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Some cultural changes over the past century or five have been very deep, and some have been shallow. It’s much easier for women to get divorced; that’s a deep change. They often announce those di...
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#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T03:12:33Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/9487 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
Seth Gordon
·
2019-12-08T03:12:33Z (almost 5 years ago)
Some cultural changes over the past century or five have been very deep, and some have been shallow. It’s much easier for women to get divorced; that’s a deep change. They often announce those divorces on Facebook; that’s a shallow change. (The growth of social media _in general_ is a deep change, but _this particular use of those media_ is shallow.) For world-building a novel set in the future, I would suggest concentrating on a few deep changes (the ones most relevant to the plot you want to write) and then providing lots of shallow changes to convey the atmosphere. Your protagonist could be anxious about getting a marriage contract renewed, and your story could explore the various expectations, conflicts, jargon, child-rearing practices, etc. etc. surrounding renewable marriages... but you can also drop in occasional references to self-cleaning clothes, robot butlers, and functional health-insurance companies, just to prevent the reader from feeling that your setting is “just like 2013 but with renewable marriages”.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2013-11-20T18:53:27Z (about 11 years ago)
Original score: 5