Setting the Era, time, age, whatever you want to call it, in fantasy worlds.

[Philosopher]

So my book is set in a fantasy world, name undecided, but it's certainly not historically accurate. It's like ancient earth, but just not set in a specific time period, nor is it realistic, but when were wizards ever considered to be realistic, or documented in history, if you catch my drift.

One of the main criticisms I get is that people are unsure of the time in which the book is set.

One person's example was that they didn't feel that a boar hunt, and a pub / Inn went together in the same time period. Now, I do believe that boar have been hunted throughout history, and that there would have been Inns at the same time as boar hunts. But the problem still remains, they were, for one reason or another, unsure of the time period the book was set. I need to eradicate that problem.

Just wondering how you establish the time period / age / era, early in the piece? so that people are comfortable using their imagination however they wish, regarding that time, so to speak.

Especially if it's in a non historically accurate novel, where really the time could be anything and what happened during that imaginary time could also be anything. I hope this question makes sense.

thank you in advance.

 

[allmywires]

I don't really. I have trains and electricity as well as horse-and-carts and religious crusades. Now, nobody's read this new WIP yet so I can't say if I'm making a success of it. I think lots of people want fantasy to be 'historically' accurate, or what they percieve to be historically accurate, so you're very much going against the grain if you decide to do awya with that. But the thing is, as long as you don't have your characters using smartphones in feudal Japan (an exaggeration I know...) I think it will end up OK. You have to consider, if you're mixing time periods, why have certain things come about earlier/later than they did in our human history? I mean, if you think about it now, the Western world could not be more different than, say, sub-Saharan Africa. People and civilisations exist on different levels of technology. It's just finding a reason why they've developed steam trains and automotives and the other civs haven't.

Hope that helps, sorry it's a bit ramble-y.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I'm moving the thread to General Writing Discussion, since it isn't really a Workshop thread. The Workshop is basically meant to be a home for writing exercises and the like.

 

[Gumboot]

Establishing the "era" is meaningless if the world bears no resemblance to earth history, because the "eras" people are familiar with are specific to our planet and society's history.

I would say that as long as you don't have technological or social disparity (i.e. contradictory elements existing side by side such as motor cars for transport but horses still used to pull ploughs) you're fine.

 

[Brian G Turner]

The issue is really one of maintaining believability, but different stories are written for different markets.

If you're writing for the YA market, a world full of magic and a vague sense of The Olde Worlde should work fine.

If you're looking to write for adults implicitly, you may need to ensure a degree of research to help with suspension of disbelief.

I think some writers far too easily forget that Tolkien was utterly immersed in early Germanic mythology and culture, and that his aim was, at least in part, to write a modern re-invention. IMO it wasn't intended to be fantastical simply for the sake of being fantastical.

It's also worth pointing out that different readers have different tastes - who are you writing for?

 

[JoanDrake]

I think Chris Stevens had cellphones powered by Natural Gas in the late 19thc, but it was a parody.

I also heard of a book called "Queen Victoria's Bomb" about nuclear weapons in the Crimean War. It was perfectly serious. I never had a chance to read it but, hey, Einstein derived his field equations from Planck and Planck took a lot of his quantum theory from Faraday, so who's to say if Faraday hadn't been shut out of studying higher math by Lord Kelvin....

If you can make it believable, the Romans can have spaceships

 

[AMB]

I would say that as long as you don't have technological or social disparity (i.e. contradictory elements existing side by side such as motor cars for transport but horses still used to pull ploughs) you're fine.

People still use work horses for ploughs. Wouldn't have a category for them in ploughing contests otherwise. Certainly not the norm though.

I would say that if you are going for boar hunting then you don't necessarily want to use the word pub. Public Houses are Victorian and the boar hunt isn't really associated so much with that time, but inns and taverns will work. Of course you don't need to avoid it, as you are right that boar hunting has gone on throughout history, and such distinctions don't really don't matter if they aren't tied to Earth history.

If you don't do world building, that is fine. Still, perhaps you might want to sit and think for a minute about the rough shape of the world you are creating and how things fit. This works with Gumboot's point, but not just with technology, but customs and community (including social/drinking establishments, religion etc). If it feels like it has cohesion, you are good to go. If not, figure out what doesn't fit and either alter it until it does or scrap it.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

HMM mine is roughly contemporary First chapter:

Main character is studying quantum physics and has a laptop. He also wears jeans and I have tried to make the language roughly contemporary.

I used Sherlock Holmes which is a banned text that came from the barbaric old world to establish it was not on Earth. But it also established the connection with Earth. My MC describes his father's medieval regalia as something out of the history books. He also mentions all history books were burned by his grandfather.

His father uses a mobile phone and the servant behaves in an almost Victorian manner towards the king.

Next chapter I discuss the crystal sphere/dome that surrounds the planet which prevents air and space travel - also the special ore that supplies them with electricity.

The chapter after that introduces the idea that there was a time without death on planet so explaining a reduced amount of hydrocarbons.

***

My Urban Fantasy is set in the 1980s and it is in Blackpool so that was easier to do. I used things like £1 notes, The current Dr Who is Peter Davidson etc

 

[Philosopher]

Some really nice points here, thank you.

I think I need to read a little about world building because I have a feeling I'm half world building and half relying on the readers conceptions of ancient earth, or their vague imaginations on it anyway.

I'm also not very sure who I'm writing for yet, when I read it I'd say it's pretty much YA fantasy fiction, but hopefully with a bit more meaning and depth than some YA

Do you guys prefer to define your audience before writing, or do you also write and then see who it appeals to afterwards?