The Difficulty of Setting Stories in the Modern Age

What cell phones steal from our stories

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

In college, I took a creative writing class in which the teacher instructed us to read the novel Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley. It was one of the professor’s personal loves, so raising a couple of critiques of the book when it came discussion day wasn’t spectacularly well-received. The biggest complaint that I had pertained to the period in which the story was set. The characters, plot, and language of the story were of uniformly good quality, but where the book faltered for me was in the idea that it took place in the present day.

“Reading the first half of the book, I assumed it was set in a different generation. When cellphones seemed to suddenly appear in the final act, it caught me a little by surprise,” I explained.

She shot back with a reply so fiery that one might assume she was a devout Catholic and I’d just spent the last 30 minutes denouncing the good word of God. But a couple of my peers chimed in to save me from her sanctimonious rage.

“I was surprised when they introduced cell phones, too!” added one of the teacher’s prized students, a growing look of disgust spreading across the portly pedagogue’s face.

“I thought this book was set in the 70s…” a third student delicately admitted as they prepared to duck and cover.

For the remainder of the class, the fickle professor struggled to process the flaw her students had raised in her seemingly favorite story. I didn’t understand quite why that specific plot point in the book sat so strangely with me as a reader. But half a decade later, I think I’ve finally begun to.

To set any story, movie, or TV show in the modern age runs a certain risk. To craft something realistic that’s set in the present simply requires an omnipresence of technology and cell phones.

Before the 2010s, stories weren’t quite so hamstrung into bringing the digital world to life. But now, for a present-day story to feel authentic, it all but demands a pervasion of phones, vibrations, and social media apps that can be a challenge for creators to conscientiously depict.

The issue in Words in Deep Blue wasn’t that the portrayal of the modern age was wholly unconvincing. When phones emerged, they were used realistically. The issue was that full chapters of the book seemed to forget that cell phones existed entirely. And in the real world, we’ve reached a place where there’s just no longer any forgetting that fact. The inescapable prevalence of phones in our lives is more than an afterthought.

As an author, director, or producer, you can’t just dip your toes into a world where information hovers through the air around us; the only approach that feels believable is to dive head first into it. To do anything less and call it “the real world” misrepresents our present moment.

To properly render the modern teenager is to depict someone so umbilically attached to the device in their pocket that they can no longer escape it. In the accurately embodied story of the modern age, fewer and fewer segments of the story will take place in the physical world at all. No chapter will be devoid of the non-stop incursions of our digital world. Hardly a single scene should finish without a cell phone in sight.

Faced with the decision of bringing this eerie world to life, storytellers have largely divided themselves into two separate camps. There are those that try to make tangible out of the digital. The arcs of shows and movies are riddled with the blue bubbles of iMessages popping up on screens. Refreshing Instagram feeds are a part of the plot.

In this breed of contemporary storytelling, we’ll watch characters type their replies to their “DMs.” We’ll watch them interface with apps, overthink, and second guess themselves on the messages they send. And the audience will hear the abrasive little beeps and whooshes of messages received and delivered. Most of the time, it’s a device that comes across as lazy storytelling. Not because it’s unrealistic, but because there’s a mundanity to these digital lives we lead that don’t lend themselves to great stories. We’re less adventurous than we once were.

We have enough notifications in our own lives to want a reprieve when we read stories or go to the movies. We yearn for a world without so much stimuli and see something a little jarring when it worms its way into more and more forms of entertainment and escape. We don’t want to see characters trapped in the same patterns of overthought with which we’re already so familiar. We want to see them living their lives and dealing with stakes, not nursing dopamine addictions and wrestling with the urge to reply to texts.

The other camp of creators appears to have given an honest look at the modern age and decided that it’s off-limits. Tales of the past simply provide more space for the mind to wander. Setting a story within the 2000s or early 2010s leaves some remaining room still to seesaw between the digital world and the real one. But nearly all stories set beyond the turn of the last decade seem to enter into taboo territory.

Some shows, like Black Mirror, effectively lean into this challenge. Each episode is set in a disturbingly familiar world, and each plot of the anthology show goes to grating lengths to explore the philosophical implications of the emerging tools in our lives. It’s a show that’s too close-to-home for most to comfortably binge — and yet, along with Her and The Social Dilemma — it’s one of the only viewings that I consider mandatory for anyone struggling to grasp the times in which we’re living.

For a convincing tale of the 2020s to be told, there’s just no escaping our digital lives anymore. They permeate everything. Bringing the extent of it to life in any true-to-form way runs the risk of turning even comedies into something borderline dystopian.

More creative writers have found ways of skirting around the ubiquity of phones in even their most present-day portrayals. But more seem to struggle telling the story of these strange digital days. They’re a challenge to truly and fairly capture, and they’re more than I’ve managed to encompass in my own attempts at contemporary fiction.

There’s a primality to those problems in stories that can’t be solved with cell phones. There’s a sense of stakes that we often lose when each person has a phone in their pocket. So much of the excitement in any story lies in the escapism. We want to be transported elsewhere. But in so many ways, the technologies in our lives have frayed that portal. They stunt our creativity and curtail our very desire to imagine.

It isn’t just the real world that’s been toxified by technology. It’s the very movies we create, the TV shows we watch, and the novels we write. But in distant pasts and faraway futures, we find a greater opportunity for the mind to freely unfurl. We transcend the stifling shackles of a present to which few words can do justice.

Originally published on Medium