Keeping Up with the Times

I just read a new short story that featured a woman on the run and in danger. Old story, right? The problem is, this one was. It was set in the present but her problem was made worse by the fact she couldn't find a pay phone to call for help.
     There are no pay phones.
     I see these time anomalies all the time in print, and in film as well. We grow up in one time and write in another. I remember reading a science fiction novel when I was in my early twenties about cities in space. These cities had been ripped from the Earth, whole, covered with a bubble and sent off into the universe. It took entire cities because the vacuum tubes had to be so huge it took an entire city underground to hold them and the machines they powered.
     Then, along came the silicon chip. Micro-electronic engineering. The story was still good, but it didn't survive the change.
     I wrote a screenplay once that ended in a confrontation between the Soviet Union's space station and the United States' space station. Goodbye Soviet Union, goodbye a year of work. Oops.
     So, we have to pay attention - something I'm spotty at doing. We have to be aware of the Present as we write. I still see private investigators in black-and-white in my mind. Big fat black telephones you could bludgeon someone with, not one that's the size of my thumb and weighs a half-ounce.

When I was younger black fingernails meant you'd hit yourself with a hammer. Now, they're the height of fashion. Men in cities grew facial hair once a year for Pioneer Days, then shaved it off after the event was over. No women had tattoos, unless they were in the circus. Some men had tattoos, but they were ex-sailors and worked pumping gas at the filling station. They usually had a cigarette behind their ear, a pack rolled up in their shirt sleeve and a crooked smile. They had a girlfriend named Blondie.
     Gas was pumped for you by ex-sailors and banks gave away toasters.  
     Now, a good story needs a tattoo somewhere. Maybe not a dragon but at least some little peek that's part of the story. I try to be aware of these changes, but digital natives will notice things I've overlooked because these things are a normal part of their lives. Hubcaps that keep spinning after the car has stopped; people who seem to be talking out loud to themselves while alone.
     We had those people around when I was younger, but they usually had one pant-leg rolled up, a rope for a belt and a grocery cart holding all their belongings. Now, a crowd scene with no one on their phone, their Blue Tooth, no one texting a message on some portable device, is not real. Airports were filled not too long ago with people either looking off into space, reading the newspaper or talking to strangers in the next chair. Now they're lost in their ear-buds, their Kindles and Nooks, their computers. Not just a few but almost all of them are in their own little worlds.


     These are not little things when working on a novel. Even in non-fiction, as the book I'm working on now, we have to get the times right. I've been sweating bullets trying to research a 20 year time-span in New Orleans, from the late 70s until around 2000.  So many changes big and small, and one mistake will take the reader out of the story like the opening of a parachute ruins a good free fall.
     I was born into a post WW Two world of dirt road Southerners, fields still being plowed with mules and Separate While Unequal Rights for the races. Towns that closed on noon Wednesdays, and from noon Saturday until Monday morning. No ATMs, no weekend banking. All stores closed on Sundays. Separate entrances to movie theaters, to doctors' offices - on one door WHITE, on the other, COLORED.
     You cannot, absolutely cannot tell a story of those days without including that, and the racial slurs that flowed like water, and have that story be believable. If I wrote a story about a brave black man who arrived in my little Southern town in those days and became a hero of white people no one could, or at least should, believe it.
     When I write a story about ‘Now,' it has to reflect ‘Now.'
     Here's hoping I get it right.