Worldbuilding Topic

Coming up with the perfect name for a character, a location, or almost anything can be one of the most frustrating parts of worldbuilding, or storytelling in general. At times the perfect name just comes to you, but often, when you have to name a thing before you can move on, it can be feel like nothing fits, and what you settle on sounds like garbage the next time you hear it. It is easy to overthink, especially if it is an important name, like a main character. It is also unfortunately easy to tell when someone has overthought a name. Johnny Stormlash. Nikki Heat. There is a kind of a love of ironically appropriate names, but for me, unless it really fits the genre to be so cheesy, those kinds of names only annoy me. So I'm going to go through some ways to circumvent the brain...

Mountainside Temple in Bhutan Where to begin: Asking Questions I've already talked about this in previous posts because it is one of the key aspects of my methodology when it comes to worldbuilding. If you're stuck, don't know where to go next, don't have any idea what might need to be added to bring some uniqueness to your world, you want to start asking questions. Each answer will provide the potential for new questions, new answers, connections, and patterns to develop. Let us say you know you want a warrior culture, but don't want them to just be Klingons or follow that same honorable warrior cliche. You want something more original. Let's say they are human, for the sake of ease. Where do you go from here? Well, we've already established two parameters for what they need t...