Given that quite a lot of storytelling depends on break-down in communication, misunderstanding, lack of information etc. and given that, in the 21st century, we have many means of communication and information-gathering at our disposal, it seems to me that setting a story in the present is fraught with difficulties.

The story I'm working on at the moment opens with a situation that could easily be overcome by a simple text message. But my character cannot communicate with the character he needs to because that would ruin the opening and spoil the story. Which is part of the reason I am setting my story a few decades back.

Has anyone else been frustrated by the ease of communication of the 21st century when writing a story set in the here and now?

I was once tasked with updating a French Gangster film noir type thing into a modern plot and setting. Fraught with difficulties. If you need to know something nowadays you just Google it. And mobile phones, God, yes. What a pain. Luckily, one of the main characters was a 60 odd year old chap, so I made him a technophobe who couldn't operate computers or phones. It was the only way round it.

Yes, it's terribly difficult, isn't it. You can only really have one flat mobile battery or dodgy signal per story, can't you.

Sue Grafton decided to keep on writing Kinsey Milhone in the 80s for that reason - she keeps a store of dimes for the payphones - so she's slowly growing towards it being historical fiction.

I suspect speed of communications is quite hard-wired into us, too. I keep planning historical plots which only work if the communications (post, travelling) are at the outer limit of speed of the time. Although, yes, other things you can do beautifully because She Had No Way of Telling Him....

Make all your characters students. Then let them run out of credit.

Yes, all ancient or all green as grass.

It's also the visual value that is lost, I think. A character making a call from a big, black, possibly wall-mounted, possibly wind-up telephone, or from a box, or via an operator is so much more visually interesting than someone rolling a screen with their finger or tapping out a text.

Perhaps it's the sheer economy of effort attached to modern life that can place limitations on a story.

And there is the lost romance of, say, a tragedy that comes about in part because a letter went astray in the post.

I can't say it's ever bothered me - after all there are more ways than one of miscommunicating, and the emotional reasons we fail to talk to each other are more interesting to me than the practical reasons.

That said, in my YA novel I deliberately made the MC live in a house where mobile communication was impossible because of the lack of reception. Partly, I guess, to make it feel closer to my own teenage years where I didn't have a mobile and I knew every one of my friends' landline numbers off by heart.

But partly because it's a story of gothic suspense and I wanted the feeling of them being shut off in a slightly alternate world. She has to leave the house and walk to the main road to make a call.

But even so, there's only one point in the story where that becomes an actual plot point, and then only a minor one. Mainly it's an inconvenience for my MC, but not a significant one.

the emotional reasons we fail to talk to each other are more interesting to me than the practical reasons

Well, yes, but I'm talking more about when people want to talk to each other but circumstances prevent them. Rather different.

Yes but don't you think that can apply equally for emotional/psychological reasons? You can be desperate to talk to someone but feel unable to, for whatever reason. Or you can talk, but not achieve communication or understanding.

That seems to be more of a theme in my books anyway - people who want to communicate but can't because of a mental/emotional/psychological barrier, rather than a practical one.

Clearly there's room on the world for both kinds though!

It's interesting though, how much we rely on instant access to info and how lost characters can feel if they don't have it. Phone goes dead, battery's low or it has a fault. Person you need to contact has phone switched off. Why??? No signal underground, or message is late because all phones must be switched on in lessons, meetings, at cinemas, theatres, in hospitals etc. Phoen boxes are now less frequent and usually vandalised, so access is more limited to havingyour own phone up and running.

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scuse ugly typos.

Flora, I think we're talking at slightly cross-purposes here!

Yes, and the mysterious vagaries of text messaging/spam etc is a fertile ground too. You could easily have a modern version of Tess of the D'Ubervilles with the crucial letter being an email diverted into spam.

We usually tend to think of modern communication methods as facilitating communication, but often it's not the case. With a text you're forced into brevity and emotional/practical misunderstandings are rife (which is part of what gave birth to the emoticon, I guess. The need to signal very clearly and in few characters how your message is supposed to be taken).

With social media and chat forums the danger is the immediacy and the irrevocability (is that a word?) of communication. I think most people who use forums have either witnessed (or committed!) the late night drunken rant that's bitterly regretted the next day but hangs around on the internet like a pile of sick outside a pub for all to see.

Sorry Jan, crossed with you.

No, I completely understand what you're saying - you're talking about a very specific practical problem when you need communication to be impossible for some reason.

I do understand what you're saying - I'm just saying I've never felt the need for that particular set up in my work, I tend to explore other themes.

I think you're right, Flora. I guess communication can get loused up, whatever period you're living in or writing about. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic!

There you go, communication getting loused up right there!

I think the sticking point here is that I don't see it as a theme, just a tool.

It's an interesting point though.

Perhaps it's because I've pretty much grown up in the mobile phone world? I've had a mobile all my adult life, so those kind of plot scenarios you're talking about simply don't occur to me.

What preoccupies me - perhaps precisely because I've grown up in a world of SMS and chat messaging - is the other kind of communication block.