Should I make up my own names for the days of the week/months
I'm writing a light fantasy book. I think it will end up falling into the YA genre.
I'm considering making my own names up for the days of the week/months. The book is set in a fantasy world, so it would make sense, but I feel like I'm over complicating things if I do that. It also feels a little pretentious
Should I do it anyway?
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Since you feel there's no reason for your world to have the same days of the week as our world (that's reasonable), why must your world have weeks at all? Why must the weeks be of X days? A month is a length of time that's tied to a natural phenomenon - the turn of the moon around the earth. The week is tied to nothing but religion. Is there a similar justification for it in your world?
You can, if your story demands it, make some justification for having weeks, you can pick the length of those weeks, you can have weekly day(s) off, you can choose the names of the days (although some cultures just have names that mean 'first', 'second' etc., so that too is an option).
But consider first - why do you need this at all? What does your story gain, that would not be expressed by "on the tenth day of the seventh month"? If your story would gain something by adding day names, go ahead and add those. If it gains nothing, don't bother. ("The tenth day of the seventh month" is how the Torah sets up Yom Kippur, btw. So that's a real-life example.)
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You don't need to invent new names for concepts, unless they somehow relate to the storyline.
Instead, use relative names like tomorrow and yesterday, but not Thursday or next-week. Relative Celestial names like "next month" or "after the new moon" or "next growing season" are totally transferable too.
+1 for realising its pretentious. Remember the Fiction Rule of Thumb in https://xkcd.com/483/
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You are creating a world and a society. Have faith in your choices and create your own names for months if you wish. What reason would your world have for having months named after Roman emperors?
You could have your world follow a lunar year as that is more intuitive. New month, new moon.
It is your world. As long as the paradigm holds, go for it. You can even rename the seasons, the reader will know that a harvest season is probably late summer and fall. We have artificial divisions of time based on religion, the industrial revolution and emperors your world never knew.
One could say that authors need to be pretentious to carry off the world crafting and give the characters an appropriate setting and culture.
Make it different and have fun doing it.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41148. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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