hey Frank, I discovered your writing recently and it's very inspiring! do you have any advice or recommendations about writing? thanks!
Sure!
1) Don't sweat writing "basic" things like "dialogue."
If the story you are writing takes place in a modern setting, we've already established that people will say things like "like" and "lol" and "what" and so on, so it's probably okay for characters to do so as well.
2) Don't hesitate to include anachronisms.
In a time that looks like your own, characters will speak about subjects which feel like they should be very different than things which you would mention if writing in your world. A classic example is characters talking about video games, something which would be very unfamiliar to them if they didn't come from a culture that uses video games often.
In general, anachronisms can help avoid this kind of "well, how can I make this make sense in a time period which does not look like my time?" problem -- it will feel to the reader like they make sense, that "the past" isn't really being referenced but just used to give the dialogue more weight and help the character's characterization.
3) If you're writing about a setting which does look like your real time, but without the benefit of anachronisms, include them anyway.
In my opinion this is the worst time to do this. By this point you've already established some of the details which are very familiar, but not part of the "default" world view. If you haven't already, you may not know how familiar something is, e.g. "people in this world eat spicy food." So you may have to introduce these details without them seeming familiar. (You could introduce them by anachronism, if you have something like "a man says [phrase that means'spicy' here] when eating spicy food in this world")
But if the details are already familiar, putting them in the text may feel very natural, whereas using an anachronism can often feel forced and awkward.
4) If you write your world with a lot of historical anachronisms, this can come off as awkward or forced, even if your story does take place in a very modern setting.
Imagine you have two characters who, for no reason at all, discuss something which would have had a very different meaning in past centuries. When reading this, do you read the dialogue as "a lot of historical anachronisms?" Or do you read it like it is written in your time and just imagine that they are talking about something totally unfamiliar to them?
5) Don't worry about making sure a world has enough detail in it (if your setting isn't very "exotic," this is less an issue).
This is very important. If you want to write about things which make sense if your reader knows nothing about those things, you just need to include anachronisms. If your world includes detailed facts which make sense to your readers but which aren't really "in their cultural world," this is harder to write. You'll have to do a lot of research, and you might end up giving up.
6) Sometimes you need to find a very specific world in order to convey an idea or to avoid having a "trivial" idea get in the way of a story about more interesting topics.
Here, the trick is to make your "small world" feel distinct from the world of your story. So instead of talking about something which sounds vaguely familiar to readers who know nothing about the world's history and geography, you want to talk about something from a world which is very distinct from the world your story takes place in. You might choose to have "smaller" details, like the food people eat, be really different in some way (like how we tend to put a lot more spice in our food). Or you may want to describe some very specific region which is clearly and distinctly outside your world, perhaps a fictionalized version of your area (though I think if you try to get too fantastical, it's more likely to make the story feel silly and forced).
For example, consider my own work on The Northern Caves. (I have not finished it yet, and do not expect to do so soon, as I have other projects I am trying to work on right now.) My setting involves lots of things that you would think are "really weird" or "anachronistic," and which really are not from the same part of the world I'm writing about. Some of this is purely aesthetic -- e.g. my fantasy setting includes a lot of non-Western influences, so I don't really think of it as being "a lot like China" as such, but I do want to avoid making it too much like any specific place in China, and I know if I tried to write about one particular part of China I would get tripped up.
Of course, in this case, I do have a setting where it would make sense to have "a lot of stuff that seems exotic" because it has a lot of things which are very different from the default world. The setting's history is very unusual, in the way you said when you talked about your own work. So I have used that world and its particularities to set the tone of the story. I don't want to have the tone be set by some random historical facts which are different than my world, just because they're different than a generic "historical place." It needs to be set by something else -- something which is very different in its own way, which I can then build up to using to add flavor.
(This also helps me when writing about cultures which are very different from mine in some things but share many basic values, e.g. the kind of setting I've mentioned earlier, where many people use a sort of religion which looks superficially strange from a Western perspective, or which uses some other form of media besides books or TV or film.)
8) Writing about a different time period than the one in which your story is taking place is very difficult!
I mean, you are writing about a different time period. (There's no getting around this one.) You're using a different frame of reference, but you're writing in your frame of reference. So a lot of this comes down to your frame of reference being really good.
9) Sometimes if you've written a lot about things which are very familiar to your readers, you can feel "stuck" in that world.
You need to figure out some way to create interest for your readers without relying too much on the details, the "basics." If you have lots of those, then your world is "familiar," which can limit your ability to create new stories. One trick which works for me is to focus less on a world that is "familiar" in the traditional sense, and make your world more like a "world-in-progress," where there are always new discoveries to be made.
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