Lucid Writing Advice IV

It would seem that writing fantasy would be easy, but yet there are an abundance of challenges that the writer must face. This article will give you a better grip on tackling the aspects of creating worlds, and the people who populate them.

No world that is to sustain life exists without water, unless the people who inhabit it are completely bizarre in design. I’ve never heard of a world that doesn’t have a desert or at least a region cluttered by perpetual glaciers.

When designing a world its prudent that you at least have a means to keep the life on your world on-going no matter what such a source may be. The worst way of doing things would be to suddenly think up a story, start writing and describing details of your world as you go along, then suddenly forget everything-a stream turns miraculously into an ocean, a desert becomes an on going oasis, cities go through several different names.

Start by drawing your world out, denoting where you want cities, rivers, oceans, continents, forests, and mountains to be placed. But before you do this there are a few things you should understand.

Cities and water: In today’s era, cities are everywhere, such as Las Vegas. In medieval times, assuming that’s the time period of your fantasy, cities were built where the people could be best supported. Usually, this was near or around bodies of water, preferably rivers. In this instance, people wouldn’t dehydrate by walking countless of miles just to reach a river you drew too far south.

Most of the well populated cities, however, could manage a few miles from water because of the invention of aqueducts, or whatever you may chose to call them. If you go even deeper into thought, you can place a city anywhere, assuming your world has under-ground water.

Forest: They are inhabited by countless animals, which if you chose to send your characters to one of these, you have the great liberty to name some of the strange animals in your world. Forests can be as small as a couple of miles, to hundreds of miles. Unless your characters know every corner of their world good, don’t suddenly believe they will know the why out of every forest you put them in. Plan the scene first, and give discernible landmarks that may help them find their way.

If you decided to place a city inside of a forest, be sure that somewhere amongst all those trees there are streams. People can’t bathe in sap.

Mountains: When you think ‘mountain’, you probably envision a snow-capped peak smothered in wisps of white clouds-such a vision is good, but mountains are like people: some sort, some tall. Mountains can vary in size such as the Appalachia and Rocky Mountains here on earth. Mountains can be cold, but only if they are very high. They can be covered in grass or forest. Putting a forest there will mean some of the animals you would find elsewhere in the world would not be there because of the climate differences.

If you suddenly decide to force people in your story to live atop a high snow-peaked mountain, you’ll have a lot of explaining to do for the reader.

You might have read a fantasy, or made one up yourself, and fall face first on the first sentence because you couldn’t pronounce a character’s name. Fantasy is full of fancy names, which tends to make it even more fantastic. Making up names in some cases is one of the toughest jobs about writing fantasy, unless your akin to sticking to more traditional names: Bob, Joe, Bubba.

If you decide to design a character’s name, you want to try and make that name worthwhile. I have devised a system to helping design characters’names below: