Celebrations!
Tonight, let’s talk about celebrations, both from literary and literal perspectives. Because this month marks 10 years of running this blog, I’ll start with ways I’m celebrating in real life, then move into how celebrations can flavor world building.
I’m celebrating this blog this month by writing an entry every month, using topics provided by people I asked on Twitter and Facebook. How do I celebrate 10 years of maintaining this open journal which chronicles my thoughts and feelings on the road to becoming an author? By giving myself more work!
“Brian, you’ve done such a good job that I’m going to make you write an essay every night for 31 days. Yes, you have to.”
It is a way I celebrate, though. I enjoy this. Writing both thrills and calms me, even when the writing is this sort of free and direct speech into a blog. I prefer writing fiction and crafting interesting narratives, but blogging has its charms.
Last weekend, at Baycon 2023, the entire convention felt like a celebration of getting The Repossessed Ghost out into the world. The official release is still a few days away, but people at the convention were able to get the book ahead of everyone else, even those that pre-ordered. There were so many people at the convention that I’ve known over the years that have genuinely supported me and my writing, and most of them bought my book and had me sign it. I defaced their books with my signature and sincere appreciation. Also, complete strangers bought my book and also had me sign it. The whole weekend felt like an out of body experience, where this guy that looks and talks like me was having the time of his life. Baycon 2023 helped me celebrate the release of my book, and it was hard to come back to the “real world” after that.
Celebrations are a part of our culture, both in society and in our family groups. Christmas from family to family looks different. So does Thanksgiving, and Halloween, and the various Hallmark-invented holidays that American culture both celebrates and endures. My family (as in me, Melissa, Bryanna, and Christopher) tends to have more subdued holiday celebrations.
We’re just now on the other side of the celebration of the 4th of July. My family used to go to the mall near Sunrise, where we’d sit on the grass and watch the fireworks show. Sometimes we’d buy fireworks to light up at home, but most years we left the pyrotechnics for others. This year, the kids were off on their own, celebrating in their own ways, while Melissa and I turned on the sprinklers and hoped our pyromaniac neighbors would fail in their efforts to burn down our home. We kept thinking of Melissa’s Dad, that served several tours in Vietnam, and how the loud fireworks were terrible for him.
Our real-world experiences of celebrations can inform our writing, and can make our worlds and our characters more realistic and relatable.
Let’s start with world building. Societies share celebrations. If you’re fictional society doesn’t have regular celebrations or rituals, you’re missing out. With more fantastical settings, the changing of the seasons often have significance, whether its as mundane as a marking of when farming can happen, or whether its something supernatural, such as Death Magic works best in Winter. How did your fictional society rise up? Is there a battle that they commemorate, perhaps by setting fire to an effigy of the dead god that forsook them?
I’ve talked in the past about world building, and how I think authors can get distracted by it and do way more than they need to. When dealing with the setting, you could do worse than having some kind of culturally significant celebration take place when things are happening in your story. Diehard did this and changed what it means to be a Christmas movie. In the cyberpunk novel I’m working on, the company my protagonist works for will definitely have some kind of celebration over the destruction of one of the rival companies, to promote brand loyalty and encourage the workers to stay the course.
Celebrations in stories can enhance the setting, but it can also be part of the plot.
Additionally, how your characters react to celebrations can speak volumes about who they are, and make them more interesting. Does your fearless vigilante eschew holiday festivities because they were an orphan growing up, and they cannot bring themselves to open up during that time because of the pain and trauma they continue to carry with them? Or, maybe your fearless vigilante goes overboard with holiday festivities specifically because they were an orphan, and burying their found family in gifts and food is their awkward way of showing their love and appreciation.
When writing about celebrations to create interesting worlds and characters, we can draw from our experiences and make our writing authentic. This is one of those places where “write what you know” can be used appropriately. By that I mean, you can reach into your own experiences, knowing what it feels like to wake up on Christmas morning, excited to check under the tree for presents you were hoping for. You can impart those same feelings onto your fictional celebrations, or fill your characters with the same excitement and anticipation. Just remember that “write what you know” should not be taken literally.
It’s been 10 years of blogging here. Thank you for stopping by to visit, and thank you for helping me celebrate!
