How to Write a Timeless Book (Whatever That Means)
Listen to this episode of The First Draft Club:
Episode Transcript
Okay, I confess that the title of this episode is sort of tongue in cheek, because I find the idea of trying to write a timeless book to be a little silly. But it comes up a surprising amount and so I do actually want to entertain this question sincerely while also poking fun at it a little bit.
I think the better question (that is, a question better than how to write a timeless book) is how to write a book that doesn’t have a super short shelf life.
The most recent example from my life is Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar, a series that I read as a child and which I recently read aloud to my almost 7-year-old. Despite being written in the 70s for the most part, that series really holds up in my opinion.
So what about it makes it hold up?
In this episode, I’m going to talk about why timelessness doesn’t really make sense to me as a goal, why we can’t avoid our stories having timestamps, why we shouldn’t try to avoid our stories having timestamps, and why ironically, allowing them to have timestamps but being thoughtful about what those are can potentially extend the shelflife of the story.
First, the reason timelessness doesn’t make sense to me as a goal:
A few years ago I was in a Playwriting 101 class. It was literally called that. This was for beginners. I was a beginner, I assumed the people in the class were beginners.
On the first day of the first class, as the instructor was giving a lesson on dialogue and how we don’t say what we mean—which is really the most fundamental principle of writing good dialogue, whether it’s prose or drama—a woman raised her hand. I remember her very vividly because she was wearing a fedora… of course she was.
She interrupted the lecture to ask, “How do I write a play that’s timeless?”
First of all, this is one of my pet peeves, when someone interrupts a discussion to derail it with a completely irrelevant question. It’s not respectful of the person teaching or the people following the lesson.
But also, I suppressed a giggle, because we were still talking about how to understand the basic tenets of decent, believable dialogue. I wasn’t even close to ready to start thinking about timelessness, no more than I was ready to start shopping for my evening gown when I won my Tony award.
I don’t mean to be catty, I just mean that there are so many things we have to be thinking about as creative writers working on a first draft. It’s giving yourself way too much multitasking and avoidable mental work to think about step 200 when you’re still at step two.
But over the years as I went on to write and publish several novels and then started teaching people to write novels, I found that a version of this question IS on people‘s minds. Although more specifically, the way people usually ask it is to say, “How can I avoid dating my novel?”
And I have a very easy answer to this, which is that you can’t and shouldn’t try. For a number of reasons, but tech is a big one.
Technology moves way too fast, particularly over the last century, during which technologcal progress has been exponential, for us to write any story from the early 1900s to now that doesn’t inherently have a specific time stamp.
Are your people driving in car or flying in planes? What kind of cars? Is there TSA, and what does that look like, because pre-2001 and post-2001 look very different.
Most ubiquitously, are they texting? Are they answering a landline? Are they on social media, and what kind? Are their headphones corded?
You can try to make these choices generic in order to avoid your work having a particular period of about 3-4 years that it must fall into it, but because specifics are what make good writing (we have a whole lesson about this in the Book Incubator), doing so is to make your writing suffer, which is very much not worth it.
I think that when a new writer attempts to not give their book a timestamp, it leads to inferior writing, and the way that I will notice this is I will start to notice a lack of detail, tendency to over-generalize in their work. And when I ask about it, they say that they’re trying not to date their novel. This does the work a disservice.
In other words, details are GOOD, details are CRITICAL, and details date things. Slang, fashion, the kinds of specifics that you’re going to actively want to put into your writing because it’s what makes stories feel real are the kinds of details that are going to give away the exact time when it’s set.
Again, I mean a swing of about 3 to 4 years in any given direction. This of course excludes exceptional periods with major national or global events like war or a pandemic, in which case the range of the timestamp is going to be narrower.
But most importantly in this episode, I want to debunk the idea that this is a bad thing. Your goal is not to write a story that could be set in any time. No one is looking for that when they are looking for a good book.
Classic literature isn’t classic because you can’t tell if it happened in 1825 or 1940. It’s classic because it very clearly is set in 1825 or 1940. Do any of us read The Great Gatsby going, “I feel like that could have been in the ‘80s and that’s why I loved it!”
So my advice is to go to the other extreme. When I am working on a first draft, I am cognizant of PRECISELY the date the story is taking place, down to the month. It’s July 2019, or it’s November 1953. Now, usually I end up shifting these dates around through the process of writing and revising because of just the natural evolution of the project and sometimes because I will realize that certain large-scale events either get in the way of the story I’m telling or would serve the story I’m telling and so it makes sense to move it a few months or years.
For example, I was working on my second novel, Privilege, which is about a sexual assault on a college campus, as the #MeToo movement really took off. And so I had to make a choice: did I want to set it before, during, or after the movement.
I remember carefully weighing the pros and cons of each of those choices and how they would affect the narrative, because if I set it during the movement, it would have to become a part of the story. Would that assist me in exploring the big question my novel was orbiting, or would it distract? That was my subjective call as the author.
So if the key to writing a book with a decent shelf life is not avoiding timestamps, what is it? Why do Sideways Stories from Wayside School work 50 years later?
Don’t hate me for saying this—the sort of obvious and obnoxiously trite answer is to write a story that has universal human struggle at the heart of it. You know, that easy thing!
So there’s that. But to be more helpful, I think a potentially actionable rule of thumb is to be aware of slang, actions, and trends rooted in bias.
Because in spite of everything happening in the world right now, society DOES tend to progress in a more just direction. I believe that. Feel free to disagree but there’s a great deal of evidence that the arc of the universe does bend toward justice, even if it’s not as fast as we’d like for it to.
We realize that certain terms are not terms we should call people. We realize that certain rights are the kinds of rights that belong to all people. As this happens, viewpoints become outdated, and books that incorporate these outdated viewpoints in a way that seems to either celebrate them or fail to present them as a problem are going to feel as outdated as the viewpoints they contain.
I’m not saying that you need to pretend that a city in America in 1950 wasn’t overtly, legally racist. You don’t need to write Jim Crow laws out of your book and shouldn’t—see the first half of this episode about not avoiding timestamps.
But there’s a way to write in the racism that acknowledges it for what it is and there’s a way to write it in a way that a Jim Crow apologist might have in the ‘50s. Basically, I think this is a kind of challenge for your imagination, which of course is what writers do. Imagine the future world your book will exist in. Fifty years from now, are there parts of your story that a reader might look back at and go, yikes, that is not how we talk about or to people now. And if so, can you edit that passage so that what is bothering you about it is in the text or subtext?
But ultimately? I won’t be cheeky now, I’ll be sincere—I do think the way to write a story that has a long shelf life is to have an underlying big question that is thorny and human and ethical and emotional and touches on something resident across culture and time. This is why the big question is the first thing I teach in the book incubator.
So happy writing, don’t be shy about dating your stories, and I will see you next episode.
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