I had an odd instance as I was writing on Saturday. I was busily writing along with a character sitting at work looking for a phone number for a photographer that she needed to call out of the many she had worked with before. She was looking for one in particular. Then I had to stop. There was a definite stopping of the flow of writing as I came to that point.
Why would that stop me, you ask? Or maybe you don't ask but go with me on this one. It's an age thing I guess. The character needed to find a phone number and I realized what I was going to put down for where she was going to look was outdated. This detail took me completely out of the moment I had submerged myself into as I was weaving this fantasy and brought me squarely back to reality at my own desk, at my laptop, wondering where this character would possibly look to find a phone number.
My thought (that I knew was wrong) was a rolodex. It made sense to me. The character was at her desk, looking for a phone number out of multiples that had been used before. It made sense to look there at the small container with ticket-size pages with phone numbers written on them that are arranged in alphabetical order. But that isn't right and it stopped me from writing and out of the faux world where that character wouldn't know what that was. My problem was I didn't know what the character would use.
It was time for quick research. Google: what to use instead of rolodex
It took some searching but it pretty much came up with using a list of contacts on an application like Outlook or your cell phone contacts. I even found a small comment stream of people asking what the heck a rolodex was. Ah-ha! So I was right that the character had no clue what it was even if I did. And I had been jarred enough out of my writing that I knew it wasn't right, even if I didn't know what the character would use. Dang this is getting complicated.
I wonder how many other outdated things I might have written that my characters might be looking at me sideways with a look on their face asking, "say what?"
TT
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