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Every culture tells stories. We keep our history alive this way. We all have rituals, whether they are secular or deeply religious. When you’re worldbuilding, you can communicate a plethora of culture and history through the traditions and festivals your characters observe.

Coming up on December 10th, I’ll teach Christmas in Narnia: Creating Traditions for Fictional Cultures for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers. Pardon the frosty pun, but a fictional holiday is an excellent tip to the iceberg of your world’s history. Consider the wealth of similarities and differences of the festivals of lights that originate from the Northern Hemisphere of our planet alone:

During the season of autumn into midwinter, things get darker and colder in most of the NH. The further north you go, the more stark that dark and cold becomes. Many traditions originating in the Northern Hemisphere have celebrations and rituals revolving around light and warmth at this time. India and its diaspora bring us Diwali and Deepavali, two different but similar multi-day festivals of lights, color, and life. Judaism celebrates Hanukkah as the observance of a historical miracle”“eight nights of light produced from barely any fuel oil. A fun side note: we eat fried foods like latkes and donuts on Hanukkah to represent the bounty of the oil! Who wouldn’t love a holiday that prescribes feasting on greasy carbs?

On Christmas, people celebrate the birth of the Christ child, destined to bring light, love, and goodness into a harsh world. As Christianity spread through Europe, this tradition appropriated, fused with, and replaced several midwinter traditions, such as the birth of God of the Wood on the winter solstice. This nature-based deity literally brings the light and warmth back into the world as the days finally grow longer instead of shorter. In addition to a festival of eating and drinking (lots of drinking), popular Christmas tradition involves putting candles and electric lights on everything, particularly an evergreen tree. That tradition did not come from Nazareth.

Notice that these traditions change over time and will even be different in each family or community. Just as no ethnic group is a monolith, neither is any religious or secular culture. There’s so much room here for worldbuilding, not to mention internal as well as external conflict. Some progressive Jewish families have introduced an orange among the symbolic food (roasted egg, lamb bone, bitter herb, et al.) of the Passover Seder plate, meant to remind us of the struggle of women, lgbtq+ folks, and people of color in Judaism as well as all who face intersectional struggles and are often left out of the popular image of the Jewish community.

I have a Jewish mother and an essentially Unitarian father. I grew up with secular Christmas as well as a heritage-rich Hanukkah, but I’ve always gravitated toward Pagan traditions. As a kid, I was particularly smitten with the Egyptian and Greco-Roman pantheons and stories, and I assume this is because I grew up in Miami, Florida. Flowers, fruit, and flowing water made more spiritual sense to me than the scarcity theme prevalent in Abrahamic traditions. This is the sort of subtlety that can communicate the history of a culture; temperate or tropical traditions are more likely to celebrate abundance and indulgence. Desert cultures are more likely to emphasize struggle, scarcity, and abstinence, but also patience and most importantly, charity. It’s no coincidence that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity share these values and emerged from cultures living under harsh political and geographical conditions.

This brings us to another important subtlety of cultural norms. How hot is “hot?” How cold is “cold?” For that matter, how far is “far?” Does “nice” mean polite and friendly, or does it mean kind and empathic? These are the questions that shape so many nuances of a community and its culture, whether macro scale or micro. And don’t overlook the secular traditions”“what does Tax Day tell us about capitalist cultures? What about the Queen’s Jubilee? For that matter, what about Juneteenth?

For more on this, please join me for Christmas in Narnia: Creating Traditions for Fictional Cultures on December 10th. Happy holidays!

Bio:

Evan J. Peterson is an author, game writer, and Clarion West alum. His latest book is METAFLESH: Poems in the Voices of the Monster (ARUS Entertainment), and recent work includes Drag Star! (Choice of Games), the world’s first drag performance RPG. His writing appears in Weird Tales, Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology, and Queers Destroy Horror. Evan’s serial novel, Better Living Through Alchemy, will be published in 2023 by Broken Eye Books. linktr.ee/evanjpeterson can tell you more.

Site: www.evanjpeterson.com
Twitter: @evanjpeterson
Insta: @evan.j.peterson

A student wrote in to let me know they’d made it into Odyssey, huzzah, and asked if I had any advice about attending a workshop. As a matter of fact I do. Like many things in life, you get more out of a workshop if you’re willing to invest a little effort beforehand, during, and afterward.

I went through a number of workshops in college at both the undergraduate and graduate level, but the place where I learned the most was Clarion West, a six week workshop in Seattle. My instructors were Octavia Butler, Andy Duncan, L. Timmel Duchamp, Connie Willis, Gordon van Gelder, and Michael Swanwick; my classmates included Ann Leckie, E.C.Myers, Rashida Smith, and Rachel Swirsky, among others. If you read a lot of F&SF, you may recognize many of those names and realize how incredibly privileged I was to be part of that year.

How I Prepared

• Read work by your instructors. At least a few stories or a novel. Get a sense for what they will be able to give; there will be things you won’t expect, but you will learn what you like and dislike about their writing and what you want them to teach you.
• Come with story ideas. Not stories, but prompts and scenes. A list of potential titles. A page where you took fifteen minutes to generate ideas.
• Put other shit on hold. Clear the decks so unrelated work and deadlines is not distracting you. You want to give it your all. The spouse of one of my fellows had their children writing letters saying how much they missed the parent and wanted them to come home, and it was one of the clearest examples of someone sabotaging their partner that I have ever witnessed. Don’t let anyone do this to you. Make the most of the workshop while you can.

Useful Things I Did

• Go first. One of the things that has stood me well in life is a habit of volunteering to go first, mainly due to a let’s-just-get-this-over-with-already impatience. I’ve done it every time I’ve been in a workshop and it helps you not feel that you have to live up to earlier examples. Do a nice job and you can actually be that intimidating classmate whose work people worry about living up to.
• Talk to people. Your fellow students are a peer group you’ll be interacting with for years to come. Be a good citizen and avoid being a jackass, even if it’s your natural tendency. Ask people questions more than you tell them about yourself. Listen.
• Take good notes. I like to write stuff down, at the time in Moleskinnes. If there was ever a time for learning to write good notes, this is it. If you have difficulty, you might ask your classmates about recording.
• Take care of your body. Six weeks is a long time and one in which health issues can develop if you’re not careful. Stretch. Walk daily; work out a few times each week if you can. You will emerge more energetic and creative as a result of investing that time and effort.

What I Would Have Done Differently

• You can’t go home again. I did go home two weekends in order to hang with my spouse and cats. In retrospect, while that did recharge me, I should have spent that time hanging out with my classmates since that time was pretty finite.
• Take some board games. I don’t know why I didn’t think to do this, perhaps because we weren’t gaming as much then as we used to. I would take games that were easy to teach, had a timespan of never more than an hour or hour, and which stressed creativity. Examples: Codenames, Dixit, Fiasco, Microscope.

Life Post-Workshop

• Grieve that idyllic life a bit. It’s okay to mourn. You will miss some of your classmates fiercely. Some will become lifelong friends; others will fade back into the world and never be heard from again.
• Go back over your notes. I still go back over my notes periodically, sometimes making notes in a different color; I’m about due to review these again.
• Write and write and write some more. Apply what you’ve learned. Experiment. Reply to other people’s stories with your own. And send stuff out. And welcome to you. Once you have made the first sale of six cents or more a word, join SFWA, but even before then use its resources like the SFWA Blog, Writer Beware, and the SFWA reading series across the country.

Can’t make it to a live workshop? There’s also plenty of online ones. My own Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers features two this weekend: How to Write Better Food with Cassandra Khaw and Ideas Are Everywhere with Rachel Swirsky.

Here’s a full list of live classes and details about how to take one for free. Or consult the excellent list of speculative fiction workshops Kelly Robson has compiled.