This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends.

If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit

www.patreon.com slash writing excuses.

Season 19 episode 9

This is writing excuses rituals rights and traditions 15 minutes long because you're in a hurry and we're not that smart. I'm Aaron

I'm dong one. I'm Fonda. I'm Mahathab.

And we are going to talk today about tradition. We're going to be talking about what happens when you take beliefs in a world

and make them tangible by turning them into practices. This happens in our real world and it often happens in our fiction and I'm wondering how do y'all do that? Have you done it? Are you interested in doing it? How do you

tackle it? You know, absolutely. I think it is definitely a very important, I would say a point for world building because that is how people, like first of all, you know, when you develop rights or any kind of rituals, which is, and I'm talking about experience,

which is what I did for my novel Valley of the Rats, I built up these traditions and these

rights that the people in the village go through and that was how I actually discovered

a little bit more about my people it's what they believe it makes them a little bit more real and

it was an aspect of world building which made it really

interesting. Same I love incorporating rituals, rights and traditions into my world

building. If you think about our own daily lives, we go through the world performing a whole series of

rituals, rights and traditions, many of which were somewhat unconscious of, right?

Everything from our day-to-day practices of, you know,

holding the door open for another person

to the order in, you know, which your family members talk when they're gathered together.

To big-scale traditions like our holidays and our societal values and principles,

like those all feed so much into our day-to-day lives

that to the extent that we can incorporate them into our fiction it will make our

...