The following is an excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide.
When writing time travel stories, anachronisms need to be avoided.
Fictional characters in the medieval period or in World War II obviously can’t carry cell phones, check their email, or talk about TV shows.
However, characters also can’t have political views that aren’t in keeping with their time, level of education, or social status.
The role of women in society was also often very different at certain times in the past.
Female heroines in historical fiction are often depicted in ways designed to appeal to modern audiences.
Their anachronistic attitudes to a woman’s role in society may help readers to relate to them, but this is very much out of step with how women were treated in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, for example.
Similarly, the author may give a medieval peasant or a Roman slave political views that are utterly out of place with the character’s time period.
Sometimes an author includes an element in their story that they assume existed in their chosen period but hadn’t been invented or discovered at that time.
For example, someone might be shown eating potatoes in a medieval English castle although Europeans didn’t discover potatoes until after the voyages of Columbus, beginning in 1492.
It’s also important to show characters using appropriate firearms for a particular period, such as a rifle or a musket.
And while outlaws in the Old West may have used revolvers, pirates sailing the Caribbean two hundred years earlier would not.
Your lead character from the era of the Napoleonic Wars shouldn’t wake up in the morning to his electrical alarm clock, check his text messages, zip up his pants, and have waffles for breakfast, but make sure he’s a true fit for his era in many other ways, too.
Learn more about The Time Traveler’s Guide and all Simon’s other books on his website at https://simon-rose.com/.
Simon also offers a variety of coaching services for writers, along with online writing courses.
Note: Posts and pages on this site may contain some affiliate links for your convenience (which means if you make a purchase after clicking a link I will earn a small commission but it won’t cost you a penny more)! Read my full disclosure and privacy policies…
