/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20216721]

I avoid any reference to modern technology when I write, my novels are either situated within the 19th century, or I avoid any mention of technology, making my character evolve in a blurry and unknown timeline.
I just feel like my novels would become lame if my characters were to receive a text, or an email.
Am I a contrarian faggot? I tried to think about why I do this, and many responses come to mind
Firstly, I do not want to be associated with contemporary writings.
Then, I want my novels to remain relevant, emails and text messages are probably going to be considered silly in a few decades, just like pagers or faxes are now.
Lastly, I write characters that suffer, and I feel like modernity erases a lot of suffering, at least physical suffering, and it makes for an uninteresting book. I want not to abandon the principle of struggle in my novels.

What do you think, do you do this too, and why?

[Anonymous No.20216725]

>>20216721
>Then, I want my novels to remain relevant, emails and text messages are probably going to be considered silly in a few decades, just like pagers or faxes are now.
are horse-drawn carriages or daguerreotypes silly

[Anonymous No.20216727]

ya youre a huge deceitful posturing faggot

[Anonymous No.20216754]

I feel the exact same way. Would be disgusting to pollute a novel with modern technology.

[Anonymous No.20216764]

>>20216721
I don't really think there's anything wrong with your views per se. If that's how you feel then that's how you feel. All the more power to you, keep on writing.

[Anonymous No.20216770]

Alternative: use long-term well ingrained technology, but not tech which is newer to your time period. In 1909 you would have run into the same problem if you referenced automobiles or telephones excessively, but by 1929 they were so commonplace it became a non-issue.
In modern times I would hesitate to mention more cutting edge tech than the average cell phone unless the story calls for it. No sense in writing about the protagonist answering all their questions with an internet search. In a similar fashion, mentioning things like social media adds another layer complex (and offstage) social interaction.
Things which do not serve the story are much easier to justify leaving out

[Anonymous No.20216775]

>>20216770
>No sense in writing about the protagonist answering all their questions with an internet search.
This is probably going to have the most longevity out of anything though

[Anonymous No.20216795]

>>20216775
Maybe, but it makes for an awful short and uninteresting story.

[Anonymous No.20216804]

>>20216795
Houellebecq pulls it all off quite naturally. The internet creates its own phenomena and avenues

[Anonymous No.20216810]

>>20216725
Yes.

[Anonymous No.20216818]

>>20216721
Nothing wrong with that. Characters having smartphones for example would make certain plots impossible.

[Anonymous No.20217037]

>>20216721
>Then, I want my novels to remain relevant, emails and text messages are probably going to be considered silly in a few decades, just like pagers or faxes are now.
Except if you left your house you'd realize many businesses still use fax, especially true for many countries like Japan.

[Anonymous No.20217049]

>>20216721
same. I want my stories to be more or less timeless.

[Anonymous No.20217128]

>>20216721
your """""""""""""""""""novel""""""""""""

[Anonymous No.20217653]

>>20216721
Read Gracq's The Opposing Shore, does something similar

[Anonymous No.20217663]

My play has a Victorian pastoral setting. No romance killing technology is mentioned, but I do include words like simp, based, chud and roastie.

[Anonymous No.20217838]

>>20216721
This is fair anon. Something Ben Jeffrey wrote about the problem novels face in depicting life in the information age:

>A massive proportion of Western art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is a reaction to the feeling of overload. But for literature the issue isn’t simply one of scale, as though in principle, and with enough imagination and effort, one could amass a large enough quantity of information plus character and put it all inside one long book. It is also a matter of fit. In some plain respects novels just seem like the wrong way to depict life in the information age. A linear narrative without explicit audio/visual accompaniment doesn’t rest easily in the job of conveying a time and place animated by flickering bangs and whizzes. It not just the problem already sketched, i.e. the need to compete with all sorts of other, extremely colourful, forms of entertainment for an audience with less attention to give or the desire to give it. It is that literature aiming to be ‘realistic’ would have to depict all the up-to-the-minute parts of the twenty-first century which make it difficult for novels to be that. As though the timely, twenty-first century novel would have to somehow internalise those elements that make novels seem irrelevant and out of step – that is, represent (in a novel) a form of life that novels do not seem to be representative of; like pushing square pegs against round holes. What would a long story be like where the hero worked all day and then spent all his spare time on the internet? Possibly very interesting, but also hard to imagine; as a rule of thumb, novels struggle to capture information-age paraphernalia, and very often seem wooden when they try.

I unironically think alt lit guys like Tao Lin did a really good job using the novel to depict life in the information age, but that's mostly due to the idiosyncratic hyperminimalist style they were writing in. Obviously not everyone wants to/should write like that, and it creates its own set of limitations. So I'm curious to see how other authors moving forward will address the difficulty that literature as a medium has in dealing with life in the 21st century. Maybe they never will as it seems like an artform that's destined for irrelevance.

[Anonymous No.20217854]

>>20216721
You shouldn't be afraid to work in modern technology. The way authors mess up is when they introduce tech in a way that reveals how much of a boomer they are.
>"Haley texted back,"omg ttyl Ig2g." she snapped her phone shut and shoved it into her pussy."
If you set your writing in a time before phones, then it's fine.

[Anonymous No.20217894]

>>20217854
I don't read much (especially contemporary) fiction but I'd be interested to learn more about how good authors are incorporating texting into their writing. Obviously you could just use old school vanilla dialogue:

>"are you coming tonight?" he texted.
>"ya" she replied.

But I feel like there must be a cooler way, seeing as texting is all writing. Say what you will about his novels, but Tao Lin did a really good job at capturing these exchanges in a way that felt convincing. I feel like filmmakers also had this problem for a long time, and I remember how mindblowing David Fincher's depiction of texting in the pilot of House of Cards was at the time. It's cool to see how film has since adapted to today's technology but I haven't read enough contemporary lit to know how prose is dealing with it.