Time Traveling

    by Gayle Bartos-Pool

We’ve all done it… Time Travel, in a book. Or maybe in a flight of fancy or even in a dream. But it’s that journey we get from a novel that interests me as a writer. I wouldn’t have thought about it had I not been reading a book by a favorite author. It was published in 1992. The title of the book and the author aren’t necessary to mention because I like him too much and obviously the publisher and booksellers and fans at the time weren’t thinking about how the book would be received in the future more than thirty years later. But I’m thinking about it now after I had finished some eight chapters of the best seller.

On almost every page there was a reference to a political figure of the time, a current joke going around, or a character in a popular television show or movie. I knew what the author was talking about, but I can bet quite a few of the people in the generation right behind mine wouldn’t understand half of the comments and people in Gens X, Y, Z or whatever young people are calling their particular era now wouldn’t have a clue to what was being said.

I personally can testify that 90% of the current actors, movies, on-line places one would go to be “entertained” or God forbid, enlightened, don’t mean anything to me today. I haven’t read a book written by the younger generations, at least those in their 30s or 40s, if they have ever written a book. Since many high school and even college graduates aren’t exactly proficient in writing our language or maybe even their contemporary slang, maybe there is nothing to read from their generation anyway.

Am I cynical? Yes. Should I be? Yes… and No. I have to be cynical when I see news stories that show some areas of the country have entire school systems with zero kids graduating who can read or do math. And No, it’s not cynical to want the country to do a better job educating our kids so they can write a book, much less read one and to know that 2 and 2 equals four, not five. (There’s a reference there if you care to look it up.)

But there have been books written by older contemporary authors who do a great job writing about bygone eras. How do they do it? They give the reader a nice history lesson along with the story. Their research lets us see what Jolly Old England looked like over two hundred years ago or other places in history. If they do a good job, the reader can “figuratively” walk down a street in London during Sherlock Holmes’ time or Berlin during World War II and see how people lived back then. The scenes are as much of the story as the plot and the characters and the reader gets to learn a little something along the way. Even in science fiction novels we can see the “future” through the writer’s eyes. That’s always fun.

But in a contemporary novel, what if every humorous or “ripped from the headlines” comment mentioned is so obscure the reader thirty-forty years hence won’t understand any of it? When I wrote my three spy novels covering the time from the Second World War up until the early Nineties, I understood the eras, but I had seen a lot of movies made during the war, read quite a few history books on the topics I was covering, and lived through the fifty-plus years after the war. I have to hope they still show some of those great movies made during that time period so future readers have a chance of understanding parts of that history in my books.

But what does a writer do now? Continue dropping current events into their stories just for current readers? How did Arthur Conan Doyle manage to write a story that has lasted through the ages? Even if you never saw the dozens of movies and television series based on his Sherlock Holmes character, the stories are still totally understandable. One thing I can say, he didn’t drop tons of humorous quips into the mix.

When I write a story told in the First Person, the character, if it’s a male, doesn’t have the opportunity to wax eloquently about the surroundings other than a casual mention. Perhaps a woman would comment about the furniture or wallpaper in a room or the fabric in a dress someone wore, but guys usually don’t do that if the story is in First Person. The book I was reading by that famous author wrote in Third Person and did drop in lots of references about everything: clothes, gadgets, politics, movie stars and other current events. My characters, whether it’s a guy or a gal, will often drop a clever remark about something reminding them of a television show or movie, but after reading the book that opened this article, I might not do it as much unless I give a few more details about the show I’m referencing.

I have actually watched reruns of a few television shows done maybe ten years earlier from this current time, but ones I had not watched when they were new, and even in those shows there were one or two references that I didn’t understand. Maybe that’s because I stopped watching television about twenty years ago and haven’t been to a movie in about thirty years. I can’t say it’s my loss, because when I have tried watching a few TV series that I missed when they were new, but was watching them in reruns, they weren’t very good and I stopped watching. To be honest, there have been a few movies and TV series I have watched on television done over these past 20-30 years that weren’t bad. Mostly science fiction or adventure: Galaxy Quest, Star Wars, The Mummy.

But if I want my books readable for a younger audience even when they get into their forties, what do I need to do? Watch contemporary stuff and try to mimic it? I don’t think that’s going to happen. But I will cut down the clever references to favorite television shows and old movies because a whole lot of those particular shows might never be shown again. The future’s loss. Or, perhaps, I will try to explain the reference to the show so even a space alien would understand it. That might work.

As often happens when I’m writing an article or even a book, I will have watched a movie that is pertinent. In this case it was Demolition Man starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. The movie was made in 1993, but the opening scene is supposed to be in 1996, when two guys, a rogue cop and a psychopath, lock horns, cause chaos, and as punishment are frozen for over thirty years for their deeds, but when Snipes is thawed out in 2032, he escapes and starts causing mayhem, but since the “new world” is supposedly crime free, they need to thaw out Stallone so he can catch the bad guy since nobody in this “future” knows how to deal with a criminal.

It’s a fun plot. But in the future, 2032, which is only ten years from the time of this writing, 2023, things are different from the world back in 1993 when the movie was made. But even though the writers of this movie were making up what the future would look like, they hit a few nails on the head. Nobody used cash anymore. Everything was credit card so your every move was watched by “Big Brother.” Another thing that hit me was a word one of the characters used: TikTok. That app didn’t raise its head until 2021. The new society around Los Angeles where the movie takes place had been devastated by an earthquake and this new, non-violent society, emerged where they banned everything and controlled everybody except for the underground rebels who try to get the world back to reality.

Even though the plot was eerily reminiscent of books like 1984 and Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451, most all of the references were familiar to me, but I wonder if younger folks will get the joke about the Arnold Schwarzenegger Presidential Library or even the underlying theme of Big Brother.

So what words or themes or references do writers use that will make it into the future? Should we care? As for caring, of course we should care. Books are what people use to learn things and understand what happened in the past. Movies are those same words in picture form. Are you familiar with the phrase: A picture is worth a thousand words?

But maybe when we write those words we should make sure we don’t overdo it. The book I read by that very famous author had way too many references to current events of his time and they got to be problematic after a while because I was wondering if folks in the future would understand any of them. But since we do have the Internet that allows readers to look up a name or TV show from the past or a fun quote from somewhere in history, maybe the readers in the future will look up a few of them if they want to be enlightened. Maybe they won’t call it the Internet in the future, but if there is a way to learn things, writers might use a few fun facts. Now we just have to make sure people in the future can read…

WRITE ON!

(This article and several others from The Writers-in-Residence blog written by G.B. Pool are in her latest book, Words, Words, Words – The Art of Writing, available on Amazon.)