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Dated vs. Timeless Classic

by vectormatrix
Posted to Craft, Style and Voice on Thu Dec 25, 2003 at 02:29:12 PM PST
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I'm currently writing a story that made use of a pop culture reference (Seinfeld). The story is quite serious and this is the only references I made to pop culture which caused me to realize that it wasn't really needed at all. Perhaps if I were writing a light hearted story about modern life, with snappy dialogue and societal observations, then a pop reference would have made sense.

It is often said that, the best stories are those that retain a timeless quality, they aren't defined by the era they were written in. (even though period affects the sensibilities of the writer and their style) Not many of us will join the ranks of Wells, Twain or Dickens. And even thought it's easier to allow modern culture to slip into our writing, perhaps we can achieve our best when we hold ourselves to a higher standard as if we expect our work to be read by many generations to come.


While reading a Harry Potter book I was surprised to discover a reference to the `Playstation' video console. It was just a throw-a-way line, but it still caught me off guard. I had always considered Harry Potter to be a series of books with the potential to be a timeless classic. The fictional term, Muggles, coined by author J. K. Rowling, has even been added to the Oxford English dictionary, and I don't think they are over-estimating the cultural impact of Rowling's work. Yet I can't help but feel as if Rowling damaged the legacy of her work with that casual reference. Then again, perhaps I am underestimating the cultural impact of Sony's PlayStation platform. I remember an amusing commercial that predicted things to come for PlayStation version ten, a hyper-realistic virtually reality machine interfaced with the human brain. Perhaps, Playstation will remain apart of our lives similar to how Sony's other popular brand, Walkman, has remained a part of our nomenclature after so many years.

Does anyone have a rule or guideline they use for deciding what kind of modern references to use when working on an ambitious writing project?

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Dated vs. Timeless Classic | 5 comments (4 topical, 0 hidden)
Ageless or Timeless (5.00/1) (#4)
by pkej on Fri Apr 16, 2004 at 02:39:40 PM PST
Dickens' "A Tale of two Cities" is timeless, it has themes and characters which we can identify with, even now, some 140-50 years after it was written. The same can be said of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" and Tolstoy's "War and Peace". All those works are, however, easily "tainted" by the age they were written in, all of them are actually placed within historic and momentous events of that age. But does that detract from them? There were, at least in "War and Peace" several references to equipment and clothing which are totally outdated today, but the prose flows so well that even though you don't know what exactly a thing is, you can deduce it from the text.

The same is true of stories written today, we can't distance ourselves from our own time and our own ideas about the world. Witness William Gibson's "Neuromancer", some of its concepts seem pretty dated (the net as pictured by Gibson), but for its time it seemed modern, but that doesn't make the story less enjoyable. The same can be said of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", its "Metaverse" was groundbreaking back then, and the phrase stuck, but the metaverse was pretty unimaginiative as opposed to what'll be.

Those two stories show that we are coloured by our own age.

Bringing in the latest and greatest techonology into stories is natural. If you write of someone living today, use current events, use the things you know. Don't try to place your characters in an indetermined age. You won't be able to do that. Keep the themes and characters timeless, let their stories reflect something which is true about humanity, regardless of which age we live in.

We can recognize ourselves in literature which is thousands of years old, even though their lives were totally different and the stories reflect that.

Think of how exciting it will be to read the best literature of our age a thousand years from now? Someone is going to read about "Commodore 64" and "Atari" computers and wonder at how we could make do with such primitive ways of entertainment.

And yet, they'll still read books, and I hope that the works mentioned in the first paragraph will make it through to those readers. Though, from a story point of view it would be much more poetic if the future would be left to wonder what happened to those wonderful works which are so abundantly referenced in other works from our age, and yet those primary sources disappeared, leaving them to conjectures and wishful thinking...
--
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turn around,
cry and shout

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Dating (4.00/3) (#3)
by MrBucket on Fri Jan 09, 2004 at 01:07:22 PM PST
This is a great topic!

IMHO, any piece of writing is a product of the time it is written in -- that's pretty hard to get around. Even if you set it in some other time period, the period in which you live will color how you look at that other time and / or culture.

My guideline has always been to give loyalty to the story first, and not worry about dating the material. I had to make this decision early on in my first book, which is full of pop-culture references, because that's the kind of environment the characters existed in. Certainly, someone reading it some years down the road will see the material as dated and set in a certain time period, but that's the story I set out to tell. I could just as easily have surrounded them with the popular culture trappings of some other decade, or even century, but I chose not to. (But then I should mention, one of the major themes of the book was, in fact, the influence that the characters' culture had on their personalities. So YMMV.)

My feeling is that if you set out to write a piece of immortal literature that will be understood by generations down the road and put story considerations second, you've already lost to some degree. If you have something transient like a pop-culture reference in your work, look at it and decide if it really belongs there. Does it help set the tone or the mood? Does it lend the story context? Do the characters mention it because it is important to them? If so, it should probably stay in, regardless of other considerations. If it's there because of laziness or doesn't really belong, then scrap it.

Additionally, it's probably nothing to worry about in a first draft scenario either -- when I write characters in a modern setting and get lazy or weary trying to get over a story hump, my dialogue will often descend into quotes from movies and pop-culture cliches. It all gets weeded out in the editing process later.
-------------------------
You're back into the bog.

"timeless" doesn't mean no dates (3.50/2) (#2)
by janra on Fri Dec 19, 2003 at 06:11:57 AM PST
As you mention, Dickens is a "timeless classic", but you can still tell what era it's set in. Since you can figure out what date it is in the HP series, I don't think a reference to a playstation is completely out of line -- it fits the era (and the character) and IIRC it's pretty clear that it's a "popular brand game console" from the context and the name of the machine. Even if 50 years down the road playstations are long gone kids will still be able to tell what it is. Now if she'd used "Nintendo", that name doesn't scream "game machine"...
--
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www (3.00/0) (#5)
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Dated vs. Timeless Classic | 5 comments (4 topical, 0 hidden)
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