 Fantasy: December 24, 2014 Issue [#6732] |
  Fantasy
This week: Celebrations Edited by: Jay's debut novel is out now!  
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This issue:
Celebrations
Ways to define experience-- tradition and cultural permutation. |
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So, "the holidays" are here, for those of us who celebrate Solstices, Saturnalia, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year's... a pretty broad litany of days with different meanings in different cultures.
A recent conversation got me thinking about my own writing and the cultures that I've created for a speculative fiction series I'm working on-- I realized that for all of the years I've been working on the half-dozen or so distinct cultures that I've developed for this series, I really haven't bashed out a working theory on the religious and secular traditions of these many peoples.
A hell of an oversight, being honest about it.
Certainly, a society that can travel across a galaxy will have enough cultural baggage that it certainly OUGHT to have holidays, whether affiliated with its religions or operating independently of them. Traditions long loosed from their native soils, perhaps. The permutations of tradition are long and winding, living things. It seems natural that beliefs and even superstitions would be a part of life no matter where one's journeys might lead.
Have you made a similar oversight? Here are some of the things that I've contemplated as I've gone about the early steps of trying to mend this particular thing.
 While they're certainly a common choice, find a unique way to express things like birthdays or namedays or other rites of passage. While they're an easy detail to lean on, it's easy to make them, if anything, a little too similar to contemporary culture. Find a way to subvert expectations.
 Pull common elements from distinct sources and find new ways they might work together. One way I came up with for mine was to look at common elements of many celebrations; and one of the key pieces that I came away with for mine was light. Many holidays put an emphasis on some kind of illumination, and this, to me, is a very primal thing. Light in the dark is what separates us from nature-- from the ragged edges of campfire light to the relative comforts of electric lamps, our ability to manipulate the threats of darkness feature prominently in humanity's celebrations, however loosely related. To me, this struck a chord with something I'm trying to do in my own stories, and I started to sketch out some thoughts on how light in darkness might affect different landbound and spacefaring cultures alike. I came up with a few different angles and I'm excited about all of them.
 If you're going to work with things like historic dates or anniversaries, make sure you have a reasonably clear picture of the calendar in your story, even if it's not something your readers will necessarily know. The older a tradition gets, the weirder it gets, and the more removed from its original symbols and so on.
What other ideas do you have? How have you made ways for your characters to unwind and celebrate?
Until next time,
Take care and Write on!
~jay |
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