How to establish the story takes place 15 years ago

I don't know what the SuperMoon is, but I did want to share an idea I had about revealing the year.

The news report can be utilized even better than what you've got. Instead of the weather, why not let them talk about an actual news story that was big in 2005? Something political, or a natural disaster. Later on, you could throw in a song on the radio, something that hit the top charts in 2005. A piece of celebrity news would be good, too. Or a reference to a movie that came out in 2005, or a TV show that was big. You might be able to get away with never mentioning the year at all with some hints from pop culture.

An easy method is to put the year in the chapter title.

A lot was going in in 2005 with Bush's reelection. There could be a comment about that.

But I would also note that critique groups are reading a chapter or so at a time. I said thanks and took the feedback with a grain of salt when it involved them not understanding something they would understand if they read the novel and not just a chapter.

In my case it was tricky because I have a very complex setting with my character growing up in a village that has scientific knowledge but has had to do without much in the way of technology. The critique readers had all kinds of preconceived ideas about my character because they applied what they thought a hunter-gather group would be like. They also had some ideas that such a group would innovate faster than I had written them as innovating. But the critique group had some unrealistic ideas about what you could develop from scratch in an unfamiliar wilderness where you were also in hiding.

But their feedback was useful when I put it into perspective, I knew I'd have a hurdle to get over making sure readers did find the story credible. Bottom line, I took the concepts from the critique group but not the specifics.

I'm going to agree with MaeZe - for now - why not just put the date at the beginning of the chapter. Maybe just italicized before the reader starts. You could always tweak it later if it wasn't working, but this way the year would be obvious right away!

Night_Writer said:

The news report can be utilized even better than what you've got. Instead of the weather, why not let them talk about an actual news story that was big in 2005? Something political, or a natural disaster. Later on, you could throw in a song on the radio, something that hit the top charts in 2005. A piece of celebrity news would be good, too. Or a reference to a movie that came out in 2005, or a TV show that was big. You might be able to get away with never mentioning the year at all with some hints from pop culture.

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Personally, I wouldn't do this. I note that this is in the "writing for kids" section, so the audience for this book was either not born in 2005...or they were babies. They might not be familiar with the pop culture or news stories of the time.

I think it is better to be obvious about it. Your solution with mentioning the date in the news broadcast is okay, I think, or just putting the date at the beginning of the chapter is fine, too. I've seen that done.

I write MG magical realism geared for 8 - 12 yearolds with exactly that age of MC and my first book was 87K. The one that came out last month was around 65K.

Who is the person telling you that 55K is too long?

I don't write MG, but from what I've read, your 55k word count should be fine. But listen to Toothpaste, because she knows better than I do.

http://literaticat.blogspot.ca/2011/05/wordcount-dracula.html

More for curiosity than anything else - is a cell phone the only reason you want the novel to be set in 2005, or are there other reasons? I'm not sure if you want to go the traditional publishing route, but lot of agents tend to shy away from things that are written in the not-so-distant past. If the cell is the main issue, there could be financial restraints that prevent the main character from having a cell phone. This is the case in The Raven Cycle, by Maggie Stiefvater. If not, she could just be notoriously bad at carrying it, or she could have broken it, or her parents decided that she's too young for a phone.

Not sure if this is helpful, but just throwing out some alternatives!

I should have commented on this as well like s_nov and not just on the last part of your post, I'm sorry. My latest book is technically set now (it's Magical Realist as you know so it's sort of not addressed that much), and neither of the kids have cell phones. One kid is living as a ward of the state and simply has no means to afford such a thing nor anyone to call with it. And the other is a bit old fashioned and comes from a family that isn't particularly into tech (he does have a computer). Also 12 year olds don't all have cell phones. I think it's really by high school that it become more ubiquitous. Lots of parents don't want their kids with cell phones until they are bit older for fears about safety etc. There are also economic factors, not every family can afford to give a kid their own 500$ tech toy. And I know of some companies that have phones for kids where essentially the parents program the numbers in so the kid can use it for emergencies and that's it.

Basically I agree with s_nov in that there are many reasons why a kid might not own one. And if there is no other reason to set the story in the past I wouldn't recommend it either.

Count me as another person who thinks that if the only reason for setting the story twelve years in the past is "Why doesn't the MC have a cell phone?", you're better off setting it in the present and finding a different reason for the MC not to have one (Toothpaste's made some good suggestions for that).

For that matter (I haven't read your story, so I don't know how a cell phone would have solved the problems of your MC too easily), even if the MC had a cell phone, might she just not think of using it, or choose not to use it for some reason, something to do with her weaknesses or internal conflicts?

Cindy From Oregon said:

I honestly couldn't tell you who told me 55k was too long, but it must have been someone I had faith in because I sat right down and spent 3 days cutting my darling in half. It's okay, though, because I still have the 55k version, it just needs to be polished.

The reason she has no cell phone is because she needs to be incommunicado, but at the crucial moment she has to be able to hear a message that her best friend made for her. The only way I could figure to do that, was to ignore the cell phone issue and give her an mp3 player. My crit partners maintain that every kid has a cell phone, and today's kids won't have any idea what an mp3 player is. I attempted to solve that by jumping back a few years.

Also, my 12-year-old female MC has a crazy amount of freedom, by today's standards (nothing that extreme, she just goes to the post office and the library, and gets into some amazing adventures while she's coming and going) and again I thought I could buy some extra freedom for her by having the story take place a while ago.

Thanks for all the comments! I might ignore the cell phone issue, have it in present day, and go back to my long version. After all, I'm pretty sure this isn't the last version I'm going to write...

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I think you're WAY overcomplicating things. Setting it back not far is making trouble for yourself. It's not far enough that it's interesting (stuff isn't different); and yet your audience wasn't even born, so it's just kind of odd.

Just don't give her a cell, or give her the most basic emergency cell, and, as her friends would know she doesn't have one they can contact her own, have her friend leave the message on her home answering machine, another friend's cell, in an passworded youtube, anything.

Going to the post office and library doesn't sound like anything but normal for a 12-year-old to me, and the whole 'kids used to roam around all day until dark' vs. today's helicopter parents was not ANY different ten years ago. Thirty or so maybe but 10? Not even close.

Cindy From Oregon said:

I honestly couldn't tell you who told me 55k was too long, but it must have been someone I had faith in because I sat right down and spent 3 days cutting my darling in half. It's okay, though, because I still have the 55k version, it just needs to be polished.

The reason she has no cell phone is because she needs to be incommunicado, but at the crucial moment she has to be able to hear a message that her best friend made for her. The only way I could figure to do that, was to ignore the cell phone issue and give her an mp3 player. My crit partners maintain that every kid has a cell phone, and today's kids won't have any idea what an mp3 player is. I attempted to solve that by jumping back a few years.

Also, my 12-year-old female MC has a crazy amount of freedom, by today's standards (nothing that extreme, she just goes to the post office and the library, and gets into some amazing adventures while she's coming and going) and again I thought I could buy some extra freedom for her by having the story take place a while ago.

Thanks for all the comments! I might ignore the cell phone issue, have it in present day, and go back to my long version. After all, I'm pretty sure this isn't the last version I'm going to write...

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Helicopter parenting was well in place by the Early 2000s. I know this because my contemporaries were having their kids in the 90s and early 2000s, and I was floored at how things had changed, with parents' lives revolving around driving their kids everywhere and most activities being very organized and chaperoned. My friends with kids were constantly worried about the barrage of "alerts" received from their local school about "suspicious vans," or about the latest amber alert re a missing kid, and they didn't let their kids out of their sight until they were in high school. It's been a thing since little lost kids first started appearing on milk cartons back in the 80s.

However, I notice that the middle school and older grade school kids, at least, often walk to school alone or in groups in the neighborhood I live in now, which are set up with smaller schools that are walk able within the neighborhood. It's really different from where my brother lives (a gated community where nothing is within walking distance, even for adults). And the youth sports are lower key here too--taking place at the local schools and parks instead of at those mega sports complexes you see in ritzier neighborhoods.

If your story takes place in a small town, and the girl's family isn't prosperous, you could probably justify her having a fair amount of freedom, even coming home to an empty house, by the time she's 11-12. Latchkey kids still exist, even if people are more surreptitious than they once were about it. And not having a phone, or maybe only having a very rudimentary one that isn't too reliable, could be plausible too for monetary reasons. And when you're out in the sticks, coverage can still be really spotty, and not all providers are equal. Also, ipods have been around for a while, and some people still seem to have them, even if mp3 players aren't common anymore.

The thing about phones is they can be out of coverage, drop calls, have dead batteries (when phones get old, their batteries tend to hold less and less charge) or do any of a thousand other things to interfere with someone quickly or reliably placing a call or getting on the internet or snapping a picture or whatever when they wake the phone up.

Conversely, you could set your story a much longer time ago--the 70s or 80s maybe--and even have it be rather historical in flavor. This would require more research, but instead of an mp3, the kid could get a recording via cassette tape.

I agree with others who commented that readers who get just a chapter or two at a time often have a harder time getting a real sense for the setting or with being caught up in the story in the same way they would be if they read the whole thing at their own pace. So they tend to be nit picker or to overestimate suspension of disbelief problems.

Or if it's in a city, certainly. Twelve-year-olds roam the streets, run errands, take public transit, etc., on their own. Most have been doing most of those things for a while.

cornflake said:

Or if it's in a city, certainly. Twelve-year-olds roam the streets, run errands, take public transit, etc., on their own. Most have been doing most of those things for a while.

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Yeah, I suspect the places where kids are most cloistered, so to speak, are the upper-middle-class suburban enclaves that are planned around the automobile, so kids couldn't walk, take public transit, or ride their bikes places if their parents wanted them to.

Though some of my friends live in Davis, a rather safe and very bike-friendly college town, and they were still petrified of someone snatching their kids and of their kids falling in with the wrong crowd if they didn't watch them every moment.

Roxxsmom said:

Yeah, I suspect the places where kids are most cloistered, so to speak, are the upper-middle-class suburban enclaves that are planned around the automobile, so kids couldn't walk, take public transit, or ride their bikes places if their parents wanted them to.

Though some of my friends live in Davis, a rather safe and very bike-friendly college town, and they were still petrified of someone snatching their kids and of their kids falling in with the wrong crowd if they didn't watch them every moment.

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Totally agree.

Someone I know was trying to arrange working with a couple of I think 14-yr-old kids on a team for some extra practice. Called the parent of the one who lived in the city and asked if such and such would be a good time. Parent was all 'how would I know? Here's kid's number, ask the kid. I don't make her schedule.' Called the parent of the other kid, who lived in the suburbs and got, basically, 'hold on, let me check the calendar, yada yada, ok, we'll be there, what does she need to have with her... ' Kids were the same age, doing the same thing. Obviously different parents, and who knows what accounts for what, but in my experience, the city/burb thing is right there. The suburban parents are used to arranging things because they have to drive, and that seems to bleed into everything else, like making sure all the stuff is there, just doing stuff for the kids as when they were small, long past when they're able to do it for themselves.

A bit ago I was checking out next to a kid probably 9 or 10, in the market, who asked the cashier if he could have an extra bag to cover the end of his baguette, as it was pouring out and the bread was sticking out of the bag she'd given him. It was near 7pm, he was buying the bread and something else I don't remember -- kind of clearly was sent out to fetch a couple things to complete dinner, because it's easier to send the kid while you finish cooking. He was savvy enough to think of the extra bag and ask for it, so it wasn't like the first time he'd been sent to the market, and no one noticed him much, except a woman showed him how to tie it shut around the bread and told him it was good thinking.

The cell phone alone isn't good enough as a reason. I have a novel set in 2003 because that was when I revised it before this last revision, but the story couldn't happen today. It involves an untreatable cancer that is likely to be cured today. Cell phones and the computer use of today among (suburban middle class) kids would change the relationships between the characters, parents and kids alike.

I never spell out the year though, but it can be figured out. One person mentions something that happened in the past and the main character is like, "But that was five years ago." I do mention specific events a savvy kid could Google if they cared to, like SpongeBob and SNL on TV as well as Derick Jeter joining the Yankees. Use your details.

2005 had some events everyone was talking about. Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Be aware that your story is set in a place in a time. I reference 9/11/01 in mine because it occurs in suburbs of NYC. Even two years later in the right context it would come up. My point is the year is part of the setting and the setting impacts the characters and effects the story. Before you decide when to set it, look at what that impact will be fully.

I'd definitely push it back a little if you want the freedom-to-roam thing. I was 9 in 2005 and not allowed to go ANYWHERE alone. Neither were any of my friends.
Also, I thought of referencing Hurricane Katrina, too if you're still going to do 2005. Or maybe a movie that came out that year. I went to see HP and the Goblet of Fire, the first Narnia film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Madagascar, etc. Every kid these days has seen those films...but they probably know they came out before they were born.