Tag: writings

Let’s Consider Speculating About the Future

Speculating is fun. However, future predictions can be notoriously inaccurate. I’m still waiting for my flying car, for example.

However, some predictions have been eerily on the nose, such as cell phones, which are a lot like Star Trek’s communicators. So here’s a few idea on how to essentially build your own crystal ball.

For writers, this kind of speculation can be helpful, either to set a scene or to spark some other idea. While science fiction and fantasy are natural genres for this, probably just about any genre could work. Maybe the couple in your romance are inventors.

Or the victims in your horror are dispatched with cutting edge (pun intended) stuff.

Extrapolation

The easiest way to speculate and predict is to take what currently exists, and then extrapolate from that.

Transportation

For example, consider transportation. Your car gets a certain degree of fuel efficiency and it has a particular top speed. It holds a certain number of people. And it has a particular styling. So what happens when you stretch those characteristics?

And so you can consider a car that can go faster yet safely. Maybe your futuristic vehicle is self-driving, or a robot ‘drives’ it.

Since parking can be a pain in a lot of places, why not think up a car which can park itself, or can fold up so it doesn’t need a conventionally-sized parking spot? Maybe your new car is partly powered by solar or nuclear fusion. And how sleek and aerodynamic should it be?

Communications

And you can consider other basic areas of life. Let’s look at communications next. Because nearly all of us already have smart phones, think about the trends. Sometimes, phones get smaller, and are more lightweight and compact. However, at other times, they become larger and almost could be thought of as tablet hybrids.

What do your characters need? And what are the limitations on either scenario? How small can a phone become? How large?

Can it be embedded?

Speculating About Feeding the World

So what about food? People still starve. However, that’s usually due to distribution problems rather than growing enough crops or the existence of enough arable land. Hence how do your characters (or your setting) solve this problem?

And so you can look at any basic area of life, from finding love to consuming entertainment or buying clothing. See where extrapolation takes you.

Employment

When I graduated from undergrad, in 1983, there was no such thing as social media. In fact, I well recall cutting and pasting paragraphs in papers by literally cutting and pasting. Sorry, rain forest!

While computers already existed of course, they had not made it to the mainstream yet. But once the price started to drop, in the late 80s, mid 90s or so, computers started to become more ubiquitous.

So, that year, the prospects for employment using a computer were really just programmer or someone who taught programming.

Now, of course, many of us use our computers every day at work. And this doesn’t even get into how often we check and use our cell phones. But back in that year, would any of us have come up with so many varied uses for computers in work?

And what about AI?

Off the Wall

And then there’s the somewhat pie in the sky, kinda crazy stuff. For example, let’s think about the second Back to the Future film. Doc Brown uses fusion power to make the DeLorean go, but one of the things he grabs for fuel is a discarded banana peel. What a brilliant off the wall idea!

Off the Wall Fashion

So let’s look at, say, fashion. Maybe it’s the opposite of today, where everything is covered up but genitalia. But what kind of a society would support that?

Or maybe everyone wears a uniform, but the uniforms look really odd.

Consider hair when you consider future fashions. Does the mullet make a mainstream comeback? Or do we all just say to hell with it and shave our heads?

More Speculating Out of My Overly Fertile Imagination

Cars could be six stories tall. Communications could be facilitated with chewing gum. Maybe you vote telepathically. The sky, as always, is the limit.

Takeaways for Speculating About the Future

In short, thinking about our future, you may want to consider today, back a few decades, when today was the future. How did everything change? Was it gradual or radical? Did celebrities and influencers steer the ship? Or did it come up from grass roots?

Depending on your genre, and how much room there is for humor, your ideas about the future can go in any number of directions.

Decide on how plausible you want everything to be. And don’t forget to take into account professional predictions like Moore’s Law when speculating about the future!

Let’s look at getting writing inspiration from religion.

Religion

Oh religion. It is one of those topics which nearly everyone tells you not to talk about. However, it can be a great source of inspiration for writing.

No Faith? No Problem!

First of all, I am not suggesting anyone run out and convert. If you do not believe in God, then that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Faith can still provide inspiration.

You can observe it in others. Or you might want to document people’s reactions to your declarations of atheism or agnosticism.

Since the percentage of agnostics and atheists is still fairly low (at least that’s the case in America), minority status by itself can be an inspiration.

Perhaps you can write about living within a more spiritual majority. Another idea is to write about discrimination you may have faced.

Your Own Faith

Personally, I am Jewish. However, that doesn’t matter to my point. I can write about rituals. Or about what happens when rituals are absent. Furthermore, I can write about discrimination.

Since I am in a minority, that is also on the table. Because religious clashes are a fact of life, that’s also writing fodder. By changing subtle details or leaving some out, I can come up with a whole new story line.

Others’ Faiths

Almost all of us know someone of some other faith (or lack thereof). Have you ever discussed the differences? And did the discussion stay civil? Or did it fall into a shouting match? Because that is all too common.

Studying Religion

Because the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, the teachings of Buddha, etc. are all in the public domain, how about mining them for writing ideas? This has been done before.

In fact, the biblical story of Noah and the flood is pretty much the same as the epic of Gilgamesh. Hence you’d be in pretty good company.

Religion and Rituals

For everything from marriage to how to welcome children into the world, to how to help the aged and even mourn the dead, rituals are a large part of many faiths.

These rituals might inspire. Or, they may help you to transition your characters from one stage of life to the next.

Takeaways

Faith is an extremely personal experience. For many people, these stories are the word of God. However, a flood story is not necessarily blasphemous. And you don’t have to believe a thing in order to use the drama as a template for your own works.