Time After Time

Well, let's complete the setting trilogy of posts with a discussion of time. Specifically, how to provide the illusion of how time passes in the setting. We've already seen how location and character can set the scene, but to make a setting feel real, it has to have a sense of history to it. It doesn't have to be an in-depth timeline spanning thousands of years; nobody needs to know that, and nobody will care.

No, the key to giving a setting history is to make small notes to that effect in the story (or game). For example, my science fiction pulp adventure stories are, so far, set in the same setting: The far future, in our own solar system. So, how do we give that setting a sense of history? There's no need to go into long discourses about how the history happened, descriptions of how the spaceship engines work, or anything like that. Something simple, like a paragraph talking about the cities of Mars and how they're run down and slummy now instead of being the shining beacons they used to be. Or perhaps a brief bit of news on a broadcast stating that people are protesting the upcoming celebration of the millennium since the original Moon landing. That certainly provides a sense of time passing, doesn't it?

The key to making it work is to keep it subtle. If you're outlining the story, give yourself a few brief notes to give your setting a sense of history. A few names and dates that you can drop in at any point in the story will do nicely. If you're pantsing it, instead, then you can throw in any details you want that give the story that sense of depth that you're looking for, and as long as you go back after you're done to make sure the details match up with each other, you can leave the illusion that you carefully developed the setting ahead of time. It's like magic!

If you're doing a one-shot story, then the historical details can be literally anything you want. If you're writing a series of short stories, whether for an anthology or over time, you do need to at least keep track of what you put in before so you don't drop an egregious contradiction in the fourth story of a series. Establishing in your first story that the Galactic Empire was founded in the year 3125 is great, but if you set the sixth story in 2952, you'd better not put a mention of the Galactic Empire in there. Even if you don't notice it, your readers will.

The most important thing is not to throw them in the readers' faces. Let's face it: People today don't walk around discussing historical details very often, unless they're students at a university or something like that. For the most part, we just assume that we all know the general history; everyone knows that World War II happened, even if they can't always tell you what years saw fighting. Or, everyone remembers where they were on 9/11, but people don't bring it up all the time. Likewise, when writing a story, write the historical details as if people are familiar with them, even if you're making them up. It gives the story a better sense of realism, even if the reader can't quite put all the pieces together. Eventually, they'll get enough of a picture to understand what the background is.