Writing challenge/exercise: write a story-beginning that implies an era and/or place in as few words as possible, without explicitly specifying the time or place.
I'd be most interested in seeing one-word and two-word approaches—they don't have to be complete sentences—but you can use up to ten words if you like.
Bonus points for indicating time to within ten years and place to within ten miles (again without explicitly specifying), in five words or fewer.
Timbers rose, delineating a white dome — unreasoning love, and grief.
or
Twin towers fell.
1. I missed the moon landing on TV last night.
2. Moxie is …
3. Two quick knocks on the speakeasy door …
Bryan Clair contributes:
“Normans!”
Cool—keep ’em coming.
I should note that if you find the original exercise too easy, you can give yourself any further restrictions you like. For example, you can require that your answer be a complete sentence, or you can rule out various categories of things, or you can focus exclusively on one- or two-word answers. (After people post a couple more, I’ll provide a couple of suggested categories of things to avoid.)
Masako watched the lone American bomber lumber high overhead.
Grassy knoll …
Nice. Okay, here’s a restriction to consider: Mary Anne suggests not allowing specific references to specific events in history. (Open to debate what exactly constitutes a specific event or a specific reference, but give it a try.) Or, to put it another way: provide examples of other kinds of words/phrases/concepts, besides ones associated with Key Moments In History, that make good time/place indicators. (I’m not fishing for a particular answer; I think there are a bunch of answers, and I’m curious as to what people come up with.)
“Say, kids, what time is it?”
“No ruelles, miladi! Where shall we speak?”
or
“So red a sun when we go a-viking!”
or
“The enlightened man, Citizen Marat, accepts evidence: ghosts exist.”
The imperative seems to work well for this:
“Draw!”
or
“Frenchmen! Hard-a-port!”
or
“Scalpel…”
You can nail down just about any decade within the 20th century (US/Britain) with a well-chosen pop song; movies do this more often than stories because they have the budget to secure the rights.
Dialect/voice can evoke some times and places: “Fetch me mah parasol, Buttercup, or I do believe this heat will be the death of me.”
Costumes, props, and sets can also specify a time and place: “dayglo poster”, “Colt revolver”, “Automat”.
I’ve been thinking about what makes this exercise hard.
The only way for a brief phrase to evoke a time and place is for the author to leverage information the reader is known to share.
This means that you can specify a time with precision only if it is well-known in some way. For me, that means either a specific historical event (“Gilloutine”) or a US pop culture reference (“Ovaltine”). Other authors may be more adventurous in their assumptions about what is well-enough known to use as a time landmark.
As you get farther away from the 20th century and certain very-well-known historical events, it is still possible to evoke a time (“By Athena!”), but you lose precision — you can probably get within 50 years in the 17th-18th centuries and within a century before that.
Specifying a place with precision is harder, with the exception of certain well-known places such as New York (“subway token”) and Hollywood (“Roll ’em!”).
Mind you, using place-specific details that only a local would recognize (“Yaw’s on Burnside”) is an effective technique to obtain the sense of place that is a valuable tool in the writer’s toolbox. But it won’t serve by itself to identify what place you’re talking about.
You can get a lot of mileage out of specific place and person names (kings, presidents, battlegrounds) but for the purposes of this particular exercise it feels like cheating.
Well, I’ll be horn-swaggled!
Nearly three years after I posted this, it’s suddenly acquired a new life in LiveJournal, where a couple of people have reposted it: eddyfate, obake, et alia. About half the things people are posting as responses there don’t evoke a particular time or place for me, and most of the rest either focus on a specific Big Historical Event or explicitly mention a particular person; still, some interesting responses there.