One of the weird things about books is how they get dated to an era. Imagine, you innocently, and without much thought, use a word in your book, and without realising it you have dated your book to a specific era. I made this mistake in Hordes, when I made my characters watch a video tape. Yep, you got it, a video tape, which is something a lot of kids have never even heard about. Fortunately, I could rectify that mistake by a bit of editing and uploading new versions to the online sales stores, but it’s not always that easy. Stephen King, for example, had characters using what was obviously a landline telephone. Even JK Rowling had a landline telephone in the Dursley’s house to which poor Ronald Weasly made a bit of a messy call, and that scene would be almost impossible to rewrite to get rid of the telephone and pull the book out of that forgotten era. I don’t think it’s quite possible to get rid of that problem. How many books have been written about cars, and the fact that they need petrol? Sometimes, of course, these things can be used to great effect, such as when you want to set your book in an era, and you don’t have cars, but horse drawn carriages instead. That makes it a bit easier, but it does add the danger that you could accidentally add in things from a wrong, much later, era. Imagine, your 1915 character setting the alarm on his wristwatch. And this, really, is just another thing that I will have to add to my list of things to check next time I’m editing one of my manuscripts.
Imagine, you innocently, and without much thought, use a word in your book, and without realising it you have dated your book to a specific era. I made this mistake in Hordes, when I made my characters watch a video tape.
Yep, you got it, a video tape, which is something a lot of kids have never even heard about. Fortunately, I could rectify that mistake by a bit of editing and uploading new versions to the online sales stores, but it’s not always that easy. Stephen King, for example, had characters using what was obviously a landline telephone. Even JK Rowling had a landline telephone in the Dursley’s house to which poor Ronald Weasly made a bit of a messy call, and that scene would be almost impossible to rewrite to get rid of the telephone and pull the book out of that forgotten era.
I don’t think it’s quite possible to get rid of that problem. How many books have been written about cars, and the fact that they need petrol?
Sometimes, of course, these things can be used to great effect, such as when you want to set your book in an era, and you don’t have cars, but horse drawn carriages instead. That makes it a bit easier, but it does add the danger that you could accidentally add in things from a wrong, much later, era. Imagine, your 1915 character setting the alarm on his wristwatch.
And this, really, is just another thing that I will have to add to my list of things to check next time I’m editing one of my manuscripts.