(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . WriteOn! Times, they are a-changin' [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-13 We’ve had some amazing WriteOns lately about language and names, so let’s look at another things that’s different… time. Measuring Time We commonly measure time in days, weeks, months, and years. Annual cycles have been around as long as we really have history, and same with days. But the rest? Cultures have measured time based on seasons. The growing season; the harvest season; the cold season. Or four: planting, growing, harvest, cold. Or three: rabi, karif, and zaid. But are weeks consistent? Months? How do you measure time in the Arctic Circle, where there is a Long Day and a Long Night? Think back to names — the names we use on the Julian calendar are from Rome. August, after Augustus. July, after Julian. Days were taken and given to different months at different times. Are times for your people different? What is time for your culture? What does your character use to measure time — hours or hands of poker, sunrise and sunset or the ‘movement’ times of dusk and dawn versus the cold night and the boiling hot day? How does your culture look at time? Is it measured in campaign seasons or annual harvests and famines or generations? How does time affect your character? How does climate shape time? The Changes of Time Now let’s look at something very different — the seasons of the market. Each genre has riess and falls. Young Adult as an age category has only been around for about 15 years or so, but its had seasons as well. In YA fantasy, you’ve had the era of dystopian and that of vampires and now the fae. What marks a generation of fiction, when time is measured in subject and prose? 1) POV and depth: The old becomes new, and the new, old. Omniscient POV was popular in the 60s and 70s, while 1st person thrived in the pulp novels of the 80s with asides to the reader. Today, genre fiction loves the idea of deep POV and unreliable narrators. Intimacy of perspective rather than breadth of perspective. 2) Vibe: Looking at my ‘home’ genre of fantasy, it involved adventure and discovery in the 70s and 80s. The 90s and early 2000s were a dive into dark, gritty fantasy: amorality, the crushing weight of oppression and corruption, the compromises made with morals to survive. In the late 10s and into the 20s, there was a move back to the bright victory of morality and change for the better that so marked the 60s and 80s, and now there’s a new vibe forming of coziness and people making their small part of the world a slightly better, more welcoming place. 3) Scope: Are the ranges of your genre broad and expansive, or diving into the characteristics of a town and village, the expanding texture of a day? 4) Privilege: Whose stories get to be told? Who is the hero of the story, and who is the villain? Who exists in the tales, and who is minimized or even erased? This is painfully relevant in today’s era of book bannings, but this is not the only era of bannings or erasure of a minority or underclass. Whose stories are told? Whose stories are heard? Now to our work and reading We write here, but what we write is grounded in what we read and what we experience. Time shapes us as much as language does, and time can differentiate us as well. Beyond that, whose time is it in the sun? Who is endarkened, to look at Thud by Sir Terry Pratchett? Today’s Challenge: Time Take your characters or stock characters and examine how time is marked, how it passes, or how it is lost. READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/13/2163724/-WriteOn-Times-they-are-a-changin Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/