Can there be specific dates in novels?

[WinterFall]

Yep. The title says it all.

So basically, I'm kinda torn. I'm writing a new chapter for my novel right now, and yeah. So you see, the main character of my novel is going to have her first day in school, and specifically, everything in my novel is set in Japan.

I was doing some research a while ago for references on how education works in this country, and what a coincidence. The first day of school years in Japan is actually in April, the exact date is either April 7 or April 8, which is actually pretty cool since if I smack that into my novel, that would mean that the timeline in my novel would pretty much have the same timeline as in real life (to Japan, at least).

But then again, for example, what if I put April 8 in the chapter, but I published it on April 10 (haha I mean, it's not impossible since I'm just halfway done with writing the chapter), it would be... a bit weird? I mean, sure, my novel can have a bit of a different timeline... but still. Would it be better to put something like April XX as a date? What would you guys suggest?

[Kelheor]

I have zero idea why would it be weird to have April 8th in the novel and it being published on April 10th...I mean,this is basically just a coincidence, unless your point is to exactly follow the current events and make it a chronicle of 2021 I bet many people will just say "oh, it's April now too, cool".

[WinterFall]

Well... so I guess it doesn't really matter-? I guess I'll just be smacking April 8 in there even if it doesn't exactly follow our timeline. Maybe I'm just overthinking everything again, haha!

[DasIstWunderblyat]

I do not think readers would really mind, they would find it as a nice info or coincidence. Even if you use a full date (day-month-year) which coincides with reality, it is normal too as many stories do that. If you are worried things in the story won't be happening as it is/differ in real life (e.g. your series has no pandemic occuring), that is okay because you are writing a fiction, any readers would assume that is an alternate universe.

What you need to worry is remembering the date and match it with the duration of events in your series. You would like to avoid a mistake such as the date of a week after 8th April shown as 24th.

[WinterFall]

That's a great point! Maybe I should just worry about matching up the events that'd happen in my novel instead of trying to match everything up to reality, lmao.

[ISNEKO]

This is a level of anxiety far greater than my own. This has never crossed my mind. I wish you peace, lol.

[Filosofieke]

I've written a contemporary romance set in Belgian's 2020 fall lockdown and I have always used specific dates, but I often posed weeks later, since I couldn't run ahead of time (the situation here changed to rapidly to do that in an accurate way) which meant I was ALWAYS behind.

I never worried about that. The dates were meant as a recollection for later, for myself, when I would reread, and, perhaps for others, but they aren't story critical.... There also meant to give a feel of how much time is between events, since it's a developing romance...

[WinterFall]

Thank you. I needed this.

[WinterFall]

I see! I guess I really didn't have to worry about this. Thank you for your reply!

[therosesword]

I would say not to worry about it because if a new person signs on to Tapas on August 14th it won't matter at all.

[WinterFall]

...I didn't think of that.

[Darth_Biomech]

I think the only case when dates being weird are the cases when they age like milk with uses like "it was the distant future of 2005, mankind was destroyed by the nuclear war with the soviet union".

In other words it's fine unless you're writing sci-fi about the future.

[WinterFall]

Well, I'm just writing a simple Slice of Life, so... I guess it's fine this way.