How to Write Fiction in a Different Time Period

Looking at Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them to examine the use of time period in your writing!

Watching Like a Writer is a movie review series that looks at films from the perspective of a fiction writer, complete with one writing takeaway, and an exercise that will help better your fiction!

It’s hard not to be a cynic when it comes to the film business today. Original properties are luxuries from the past, and lately it’s a borderline miracle when a film sneaks into theaters from a major distributor that’s not based on anything. Sequels have been around forever, but notice how much more frequent they are every year? Literally anything that makes even the slightest profit gets a green-lit continuation, and any franchise that’s beloved and that has a definitive ending can never stay dormant for long.

I like plenty of sequels and prequels, even the occasional remake. And I don’t mind this new trend of building more than just a franchise but an actual universe of stories that can feasibly go on forever. Marvel has handled their properties extremely well, and at the moment I’m thrilled we’re getting a new Star Wars movie every year (not so sure how I’ll feel about that in, say, 2027).

But there is starting to be the sense that major Hollywood movies aren’t really movies anymore; they’re products meant to be packaged and purchased. I’m happy that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, directed by David Yates (the last four Harry Potter movies) and scripted by J.K. Rowling herself, tries to be its own entity, one so far removed from Harry Potter that all we get are a few throwaway references to Dumbledore and Hogwarts. But as imaginative and entertaining and quirky as the movie is, I did get the feeling while watching it that I was looking more at a product of the Wizarding World universe than an actual movie, a product that’s meant to set up a new series of films rather than tell its own singular compelling story.

Let’s start with the good. Yates is a talented director, but I did feel that he brought a coldness to the last four Harry Potter movies that at times became borderline depressing, especially in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood…

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