3 Ways to Incorporate Major Events Into Contemporary Fiction
Author Namrata Patel shares three ways to incorporate major events into contemporary fiction, whether it involves a violent act, a widespread pandemic, or some other major event that has an impact on readers and writers alike.
Fiction is prose with imaginary characters, and, as writers, we want our readers to find meaning in our stories beyond the plot and characters. Readers want an immersive experience that enables them to feel as if they are in the story. One way to do that is to build a world that helps readers bring their lived experiences along for the ride.
It doesn’t mean all stories should be relatable, an unrealistic expectation that often becomes shorthand for gatekeeping. It’s about helping the reader recognize that this is set in a familiar world, that this story exists within our contextual framing.
It's more than just picking a location and next year’s date. It’s about using momentous events to deepen the story in a way that they recognize the setting, whether they’ve been in that city or country.
My second novel, Scent of a Garden, is a story about a perfumer who loses her sense of smell. The how was COVID-19. This isn’t a pandemic exploration, it’s about perseverance and discovery. However, seamlessly incorporating this global event and the way it changed our world, allowed me to tell a rich and expansive story.
I’ll highlight three specific ways that may help you as you think about your next contemporary work of fiction.
Offer World-Building Shorthand
We have a finite amount of space for our work, whether it’s short- or long-form. Using shorthand for our world-building allows us to give cues where readers fill in the blanks while we can use our word count for plot progression, character motivations, tension, etc. It’s about using our shared understanding of events that have happened and are happening to ground our setting in the familiar.
Let’s say your story takes place in London in 2024 and you have characters on opposite sides of a battle against the British monarchy, you can trust many of your readers to know who King Charles III is and how he came to be in power. You don’t have to spend valuable real estate to rehash the details, only what’s relevant for your character motivations and their why. And this helps readers get a layer beneath the surface and possibly identify with one character’s reasoning over the other.
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In Scent of a Garden, my main character is having an existential crisis because she’s ambitious and has a plan to become a master perfumer. But she loses her sense of smell because of a mild bout with COVID-19. Having that be a simple explanation, readers can immediately understand and buy into this as something that can occur because of our shared understanding of the effects of this particular virus. I didn’t use a chapter to talk about it; in fact, I only needed a few sentences to explain what happened.
Explore Impact of Historical/Real World Events Through Characters
Current events also enable us to explore themes and deepen readers’ understanding of our story. This is especially true when you’re examining something that may not be widely familiar or have layers.
A story about the immigrant experience can be told from several viewpoints and could have regional and racial components. For example, a current day story that takes place in a border city in Arizona can be told through multiple viewpoints that can give your characters depth and a range of motivations and actions.
In my first novel, The Candid Life of Meena Dave, I wanted to set my story in current day Boston, Massachusetts, in a very specific location because of a little-known historical event where 100+ Gujaratis came to study engineering at MIT between the 1920s and 1940s. I wanted my story to explore diaspora, assimilation and adoption for third generation Indian Americans. Taking a historical event and presenting it in current context helped me convey what it means to belong.
Use Visual Markers
This is another way to leverage current events. The magnitude of it changes the landscape. Before 9/11, a familiar trope of romantic comedies was the last-minute airport run to stop the love interest from getting on a plane. Using that now would be impossible because we know that flying and security work differently.
Scent of a Garden takes place partially in Paris. Candid Life of Meena Dave is in Boston. I used visual markers of how both of those places look and feel now versus a simply romanticized version. The Back Bay area of Boston is different since the Marathon Bombing and noting that was critical to ensure that readers understood and felt immersed in the setting.
Current events can not only enrich your writing, it can help readers feel as if they are traveling along with your characters. Additionally, incorporating these into the work, can help readers personalize your fiction by filling in the blanks with their knowledge and experience. Even if it doesn’t identically match with your characters’ narrative arcs.
Namrata Patel is an Indian American writer who resides in Boston. Her writing examines diaspora and dual-cultural identity among Indian Americans and explores this dynamic while also touching on the families we’re born with and those we choose. Namrata has lived in India, New Jersey, Spokane, London, and New York City, and has been writing most of her adult life. (Photo credit: Andy Dean.)
