Dealing with time

[Benjamin Clayborne]

It would be fun to live without having to worry about timekeeping. All you need to know is roughly what part of the day it is, and you go about your business accordingly. Alas, timekeeping is so much more efficient, everyone insists that everyone be connected to a clock all the time.

When I manage to make writing my primary career, I may well banish clocks most of the time. I'll just go by the light of the sun, and how hungry or sleepy I feel. ;-)

 

[Ravana]

I tend to be lazy about calendars, unless I have some reason not to be. Most of my worlds have 360-day years, divided into twelve months with five six-day weeks. Of course, if I'm going to be that lazy, I usually don't bring up the issue at all.

And if I'm not going to be that lazy… then just about everything will be a prime number, or the product of two primes, and nothing will synch up.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

It really seems that, unless the days of the week matter, you can pretty much have an Earth-like calendar with about 360 days per year, divided into season. The seasons make for good metaphors anyway, and we're all familiar with them (well, those of us born and raised in Los Angeles had to learn about seasons from TV and movies, but still). It's possible that anything that deviates too much from that will be distracting or confusing even if you never really bring it up.

E.g. imagine a set of characters travelling on their epic quest throughout the lands, and it takes them a couple of years, and they're going through temperate deciduous forests a lot of the time, and yet somehow it never snows. You could certainly do that, but readers might wonder why it's never snowing. So you kind of would have to mention that there's no seasons, the planet has no axial tilt, the sun always follows the same path across the sky, etc.

 

[julienlegault]

Not to mention without seasons crops wouldn't grow and weather may well be non-existent lol...

I just burned through LeGuin's "The Tombs of Atuan", and sections of the book take place under a vast series of underground tunnels where you cannot tell time, and she plays with time by having a character trapped under there, not knowing how long he's been there, etc. That, to me, was a perfect use of time interwoven with plot. I know it's been done before, but it works. Other than that, I don't care if my day is 23 hours instead of 24 if you still eat and sleep at the same times.

On the note of seasons, I agree; I would struggle with a lack of seasonal changes and weather. When you do landscape paintings, you learn the four seasons well, because, as humans, we have such different feelings depending on the time of year. Seasons are a really important part of setting to me. I have played with the idea of certain areas being trapped in a particular season (could be fae influenced, as they are often related to the seasons in lore; have the winter fae created a haven of ice that never thaws? is it upsetting the surrounding area?), but a season-less world would be a sad world to write about for me!

 

[Elder the Dwarf]

E.g. imagine a set of characters travelling on their epic quest throughout the lands, and it takes them a couple of years, and they're going through temperate deciduous forests a lot of the time, and yet somehow it never snows. You could certainly do that, but readers might wonder why it's never snowing. So you kind of would have to mention that there's no seasons, the planet has no axial tilt, the sun always follows the same path across the sky, etc.

I don't know where I live its mostly temperate deciduous and we definitely go years without snow.

 

[Queengilda]

My story is written in an England of the 9th Century A.D. It is a fantasy story of course so there is some historical and some fantasy made up stuff. The calendar year is split up by religious and agricultural festivals. Sundays are referred to as just the Sabbath, and the rest of the days of the week are just work days. The seasons are mentioned, but not necessarily the months. The years of a person's life are measured in the number of harvests winters they have seen, and the year starts in March when the sheep start of lamb and other new life starts to appear. People don't really care about their actual ages, but they do care about their ancestors, and they will go to their family plot in the cemetery to give offerings on the feast of All Souls Day (November 1st to us). As to the actual year it is 892 or 863 they don't really care, and most probably don't even know.

 

[Devor]

I haven't really thought about it yet for my world. But if you want to change the way time is told, I wouldn't worry about info dumping. A lot of this information is for you and can simply be implied, if the details - when taken individually - all feel intuitive enough. And mostly likely you will end up making it relevant - I think it would be kind of hard not to. Off the top of my head a good place to start might be ditching "months" and just using seasons, or using personal elements to define the calendar instead of "official" terms. You can probably avoid using words like "Monday" all together for a while, or suggest that such words end up being regional instead of national.

"My mother always referred to the seventh week of winter as Curse-Bringer, as when she was young her father had died that week in a blizzard. For five days she would refuse each year to leave the house and paint his portrait onto a canvas in her room. On the sixth day, week's-end, she would burn her ugly likeness of him in the campfire."

That's just me typing at random. Another note, if your calendar has a huge change - like two suns or a dozen moons or if the world is just flat - then readers will probably expect a different system for time. Showing them this difference first will help them brace for the different system.

((edit))
To add a thought, it would be really crazy and different if, for instance, something cast a shadow over the sun and made it kind of dark for an hour around midday. Something like that could have huge implications on all aspects of society.

 

[SeverinR]

I try to avoid seconds and minutes, because in the period I write, seconds and minutes weren't a big thing.
Hard to tell a minute when there is no minute hand or second hand.
In truth, they weren't chained to appointments as we are in modern day.
The author I read uses time in candlemarks or chimes(hourly)
She also uses fortnight, moons, and seasons to tell calender time.

Sun dials and sun positioning could describe time of day. Sun up(dawn) sun above you(high noon?) etc.

Commonly; change of sun is a day, change of moon is a month, change of season(3months?)

 

[Lia-Art]

The main fantasy world that I have has a similar time system to earth except days and years are shorter and weeks and months are longer. I've also changed the seasons a bit so each one is more intense. Winter is freezing, summer is burning and spring and autumn are the middle ground.
I thought, to avoid an info-dump is to write a separate story about someone from Earth, from the current Era somehow ending up in my fantasy world, and having them explain the time system through out the story in a way that an outsider would see it.

 

[Legendary Sidekick]

My story takes place on two planets (which were once one planet--not that this detail is mentioned in the story). The planets share an orbit, rotating in opposite directions (like gears).

Point is, I number the days per season (Ex: The 99th of Winter) because there is no moon; therefore, you can't have months. Because the days are just as long on both planets, they can share the calendar.


(EDIT) - Devor, in my story, there are "dark ages" which occur when the planets get close and one eclipses the other for a few years.

 

[Devor]

(EDIT) - Devor, in my story, there are "dark ages" which occur when the planets get close and one eclipses the other for a few years.

That's awesome. I hope you do it well.