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Calendars in Fiction
I have been phoning it in a bit lately. It’s the time of year during which all I want to do is eat tons of food in preparation for the coming hibernation season. That is why there has been less rhyme or reason to the flow of Shelf Life articles lately, if you have noticed that. If you have not noticed that, I appreciate you.
I talk about “phoning it in” kind of a lot and I was just about to comment that kids in the future won’t understand the phrase because they don’t use “the phone”; I mean, they use cell phones but not for talking. Then I realized I was “kids in the future” because I couldn’t put my finger on where the phrase comes from. I know what it means but when I tried to think of the origin, I could not. So I looked it up, and it is (apparently) a 1930s joke among thespians about performing small roles over the phone instead of showing up to the theater to perform in person.
This has gobsmacked me because that is a practice that actually happens now, usually in animation and voicework. Small roles may not require an actor to travel to where the other actors are recording; they can record lines locally and send the recording digitally to be incorporated into the rest of the voice performances. I heard somewhere that’s how a lot of Bojack Horseman was made, how they were able to get so many famous actors and celebrities to participate.
Thus, the phrase “phoning it in” has met its logical end; it’s no longer a joke. It’s just how business is done. We need a new phrase.
Anyway I’ve been—faxing it in?—a bit lately and I hope you don’t mind. Today is more of the same. Get ready for a short and inconsequential Shelf Life so I can go back to shoveling ice cream into my face hole and planning to sleep till spring.
Today’s Shelf Life is about calendars in fiction. Not like a character who has a calendar on the wall of their home, but in the sense of paying attention to the passage of time around your character and their associates as they make their way through the plot.
Why is this important? Because the passage of time and how it relates to people’s activities is a crucial but sometimes overlooked part of your setting. For example: In the United States, children regularly go to school for five days on then two days off. They have additional days off here and there (holidays, in-service days) but the five-days-on-then-two-off routine is the norm. A student in the United States might not go to school on a Monday if the school is closed, but they’re absolutely not going to go to class on Saturday, or for fourteen days in a row without a weekend.
Not all workers in the United States have weekends, but most workers have days off from work on a regular basis—not sick days or vacation days, but days when they are not scheduled to work. Sometimes that means Monday through Friday with weekends off. Sometimes that means three days working in a row and then four days off (not an unusual schedule for nurses). Sometimes it means fourteen days on then seven days off (a shift schedule outlined in the electrical workers’ union rules). Whatever someone’s schedule is, they’re probably accustomed to a certain number of days in a given period that they don’t work. If someone is working nonstop, every day without any days of rest, that’s probably something that’s burning them out. (Disregard if your character is a solo farmer or an American railroad worker.)
If you’re writing speculative fiction like science fiction or fantasy, maybe your world doesn’t have “work days” and “weekends.” Maybe you’re writing medieval-style fantasy where the serfs work every day and the gentry don’t work at all. That’s fine, but there must be holidays—right? As far as I know, there’s never been a human culture that doesn’t have holidays. If your characters are humans, or based on humans, they must have some sort of cultural traditions or celebrations that might include special food, festivities, and rest from work. And these are probably things that come around on, you know, some sort of cyclical basis.
In science fiction your characters might not be human or even humanoid. That’s fine. That’s actually what makes science fiction so great. I’m tired of humans. Sometimes it feels like everyone I meet is a human. I’d like to meet some other kind of person sometime, other than human. But anyway, whether your characters—if they are not human, humanoid, or at all like humans—do or don’t celebrate holidays, take rest days from work, or give their youth rest from days of education (and so on), that’s something that you might want to address somewhere in the story.
An alien race based on ants or bees (how novel, I know, never been done before) might not have days of rest as part of their culture—real-life ants and bees being creatures we see as totally industrious, living to work. What might their holidays or cultural celebrations look like, then?
So, time is a construct—never more evident to me than in the week when Daylight Savings Time has begun or ended—but you know what’s not a construct? Seasons. Seasons are real. Here in Maryland, the weather is different in the winter and summer (6 months each) and the spring and fall (forty seconds each). When I lived in Los Angeles, we actually had all the same seasons that Maryland has, they just weren’t organized chronologically but instead geographically. Meaning, LA proper is in the perpetual spring-summer time but drive three hours to Big Bear and it’s winter.
Other places don’t differentiate their seasons so much by ambient temperature but by rainfall—some places have a wet and a dry season. In the northern hemisphere December is cold and July is warm, but that’s not universally true. Further, not every culture has four seasons. Plenty of cultures have two (dry and wet, as mentioned above) and plenty of others have six. This is before we even consider tourist season and what that means to different places around the globe. These are all important to keep in mind as you’re writing. Depending on your setting—real, real-ish, or completely fictional—seasonal changes will affect your characters.
Now to my favorite part of any Shelf Life, which is: How to take the above information and make an action plan. Below, a few things to keep in mind as you’re writing to make sure you don’t let time keep on slipping without incorporating its passage into your manuscript at least to the minimum degree needed for things to make sense.
Work and School Schedules
As I mentioned above, try to keep in mind how your character’s occupation affects their relationship with time (specifically vis a vis the calendar). Something I have kind of noticed in the course of my life is that people who work retail and service jobs are aware that people with office jobs tend to work Monday through Friday and have weekends off; but people who have office jobs tend to forget that people with retail and service jobs don’t typically work Monday through Friday and have weekends off.
Is your character a nurse in a hospital? If so, it’s unlikely he works a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday-with-weekends-off schedule. Is your character an office dweller? Then there probably needs to be an explanation if they’re working nights or weekends. Bartender? There’s no way this person doesn’t work on Friday nights. I used to work at a video rental store and my schedule was 2:00 pm to 12:30 am five days per week, and I worked every Friday and Saturday night (no exceptions!!). That really affected when I was available to go on a date with someone.
Students (in the United States) tend to be off school on weekends, on established holidays, and for extended periods a few times a year (spring, winter, and summer breaks). They don’t go to class ten days in a row, or season in and season out without a break (if a student is doing “summer school,” that would be worthy of special mention as being outside the norm).
Another consideration for people who haven’t been in school for a while (like me), if you are writing about school-age people, is to research how schools are run now. The schools now, as described by my friends who are teachers or my friends with school-age kids, are unrecognizable from how they were when I went. Which, good, school was misery.
Holidays
As I said already, every culture has holidays. If you’re writing characters who hail from an existing culture (if it’s not one you’re personally familiar with), make sure you do your homework. Again, for those of us in the United States, our work culture is not the norm. People I work with in other countries, with other cultures, have different (and more) holidays and festivals—and associated time off for those!—than what’s the norm in here. It’s also normal in other developed countries (in a lot of Europe) for workers to have multiple weeks of paid holiday time off, which they might take all at once and just be gone from work for weeks or a month in the summer. Something to consider if you are writing characters who have immigrated to America, or Americans visiting or working in other places.
If you’re writing speculative fiction you get the pleasure of inventing holidays for your characters’ cultures—which I recommend you do, because it would be odd if they didn’t have holidays. Something to keep in mind is that an agricultural/preindustrial culture is likely to have holidays based around seasonal changes or important times of year (planting, harvest) where a militarized culture is more likely to have holidays celebrating historic military victories and renowned war heroes and (what I think of as) a more enlightened, highly developed country might have holidays celebrating important historic figures in the art, science, and culture.
Religious holidays will play a part in any culture that has a dominant or state religion (kind of like how xmas is a Christian holiday but is celebrated near-universally in the US even though our adult population is around 65 percent Christian). Unless your (real or) fictional society is religiously intolerant, the population is likely aware of the major holidays associated with the non-dominant religions as well.
Climate Patterns
Finally, when writing about a real place, make sure you’re aware of their seasons and the cyclical changes to climate and atmosphere that happen over time. In August where I live, you can’t go out after dark without being eaten alive by mosquitos. I don’t think ever saw a mosquito in Los Angeles, in August or any other time. How does local climate affect aforementioned items like work and school schedules? Do the kids get snow days? Do adults have to leave 20 minutes of extra time in the morning for half the year to scrape frost off the windshield to drive to work?
If you’re creating a fictional setting, be mindful of how the setting’s climate and its changes throughout the year (or whatever period of time comprises a revolution around their star) affects the lives of the characters. A great example of throwing a wrench in the usual nice-spring-hot-summer-cool-fall-cold-winter for speculative fiction is from GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones), in which seasons could last years or decades and there was no predicting when the season would change. While that got lost in the TV show in favor of the politics, that’s where the “Winter Is Coming” catchphrase came from. It might be winter for six months or it might be winter for sixteen years and you can only hope you’ve set enough resources aside to make it.
Personally, I have not set enough resources aside to make it through winter but I have five grocery stores in walking distance so unless society collapses in the next three months (very possible!!!!) I’ll be okay.
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