Incorporating Social Media into a Novel

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And, by this, I mean making social media a subject or a tool inside your novel. This has nothing to do with marketing or publicizing the book itself, that’s a different subject.

No, I wanted social media to be part of the landscape of how my characters interacted in “The Forest Dark.” Because a) it’s part of all our lives in 2013 and b) it provides more of a contrast between 1984 (the year in which the first part of the book is set) and 2009, where the second part of the book lives.

But how to do this while avoiding a specific app or technology that may go completely obsolete at any time, probably sooner rather than later? Can you imagine how you’d feel if you wrote a novel where all the characters left messages for each other via MySpace? I guess it would be OK if your book was all about 2006 or something, but you know it would be looked on as a curious period piece and would not, as they say in Hollywood, have legs.

I thought about this and tempted as I was to refer directly to such household names as Facebook and Twitter, I decided to allude to them but to be ever so much more generic.

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No, instead I referred to the content of a communication as a “message” – as in, somebody posted a “message online.” That could be a Facebook post, or a tweet. I had another character tapping out a “message” to a “fan” or “fans,” which I hoped would be read as Character A just tweeted their followers – without actually saying that.

Because I figured no matter what apps survive and which go away, whatever does replace them will still have interaction between communicators with some kind of message content, whether that be text or voice or video or static photography or something we have yet to imagine.

Anyway, that’s how I solved that little problem. It turned out to be really easy. Do you include specific social media companies or app names in your fiction writing? Why or why not?

 

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