Any thoughts on developing a calendar for your book?

[Babayaga321]

Greetings!

I'm new here and just starting to take a look around, but I'm wondering if anyone has any particular thoughts on the use of bespoke calendars and references to time in their stories? I've been revisiting the plotting for one of my books and it got me thinking about the use of such things in the book... for example, the story is based on another world, but to the inhabitants there would still be concepts of days, weeks, months, years etc. Is it therefore legitimate to have one of the characters recount an event which happened several weeks ago...or should a week, month or year etc be known as something else? If that is the case, how can you ensure that the reader understands what you meant when you were writing it?

I'm experimenting with a calendar generator to develop this side of things and keep track of time in my story, but giving the 8 days in my fantasy-world names such as 'Mirl', 'Tuody', 'Wicken' etc. instead of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday seems to be leaving myself open to having to continually explain myself.

On the other hand, I am probably just thinking too deeply about it and worrying unnecessarily... but I'd appreciate it if any of you had come across the same problem?

Cheers - Graham.

 

[Ireth]

Most of our days and months are named after gods or emperors. Tuesday = Tyr's Day, Wednesday = Odin's Day [or Wotan's Day], Thursday = Thor's Day, Friday = Frigga's Day. January is named after Janus, god of doors and beginnings; July and August are named after Julius and Augustus, two well-known Caesars of Rome.

So, what are the gods and leaders of your world called? Might be a good place to start.

 

[TheKillerBs]

You forgot just calling them by which number month of the year they were. September to December were the 7th-10th months of the year prior to Julius and Augustus bungling the calendar with their ego.

 

[Devor]

Yeah, so, in my opinion a calendar is just a needless headache. It's an info-dump that doesn't usually get you anything for it. I find it simple and effective to just count the weeks in each season.

It was the seventh week of winter, and . . . .

That approach doesn't break immersion with a real world calendar and is immediately clear to the reader without any explanation.

Similar possibilities include counting the weeks before and after the solstice or just counting the full moons.

 

[TheKillerBs]

I disagree. Just because you develop an in-depth calendar doesn't mean you have to go into a paragraphs-long spiel in-story explaining it. You can just give a cursory explanation or even leave it unexplained save for a few background clues for your reader to figure out if you want.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Develop a timeline and use Aeon Timeline, sweet little program with a trial period. Very customizable. I never do describe the calendar, but it exists, and this program tracks all your events etc, very nifty.

 

[Devor]

I disagree. Just because you develop an in-depth calendar doesn't mean you have to go into a paragraphs-long spiel in-story explaining it. You can just give a cursory explanation or even leave it unexplained save for a few background clues for your reader to figure out if you want.

While true, it's still more for the reader to process, and I'm not sure there's an upside to it.

 

[TheKillerBs]

I feel it adds depth and life to the world, and by extension, the story.

 

[Gurkhal]

I did think about it, but decided to just copy the calenders used by the cultures I've used as main inspiration for my stories. Thus its ancient Greek calenders I'm using now.

 

[vaiyt]

Calendars are one of these things that are complicated to add in a novel. They are pretty much required for a fully fledged world because there's no way a fantasy world even slightly different from ours would end up with something identical to the kludge that is the Gregorian/Julian calendar. On the other hand, they're a pain to keep track of without having to reference a supplement (video games at least can display the calendar at all times it's needed concurrently with other information). LOTR has multiple calendars but Tolkien just "translates" the dates to equivalents in ours, which I think is okay to do.

 

[Nimue]

As a personal preference, I'd never say "Tuesday" or "October" in one of my stories, but for the most part I haven't found a calendar necessary. There are plenty of ways to express the passage of time that don't depend upon an exact date.

I do have unique month and day names for my current world, though I haven't varied the number of months or days, and I've tried to make them as obvious as possible. Things like the Vineyard Moon and the Lambing Moon for months, and dawnsday, mornday, nonesday for days of the week (though I like to use the older term sennight rather than week). Still working on the days of the week, and I haven't needed to use the terms in-story yet, which illustrates how unnecessary they are.

Anyway, it can be a good route to choose a term that's plain to the reader without explanation. It's hard to know what's meant by "I'll see you on Mirl", while "I'll see you on nonesday" is fairly transparent. Or just use it in clear context enough that it the reader can pick up on it. I wouldn't underestimate the capability of the average fantasy reader to understand made-up terms, to be sure.

 

[FifthView]

Aeon Timeline is a great program for designing and using a calendar while tracking character arcs, events, and so forth.

For a fully fledged epic fantasy, it's probably almost a requirement to have a calendar of some sort, but even in non-epic fantasy, it can add much depth to the worldbuilding.

But you don't need to "explain" it to the reader. In fact, I'd wager that most characters in a typical medievalish fantasy society wouldn't have access to written/published calendars and probably wouldn't think in terms of a calendar with a well-defined segmentation of weeks, days, months, years. It depends on the type of society you are using, of course. But the day names and what happens on particular days may stick with characters–It happened on a Twoasday, right after Yarmeth, with Yarmeth being a holy day or day of celebration–whereas thinking in terms of "It happened five Twoasdays ago" probably wouldn't stick mentally unless the individual character had a particularly good reason for tracking each and every Twoasday.

Remembering that an event happened in a certain month, a certain day of that month, and in a particular year might be something a character would comment upon, if the event was particularly memorable. It was five years after my naming day, early in Grotahk [month], on a Twoasday. I remember because I was preparing for my ascension [happens in the fifth year after naming], and the markets were closed [markets close every Twoasday, in holy observance of the goddess Twoas's day of rest]. In this case, you wouldn't need to explain all those things in brackets; you could leave it for the reader to suss out, if the reader wants to suss it out, and it still adds depth. In fact, not explaining it could add as much or more depth, because it shows the characters are fully fledged people who have a great store of knowledge about their world even if the reader does not.

There could be particular characters who keep much better track of the passage of time, who use actual, written calendars, such as priests, scribes, advisers to the royalty and the royalty, and maybe even some industrious merchants. But even then, there may be no great need to explain to the reader all these things about your calendar (although some depth might be needed for describing war plans or plots, maybe.) You could still convey that those characters are more consciously aware of the shape of their time-keeping systems, without needing to use exposition to describe all the minutia to the reader, just by the way those characters speak when making plans.

So it could be very helpful for the author to devise the calendar, have a timeline for use while writing, but unnecessary to put all that knowledge of the calendar into the book.

 

[Ben]

My advice (from a reader's perspective) is to look at how it serves your story and decide from there how complicated it should be.

If the calendar is not a major feature of your story, I recommend keeping our basic system of weeks/months/years and just renaming them to fit the history/mythology of your world. That way I as a reader do not get distracted and spend too much energy processing something that might take me away from following the main story line.

If the calendar is a major feature that will impact the story (a la the decades-long winters in a song of ice and fire - but note that even there he's never gone into a lot of detail describing their calendar), it makes more sense to develop a unique system. If it is that central to the story, it is likely the characters will have reason to talk about it and you can work in your explanations that way.

The other consideration I would note is whether it is a one-off book or part of a series - I'm more willing to invest in learning something unique and complicated if it is going to be used over several books, and less so if I won't see it referred to again.

 

[goldhawk]

Getting calendar correct in our world is hard enough. You should research other calendar systems. Some interesting things about our world's calendars.

Before the Julian calendar, dates were often recorded as the year from the start of the reign of the king. When a new king was coroneted, the counting restarted.

The week has 7 days because that is one quarter of the moon. A month should have 28 or 29 days but nobody wanted a calendar with 13 months, so the months were made long. That is until Julius decided he was as important as Augustus and lengthen his month by taking days from February.

The solar calendar is divided into 8 periods separated by the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days. In North America, the cross-quarter days are known as Groundhog Day, Mayday, Midsummer's Day, and Halloween.

 

[Russ]

Aeon Timeline is a great program for designing and using a calendar while tracking character arcs, events, and so forth.

I also work with Aeon Timeline and think it is fantastic for your purpose.

 

[Ireth]

The solar calendar is divided into 8 periods separated by the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days. In North America, the cross-quarter days are known as Groundhog Day, Mayday, Midsummer's Day, and Halloween.

Your own link contradicts you. Midsummer's Day is the summer solstice. The following cross-quarter day is Lammas, August 1.

 

[goldhawk]

Your own link contradicts you. Midsummer's Day is the summer solstice. The following cross-quarter day is Lammas, August 1.

Midsummer's Day is the Summer Equinox in Europe.

 

[Ireth]

Midsummer's Day is the Summer Equinox in Europe.

You mean solstice, I think. There's no such thing as a summer equinox. The equinoxes are in spring and fall.

 

[FifthView]

One of my general problems in writing, or at least one that seems to assault me on a regular basis, is how to add realism and a broader sense of the fantasy world without dreary exposition. It's not exactly an insurmountable problem. Getting a feel for the characters and the things they might say which imply more than is ever said in exposition–that's what I search for. The little seemingly-offhand non sequiturs or references that a character might throw into the middle of a conversation. An odd observation that makes sense to the character and to his interlocutor, made in passing.

So sometimes having a store of knowledge, such as the specifics of a calendar, can be helpful, even if that knowledge isn't fully delivered anywhere in the book.

 

[Svrtnsse]

One of my general problems in writing, or at least one that seems to assault me on a regular basis, is how to add realism and a broader sense of the fantasy world without dreary exposition. It's not exactly an insurmountable problem. Getting a feel for the characters and the things they might say which imply more than is ever said in exposition—that's what I search for. The little seemingly-offhand non sequiturs or references that a character might throw into the middle of a conversation. An odd observation that makes sense to the character and to his interlocutor, made in passing.

So sometimes having a store of knowledge, such as the specifics of a calendar, can be helpful, even if that knowledge isn't fully delivered anywhere in the book.

I wrote an article about this for the frontpage a while back: Small Sparks of Life – Making Your World Feel Alive
It says roughly the same you do here in this post, but with a lot more words (and a few examples).