Some of you know I'm writing a story about Spirits, Swords and magic. I'm a Lv. 0 writer and have problems in a lot of things. So I need your help. What should be the name of the world in which the story takes place? What should be the name of the Village in which our protagonist resides? Suggest a Title for the story. Are there any stories or novels about Spirits I can take inspiration from?
Yzzendal Grootodia Eldenwald Village names Brook Shire Fairview Faewald Garad Tony's little happy town
there is really no need for name for the world, just think about ours, it's name is earth in almost all language which basically mean dirt. if you gonna make the starting village anything special ( like a lake, vulcano, mine, etc) that makes sense have a name with meaning if not resort to generic or convinient names like corntown, resttown , startville
Here are some sites I've found useful. http://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/ - They have probably hundreds of name generators for everything from modern humans, to gnomes to cities to diseases to spells. https://www.wordunscrambler.net/word-scrambler.aspx - chuck a word in and take a look at the results to find a good name https://www.thesaurus.com/ - For when you just can't find the right word https://writerswrite.co.za/155-words-to-describe-an-authors-tone/ - I don't generally use this, but it can be useful. Note that it's not a complete list. If you still can't find a good name, you can go on google maps and find some obscure town to name yours after. Or, you can find something around you, and rearrange the word to make it a name. I wouldn't panic too much writing the first chapter or two. If you keep at it for long enough, I can pretty much 100% guarantee that you're going to re-write it anyway.
If the village is really small & only have 1 family name, the village can be named after that family.
Other things you'll need to pay attention to: Keeping the same tense throughout your writing, and the same perspective. If you change your perspective, make sure it's pretty darn obvious or someone's gonna get confused. If you end up with lots of names, make sure everyone has unique names so that nobody confuses them, but not so weird and wonderful that nobody can remember them. Try not to repeat yourself, and keep info dumps to a minimum. Try not to start consecutive paragraphs with the same word, and not to use the same word twice too close together. You appear (from your post, which admittedly isn't a huge sample size) to have a good handle on spelling and grammar, so you have more going for you than a lot of authors already...
If you keep worrying about the little things like that, you'll never get work done. Say, you decided to name your world as 'sample' then along the story you decide to change the name to 'yehey' because of 'plot'. You'll be wasting your time going back and forth changing little details that doesn't really matter in the development phase.(trust me, i'm a programmer, paired with procrastination, i've started 4 projects and finished none) My advice for you is to use placeholders. for example, 'village a', 'person a', etc. etc. After you have your basic outline for the story then thats the time to worry about the little details(polishing). Edit: my advice applies to all the things people recommended, just write your story for now, don't expect it to be perfect, stories always start out as 'drafts' then you polish it overtime for a final product. That's why editors,proofreaders exist.
Pick a real place you have an affinity for. Just cause Paris is a place in reality doesn't mean it can't be an unrelated place in a fantasy.
That's subjective. One of the reasons i stay away from modern earth novels is because i can't subconsciously control my brain not to compare it to real life. especially if its CN novels where almost always all superpowers are all in china and the rest of the world are behind, like hell there's usa, russia, japan etc. etc. Things like that ruin my reading experience as i constantly find myself nitpicking the story itself.
You don't need to put much thought in some place names, have a port at the mouth of a river 'Portsmouth', a town on a river 'Riverton'. Take the Welsh Capital Cardiff, which comes the earlier welsh Caerdyf, caer meaning fort and dyf in reference of the river taff, so Caerdyf means 'the fort on the Taff'.
I have the same difficulty too in naming my characters so I just use randomize name generator from the net, then reshuffle some of the words/letters to makes it more unique and that's how my character's name are born.
Just make it something that's not cringy. You can do that by not using a made up name and actually use a name that has a significance or history behind it, and try to implement that significance in the story. Like if you're going to name something after an ancient Greek god, make sure it has some qualities of that Greek god that would make you name it as such. Like what undertale did with It's characters. And also, are you going to make it a gender bender like I said? If not can you at least add a side character who gets turned into a woman or something in the story? It's a fantasy story right? Everything should be possible! Please, just once won't hurt. As long as its not yuri I'm fine with anything. Come on over to the dark side. You might like it here. Read some Aji Pontarou hentai, that will get you started on the right path and it might also help with the type of story you're writing.
Well, it would be good to figure out your target audience first. A specific ages have different tastes and things you may want to add. Even in swords and magic you can have categories. Heroine or hero? Antagonist or protagonist story points of view? Redemption or adventure or both, or slice of life? Comedy only or semi-serious with a moral or straight serious? Deciding on these helps outline the story and what kind of characters you need to create to populate the world. In one sentence sum up your story u want to tell. Don't mind the details, just super simple in one brief sentence. E.g. I want to tell the story of a brave silly knight who is on a quest to save the princess. Now we add challenges and obstacles for our silly knight to overcome, such as to go in a cave of Amazons who would snoosnoo him to death to obtain x. Then he must travel through the forest of man-eating smurfs... U get the picture.
I think you missed my point. you can have the story be set in the country Trucktar, on the planet Snood, and the main character can inexplicably encounter a place called Bolivia, because in the universe of the story, there is no earth. The name isn't taken. There can be such a place. In fact, if you were writing a modern earth then this kind of misappropriation of names would be somewhat confusing, and you should perhaps pull up a map and use places that make sense, unless it's an alternate earth in which case, ask yourself how alternate you really want to go..
You really don't need to worry that much at the initial stage of the story because such details doesn't matter much to the narrative. But still, you are asking for names. The World: there is no need to name it, unless there is really an important reason to, like multiple worlds. This detail just doesn't matter most of the time. The Village: okay this one is more easy. A village/town/cities tend to be named after prominent features of the place or after significant people. This is kinda nice because it provides history to the place. Title: It is better to do this after you wrote your story or at least have planned significant amount of the story so you'll have better idea what tittle to use. Common is to use the protagonist name/title/alias as the title of the story (Harry Potter, Superman, WALL-E). Another common title convention is to name the story after an vital creature/object/McGuffin (The Sword in the Stone, Dragons of Pern, One Piece).
I think you misunderstood me. I was merely pointing out the flaws of trying to use real world/real life names onto novels. People will subconsciously connect the two together thus if you are not careful you could very well be breaking reader's immersion in reading. Regardless, using placeholders is still the best method. You just need a separate note as a reference for said place holders then you can easily change those placeholders at a later time in the story when you have cemented your storyline, otherwise you are bound to change the storylines many times and changing storylines could mean changing relevant things like if a city is important to said storyline then the city could change as the storyline changes and etc. this creates a huge mess. then again, i never really wrote any story so who am i to tell. i guess just do it and see what works.