: Re: What can I do to make my writing fit the 1950s? I'm working on a project (for a game) that needs to have a strongly 1950s feel. I, however, was born in the 1980s, so my writing has plenty

@Radia543

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For an instructive comparison, look at Stephen King's description of the 1950s in his book 11/22/63, about a man who goes back from modern times to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination, but has to enter the era in 1958 and wait five years. King goes to great pains to describe differences between the present times and that era: it's about the way a root beer tastes, the stiff feel of new blue jeans, the smell of cars without catalytic converters.

The differences may seem small, but they are striking, and they will be striking to modern readers. That said, nobody who was alive during the 1950s (or any other historical period) would be likely to remark on what to them would seem commonplace. Root beer tastes like root beer. New jeans feel like new jeans. Characters in your tale will not have the benefit of your own hindsight. Still, you're writing for modern readers, and unless you are talking about the unlikely situation King writes about, you're going to have to do something different.

Part of what makes great historical fiction is not the attention to detail, but in the writer's ability to identify and illuminate the characters' attitudes towards the details of their existence. You can't really have a character think, for example, how odd it is to sit in the front seat of a car going 70 miles an hour while not wearing a seat belt, but you can tell how such an activity might make a character nervous. (I myself am old enough to remember feeling very vulnerable in such situations.) Or you might not want to describe a DA haircut or a poodle skirt out of the blue, but you could definitely describe a character's reaction to those (which would give you an organic entrée into describing them). Even unremarkable things can play to someone's world view: who did this character think he was, to wear a hoodlum haircut like that?

Above all, read items from the period. Novels, sure, but get hold of some newspapers and read them cover to cover. Look at the ads. See what people in the pictures seem to be thinking. A picture can tell you a lot about someone's attitudes, while displaying artifacts that might be usable in your fiction.

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