeDee Contributor Contributor

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    That's a good point. But there's also the question if you will have to have scenes, ,for example, set in a library, showing how the characters leaf through pages and pages of reference books in order to find the info they need. Yawn, yawn, yawn. It's not much easier to write an 1980s mystery, really. You also will have to include enough period detail to make everything seem authentic. Unless the book is YA, there may be quite a few readers nitpicking at details you got wrong. So, more yawn, yawn, yawn, plus eye-rolling. If the 1980s gimmick becomes obvious (oh, it's set there so they won't have phones in their pockets, yawn), that also sinks your boat. Lots of pitfalls to watch out for.
     
  7. Cephus

    Cephus Contributor Contributor

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    But only if you have any clue what the 80s were like and even then, it might not be the best idea. I once wrote a story set in the late 70s and early 80s because it fit in with historical events that happened then. So I worked backwards and tried to justify it all, but I realized that this is fiction, it doesn't have to fit into actual history and I just made it modern day, which worked much better in the end. You can make up your own history if you want.
     
  8. pyroglyphian

    pyroglyphian Word Painter

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    If only wisdom was so easy to obtain.

    Go with the 80's @ashtonelias, if it doesn't work then you'll know it's not supposed to. Happy writing! :agreed:
     
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  9. Lawless

    Lawless Active Member

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    If you feel like your story shouldn't include texting and GPS, if that helps the mystery you have in mind, then yes, absolutely, you should set your story in the pre-cellphone era. I don't see anything wrong with that.


    As to what the publishers in your location would or wouldn't frown upon, I have really no idea.
     
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  10. raine_d

    raine_d Active Member

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    The devil's in the details, of course - setting a story in a very recent period, it's actually harder to catch the anachronisms than it is for earlier ones. Not just the things already mentioned like information retrieval and storing (was photocopying common yet, because I have memories of {shudder} carbon copying... and paper files, office rooms full of paper files. And electric typewriters! - and white out!), or clothes (I suggest trying to get hold of old women's magazines for the sort of things ordinary folk wore, my mother's hoard of knitting patterns are eyepopping :)) and food (more additives, way less international ingredients... but it was better than the fifties!!!) Even the simple photo: when you had to use a film camera you simply didn't take as many, and developed few of those they did (Dad had rolls and rolls of film in a drawer, we still haven't developed most) and treasured albums, boxes of those they did (if the house was burning down, that was always one of the things to save, since there were no digital copies, once destroyed that was IT.) So if a story turns on visual evidence, you need more reason for a photo that "hey selfie!!" People wrote and kept letters (future historians are going to miss that, folk).

    Also, if you're doing a murder mystery, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to read up on some 80s true crime to get a feeling for just how different medicine and the forensic/investigative systems were (I don't know when DNA came in...)
     
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  11. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

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    On the plus side - back then you could punch a bus stop because your girlfriend had ditched you/drunk whatever, and not be tasered, filmed, convicted and processed that night to a cell, therapy, re-education, beaten & given a criminal record by a whole new swathe of specialists reared at the new universities. You could blame somebody else back then and make it to 25 in one piece. I miss the 80s. Anyways, police are mainly busy with twitter crimes today, eh, eh, knee-jerk, grandad, grandad, your medication daddy, oh.
     
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  12. WaffleWhale

    WaffleWhale Active Member

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    Sometimes you can have a setting just for the fun of it. If the story doesn't need one setting to work, you can do whatever you please. In some copies of Agatha Christie's Death Comes as the End she writes at the beginning that she had no real requirement or reason to write it in ancient Egypt, she just kind of wanted to.

    On the other hand, it might be fun if it is in modern times, but they are still cut off from the internet for some reason, so they have to adjust and solve it "Old School"
     
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  13. Some Guy

    Some Guy Manguage Langler Supporter Contributor

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    OK - My turn.

    My story is about pre-adult teens left to fend for themselves morally, socially, -lly -lly, in the 80s.
    The eighties was so chaotic and dymanic that it dramatically (affected?) everything beyond it, even to now. If I had to sum up the 80s in one word - Duality. We were the walking dichotomy of ourselves at a fundamental level. Everything was upside down. We were all going to perish in fire, so lets wear Jetsons plastic, and jump around while we sing dee do do do, dee da da da. Wierd Science was dead on. The sexual revolution raged in the middle, in the face, of STD paranoia. I listened to Journey, at the drive in, while my girlfriend and I demonstrated our civil disobedience (screw you Graham) on each other. Then discovered (whenever) all the TV evangelists were screwing each other. Confusion. Here's the rules, here's how everybody breaks 'em. You can't, but you will. The poor (God forgive us) Nam vets, we made em, then broke em, then ignored em, then put it all over the big screen about how terrible it is (Rambo eyeing his cryballs out - after going Kolumbein on a whole town). We went nuts - and now no man is left behind, except each other. Band-Aid and the Corporate Raid. Formula flicks. The 80s in a nutshell (nuthouse) - Buckaroo Bonzai. Let us not forget Ternimator and War Game. Glam Rock. Prince (Purple)
    The inane turbulent undercurrents of the eighties is literarily fossil fuel for the short, to grand epic stories. I go back, thirty years, to discover the Scorpions sang some of the best rock ballads of all time. New Age - beyond time.
    My MC's life falls with the Berlin Wall.
    Tell me there isn't a better decade for introspective drama. It's nothing but passion.
    God, I still hate my favorite decade.
     
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  14. Miscellaneous Worker

    Miscellaneous Worker Member

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    True, but what's worse is the fact that people still don't know anything despite having all this access to technology. Why?!
     
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  15. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    Because there's no cure for stupidity? I don't know.
     
  16. honey hatter

    honey hatter Banned

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    I'm going through reading all the posts on this, of all the eras 1980s has special significance because like a bunch of lines drawn towards the center. The 80's was the beginning and end of a great many things. Perhaps I saw all these things outlined starkly like a Nagel illustration, culminating in a sensibility strangely compelling. Like one of my favorite horror flics of my time The Hitcher with Rutger Hauer, a brilliant underrated actor. Many things from the 80's do not stand the test of time... all you have to do is look at my softball team picture and all my girls, endless perms! Perms all around! As if it was going out of style... *which it was!* Dear god in heaven let me suffer no more perms in the salon chair!!! Curse you Hair Bands! And Georg... no don't curse George Michael even though he supported that cause with his feathered hair... *bites lower lip looking longingly at George Michael's poster.* Back to my point, the characters which the director seemed to take a loving artistic attention to detail. Taking his time to portray these characters as Nagel would, with a bold outline letting you know exactly who these characters are, what they are thinking when they think it. Sometimes even with the simplest most wry nuanced of glances, we see Rutger Hauer's wry grin always the man with a plan, always one step ahead, always knowing more than you do. His character even seemed to know how to make you want what he wanted even while doing the most horrible of murders.
    [​IMG]ea9d9042e574a3f308ee7067766c83d5 by honey hatter, on Flickr

    The Hitcher had a lot going for it in the setting, 80's mood music, and character's only added to the wonderfully stark portrayal the director wanted. I feel like the Hitcher still stands the test of time as it is eminently re-watchable. As to if your stories era isn't defined, if the characters are strong enough i think the story will develop and the story will on its own.
     
    Last edited: May 9, 2018
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  17. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    I was just a babe in the late 80's, but the 90's were pretty weird. :p
     
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  18. honey hatter

    honey hatter Banned

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    90's were interesting. Saw the growing careers of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. Madonna hit on my love for goth, Cyndi girls just wanna have fun. The 80s had unfortunate love for parachute pants and shoulder pads. Ah those were wacky days.
     
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  19. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    Today is one of the best times to be a goth with the advent of the Cyber-Goth community
    in the past few years. :)
    Cyber Goth.jpg
     
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  20. honey hatter

    honey hatter Banned

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    Love the aesthetic there. The yellow really stands out on the black, the biohazard goggles, are nice with the I'm not sure... I'm not sure hair style. I like it. Techno goth... we are evolving. Long live the 80s long live goth.
     
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  21. Some Guy

    Some Guy Manguage Langler Supporter Contributor

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    Long live Daft Punk with their Steam Goth Apocalyptic Techno... blah blah blah. One damn song sums up the whacky 80s in less than five minutes. Undercurrents people...
     
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  22. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    I think they wear a hair piece that represents the tubular style hair,
    though I am sure that some can manage to coax their locks to such
    a condition, and dye them neon. :)
     
  23. Dragon Turtle

    Dragon Turtle Deadlier Jerry

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    Y'know, this kind of thing doesn't get said enough. I feel like conversations about writing so often wind up focusing on the shoulds and shouldn'ts, and whether every decision you make serves the story. It's good for writers to make thoughtful decisions, but sometimes, I just want to do things because they're cool. Sucks some of the life out of fiction to approach everything so mechanically, imo.
     
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  24. Oscar Leigh

    Oscar Leigh Contributor Contributor

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    A lot of people don't use the internet very effectively to learn. Entertainment and weak forms of information are more popular than any hard-working thorough methods of learning. If google scholar was as popular as fake news on Facebook the world would be a better place. But unfortunately it's very easy to just half-arse paying attention to the world and not everyone wants to indulge scholarly curiosity, and they don't always have the time.
     
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  25. hvysmker

    hvysmker Banned

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    Sundowner. Let me set you straight on the Internet. It was started in the sixties by the US government as a defense strategy. The government was afraid that the Soviets would drop an “A” bomb on the US, resulting in a disruption of military communications. It was known as the ARPANET and connected military bases across the nation. Later, universities and businesses with government contracts were included. Then came satellites, cheaper than maintaining the landlines used by ARPANET. They gradually switched over to the satellites

    In the 1980s, the network was gradually turned over to civilian use, the ARPANET bowing out by 1990. By then it was known as the Internet.

    I first joined the Internet in the mid 1980s on a mainframe computer. Around 1990 I altered a Microsoft .dll to get on with a microcomputer, a Radio Shack one, I forget the model.

    There was no World Wide Web or Web Browser back then. We made do with small programs originally designed for the Unix system. It wasn’t until, I think it was 1991, that the HTML language, the one used by the WWW was designed and released onto the USENET, a part of the Internet.

    The first decent web browser, the Navigater, came out in 1996 and actually started the use of the WWW. Although there were a couple before that, the Navigator was the first to actually show photographs on a typical monitor. It was not by chance that the first microcomputer system had become popular about that time that allowed those photos to be shown. With PCs it was the Pentium system using a VGA monitor.

    I taught myself HTML coding and designed a soft porno site on the new WWW. I wanted to learn the language and figured, why not a porn site? It wasn’t easy, since that was before HTML compilers, active x, and other modern processors were invented. I had to code it one line at a time, upload the file and look for errors, then repeat the process for each page.

    In any case, the popularity of the Internet actually began in 1996 with Navigator by Netscape and the merging of the Pentium processor with a VGA monitor. In the year 1992, there were only around 200 web sites, worldwide. In 1996, that rapidly expanded into millions as everyone and his brother wanted on.

    One other thing that might seem unbelievable was that up until that explosion advertising of any kind was actively discouraged. Anyone or business that tried was rapidly “Flamed” until they stopped. Flaming was when everyone on the Internet sent long emails to them, overloading their accounts until their ISPs cut them off. With the explosion of newcomers in 1996, flaming advertisers became impossible.

    Charlie – hvysmker.
     
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