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This week on the blog, I talk about the various ways people communicate in fiction (and how it differs from genre to genre).

Looking Out The Window

(And also I make jokes about the Elves. Because that's how we roll in the Shire.)

Comments

[sholio]

That's a fascinating post! :D Communication is something I've been thinking about in my own fiction, off and on. (Especially when I go back to resurrect an old partly-finished novel and discover that I'm going to have to add cell phones to it.) It's interesting; I remember thinking, when cell phones first started becoming a big thing, that this was going to make it really hard to plot things. But it's actually made it EASIER. I don't think I'd realized what a huge "get out of jail free" card the ubiquitous cell phone has become for me as a the writer until I was working on a Forever Knight casefic (set in the early '90s, because the show is) and had to tie myself into absolute plot contortions trying to get an important bit of plot information from Character A to Character B in a different location. With cell phones, it would've been a simple matter of "... and then he called him." I've gotten used to relying on them for keeping characters in touch with each other.

It's also made it a bit easier to write scifi settings with ubiquitous communications now that we have our own! Back in the early '90s, I wrote a lot in a scifi setting (of my own creation) where everyone had little communication devices implanted in their heads, and I used to really struggle with this, at times, because it was so hard to isolate the characters, or inflict plot-related misunderstandings on them when they could just call each other. Now that constant, instant communication is a Thing We Have, I don't find it difficult at all to write it in an SF context like, say, SGA; it's just a slightly more advanced version of the way the world already works.

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It's super regional too. My hometown (where two of my books are, theoretically, set) has terrible cell reception, for a variety of reasons, so my characters don't use them very often. That's probably going to change in the edits, but the weird thing about writing at "home" is that you're so comfortable, you just DO things like that. :)