: Re: How can I convey something without going into details? I am considering writing a novel in which society has fallen into a perverse pit of debauchery. This is necessary to the novel, but it

@Holmes449

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I'll toss out a few improvised lines to answer (the caveat being that I'm "working clean")

Using some historical references and varying degrees of awfulness --

Nobody, I mean not a single person, still had the anything that you or I would call "modesty" before the [some seminal event in your plot]. "60 Minutes," was now "60 minutes of hard-core porn," Reality TV had been replaced in toto by live-cams inside our prisons, prostitution was not only legal, but state-sponsored, amphetamine replaced wine as a "polite thing to bring to a party," and The Supreme Court was replaced by "The Supreme Ring," where complainants and defendants dueled in a Coliseum (which was, naturally, live-streamed on YouTube and brought to you by Fox Sports DC and The SEO Corporation for Public Leering)"

We'd slipped from bad to worse in terms of morality. This was no 20s-era speakeasy-style "socially-acceptable" moonshine-swilling, this was 60s-era wanton binge-drugging that would make Timothy Leary blush."

When I say violence is now slipping to unheard-of lows, I mean that it had jumped off our big-screens and landed squarely on the street-corner. It was no longer a spectator sport -- everyone was involved with assault and murder on some level. Everyone.

Note the actual (specifics) of the dopings and beatings above are "danced-around." How BAD is this fictional society? I'll throw out one more to wrap a hypothetical "debauchery-slipped-nonspecific" culture in the key of gallows humor--this line sums it up as severely and descriptively as possible. it's offensive as heck yet technically "clean.' -- if nothing it gets the point across...

When I say we'd reached a new low in terms of debauchery, I can't overstate the cultural plague if I tried. [Fictional Setting#4477b] made Auschwitz seem like a Carnival Cruise.

(plz note--this writer is himself Jewish and does not make the comparison lightly, which is not to say I don't find it absurd enough to make for a good "extreme-answer," or that I didn't get an ill-advised chuckle at my own neurosis when I wrote it)

You see, if that isn't horrific enough, your setting is beyond my improvised-ability to describe sans adult-language. At worst, the young reader MAY need to have a discussion with his parent regarding The Holocaust and/or Carnival Cruise Lines...which is a good (& educational) conversation to have, nu?

(substitute "KOA Kampground" for "carnival" if you don't jive with comparing a "city" to a "boat," I just liked the way line rolled off my tongue)

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