Be Here Now by Eric Beetner

 As we head into a rather big news week - do you ever get stories “ripped from the headlines”? How much do you rely on current events to fuel your stories?

I don’t typically write anything that is “of the moment” or places it in a specific here and now. I’ve written period pieces set in the 1930s, the 50s and the 60s. For those books the time was a factor in the story for sure. And you have to get the details accurate to make the world believable in everything from pop culture to news of the day. But to start dropping in references to things happening now I feel dates a book pretty quickly.

One reason is the slow pace of publishing. By the time I write something, submit it, sell it, go through an editing process, etc. it will have been 18 months on the short end. Much longer can be typical. So already those topical references would be dated.

Songs, movies, slang terms, fashion trends all work like cement shoes to weigh a story down in one particular time and space. If I populate a book with people doing the ice bucket challenge or dancing to Gangam Style, I’ve unwittingly written a period piece. But when a period is only a few years ago, it just seems dated.

For me, one thing that couldn’t be denied was Covid. In my latest book, The Last Few Miles Of Road, I made mention of it once. When the main character, Carter, is thinking about friends of his who have died, I listed Covid among the reasons people he knew had passed on. That was it, though. It didn’t play a part in the story. I merely acknowledged that it was a part of the world and moved on.

If you write political thrillers, to contend with the ever-changing political landscape must be difficult to navigate. But to ignore social changes also risks stagnating a book into tired tropes. Are the bad guys really the same as they were 20 or 30 years ago? Authors need to move with the times.

Stories that come from news reports or some kind of current event are often best used if they could have happened at any point in history. It’s one reason why crime novels in general work so well over time. The motivations for criminal acts never change. Lust, greed, jealousy all remain untouched in the human psyche no matter what the decade, or century for that matter.

So if you manage to capture the zeitgeist and time it perfectly, you might get a hit book out of it. But the chances of writing something topical that will last is slim. You’d have to wait for it to get old enough to become a period piece. 

But I suppose if a book was set in my own youth it would be considered period now. So maybe that’s not so far off after all. Or maybe I just want to think that.