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I don’t remember who told me this but it was good advice that I have always tried to remember and incorporate.

Never take too much control of your fantasy world to the point where you drown the reader in descriptions of the insignificant minutiae. Do not smother the reader with irrelevancies. Let them have freedom to imagine the less important things for themselves and they will have a more enjoyable time reading what you have written.

When I write, I don’t like to get hung up on petty things.  Like names, for example.

Names are everywhere in a fantasy story and names are, ultimately an important part of the story.  Unless you are writing some sort of comedic fantasy, it is hard to take a take a sorcerer named Tim seriously.  This is why just such a name for just such a character is used in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

But while names are indeed important, they are not something that cannot change. And they are one of the easiest things to change in a story.  We’re not talking about some underlying piece of fundamental physics governing the fantasy world in question where deciding to change it half way through a 400 page novel would require massive amounts of rewriting.  We are talking about a name.

In one of my projects which are in development, I had a particular city that when I first named it as Reisen just never felt right.  Every time I said it, it grated on my mind.  Reisen?  I hated it. But it was a minor part of the story. In fact, it was only mentioned once in the whole story!  But because I had drawn the map of my fantasy world and Reisen was on that map, every time I looked at the map for something else I saw that damned named staring back at me.           Read more…

So I have been sitting down the past couple days and have come up with a bunch of information for my fantasy world. I’ve laid down a lot of important things such as how long the year is, what types of magic exist, the size of the world in question, a back story that sets up why there is the conflict that there is, the pantheon of deities and I even came up with a basic story plot based on all this.

But what started happening actually surprised me a little. I sat down to do some free writing and now, 75 pages and 19,000 words later, I actually have the start of a full blown novel! Not the short story I intended to write!

Bear with me while I grunt in frustration. Ugh! Read more…