: Re: How do I make it so my story happens in an ambiguous time frame? Nothing extreme, of course. No mentions of futuristic time-traveling gadgets or teleportation or the like. Or, conversely, nothing

@Tiffany377

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Creating your own world allows you to do just this. Something that is foreign enough not to seem in the past or the future, simply the present. Harry Potter for example, shows Hogwarts and the world of magic to be timeless. Sure the buildings and the mannerism is that London 100-200 years ago, but you don't feel like you are back in time, nor do you feel like you are in the future due to magic and gadgets.

If you are looking to have the story take place using actual cities and regions from earth, this will be fairly hard to pull off. Even the clothing, the means of transportation, and the view of the world will require some details that will automatically date it in the present, past, or future.

If you are going for the affect of having a reader 200 years from now apply their current view into the world then you could try not describing communication, clothing, transportation, setting in too much detail. Leave it up for the reader's mind. A reader today will add the culture of today to it. A reader 100 years from now will add in that culture.

But to have a world that does not tie into any timeline of the known world that people will say that is the past or future, I would say it is better to make your own world so that it is dissociated from any time lines that a brain would try to link with a "realistic" world.

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