Change the Time Period of the Story?

[Wiglaf]

A friend and I discussed a half finished story, and my friend suggested that it would be a great story if I changed the time period to modern times from neolithic.

1. Does the setting time wise really affect people's enjoyment the story?
2. Are there any time periods that seem to be preferable to most readers? (This would include made up time schemes such as steampunk.)
3. Currently, the main character is a pot-bellied land-owner with a uni-brow (it is the height of manliness in his society) living in the late neolithic/early bronze age who decides to procure a ship and sell his and his neighbors goods down river where it is more profitable. They would then split the proceeds. Things go bad and he now faces enslavement to pay for the resulting debt. He needs to be on the ship alone with his family. Would this work, with adjustments, in say a steampunk or modern setting?

 

[Ryan Mueller]

That's kind of a weird suggestion. I'd say you should write it however it feels most natural. I could see it working in a steampunk setting (with the whole ship thing going on). But you're the writer. Put it in the era you want. Or make up an era all of your own.

You could even put it in the future if you wanted.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The most important thing to consider is what you would gain by changing the time period.

The reader's enjoyment would not just depend on the time period, but how well the story fits into the time period. You would have to rewrite history to make that story fit into a steampunk or a modern setting, or create an alternate world, just to allow for the part about enslavement for debt. Perhaps it would be worth the work; perhaps not. It's hard to tell from the little information you have given us. But the plot of any book should be inextricably linked to the setting. Otherwise, you have a stage set and costumes -- not as it should be: an environment where your characters live their lives even when they are not before the reader's eye.

Say you wanted to make the story steampunk. Readers of steampunk want more than the trappings of the era, they want to see the bizarre machines , and they want the machines to be an integral part of the story.

So how would switching eras for your particular story provide readers with something they are looking for? If the answer is that there is little or nothing, then I don't see the point.

 

[The Judge]

I. For me, it can do eg if it's set in an historical period I know a bit about and the clothes, food, mores and beliefs are all wrong. It's particularly grating when the writer has just taken modern people, invariably tolerant humanists with correct views on feminism and racial harmony, and plonked them down in a world where such people would not have existed. As to which, have you researched neolithic/bronze age society and how it works, its likely religious beliefs and ceremonies, its clothing and food and ships, including navigation, ship-building and the rest of it?

2. No idea, but much fantasy is set in a kind of quasi-medieval period, which may well be because of reader interest. Or writer laziness, I suppose.

3. I'm not sure it would work in a modern Western setting, since we don't have acknowledged slavery here, and you'd need to do a lot of research on the reality of slave labour in order not to trivialise an horrendous problem which still exists. I can certainly see it working in a steampunk setting, but as Teresa says, you'd have to bring in all the other tropes which lovers of steampunk enjoy, and that would have to be an integral part of the plot.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

There is slavery in UK, but subtle. Tied passports for foreign servants is one.

The time period is really irrelevant. The story is the thing. Characters, places, events, plots, narrative, descriptions, dialogues.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

For me, time period does tend to affect enjoyment. I don't, for instance, like tudor/elizabethan stuff (I'm not a big fan of historical.) So, if it became very clearly one or other time period then it would affect me.

But, also, I'm not sure about the general idea that a story can just be changed in time. To me, the feel of the whole thing would change. So, I'm not sure it's about asking if changing the time would work, but changing the whole thing. Because, you know, butterfly wings and all that - I'm fairly sure by page six something entirely new would be emerging for me.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

What genre is your story? Changing characters from one time period to another is not easy because they are formed by the time period they are in.