Yuffie's Writing How-To's

How to create a CALENDAR

You made up your own world, filled it with your own made-up civilizations, wrote history books and religious texts for each civilization, and . . . you're done!

Nope, sorry. There's still an important piece of world building to cover: THE CALENDAR.

Dating events and creating a history for your fantasy/dystopian/sci-fi/non-Earth world is extremely important. But how you set up the calendar system can reveal a great deal about the civilization and its values.

If this was a different world, they wouldn't have the same calendar as we do (the Gregorian calendar). A different world might not be the same size as Earth or be the same distance from the sun, thus days might be longer or shorter than 24 hours.They wouldn't have 365 days in a year. Most definitely, a month wouldn't be the same number of days, and even weeks might be more or less than 7 days. The names of months wouldn't be January, February, March, etc. If they have multiple suns/moons, that might complicate things further.

When creating your fantasy/non-Earth calendar, keep in mind that religion and society play HUGE roles in its creation.

I'll exemplify this with the ancient Chinese calendar. Their years are named by the emperor. It's only natural the emperor would name the years of their ruling (the era) after themselves. Then each year of their regime has a separate name corresponding to the number. For example, Emperor Jianyuan named his era Jianyuan. Then the first year of an era is called Yuannian. The second year is Ernian, third is Sannian, and so on. Thus the full name of the year is Jianyuan Yuannian. Year two: Jianyuan Ernian.

Then you get another emperor, Tai Chu, so his years are called: Tai Chu Yuan Nian, Taichu Er Nian, Tai Chu San Nian, etc.

Then they have ten-year cycles, the 10 Celestial/Heavenly Stems. This gives us insight that they believe in a form of heaven or some higher power. In the society you create, you can embed hints of their societal values and religious values in the calendar without outright telling us "They believe in heaven." or whatever it is they blieve in. Then each 10-year cycle corresponds to an element. There's another 12-year version of the calendar where each year corresponds to the Chinese zodiac. There are a lot of variations depending on the region and time period, so that might be something to explore in your world.

Go to a different region, and they'd probably have a different way to tell time and organize the year. Your character might have to get used to shorter weeks or memorize names for different months. Maybe they don't use numbers to count the days. maybe it's like the Mayan calendar where day one is Imix', day 2 is Ik', day 3 is Ak'b'al, and so on. If there was some important event on each day or important people in ancient times, maybe your days/weeks/months are named after them. It'll show us what's important to that society at that time and give us a bit of indirect history as well.

If you still don't believe in the inclusion of society/religion/folklore in calendars, look at our calendar. 1 AD is based on the birth of Christ, which reflects a religious motif. The months are based on the Roman civilization, so they include their language (Octo = Latin for 8), their rulers (July is named after Julius Caesar), and their religion/myths (June is named after Juno, the wife of Jupiter).

Expore the calendars of different cultures on Wikipedia and Google and come up with your own unique way to tell time and dates in your fantasy world. Because if you're on a completely different planet, there's no way you'll have a month named after the Roman god of war or the first Roman emperor.