Place names, writing fantasy, and links

Last Friday, we were driving back from holiday, passing through Wiltshire and Somerset (in the U.K.), and at the same time, I was just starting the latest big fat fantasy novel I’d come across. (Well, not at exactly the same time, but, you know what I mean.)

Anyway, one of the coolest things about taking that route (other than getting to pass through Bath on the way) is seeing the names of the towns and villages that you go through.

Names are important. They tell whole stories just by themselves. For example, on our drive, we passed Dead Maids and Cold Ashton. I have no idea what the story behind ‘Dead Maids’ is, but you don’t have to to immediately know there is a story there.

If we’d been a bit further south, we might have passed through Buckland St. Mary or Netherhampton. If we’d been a couple of hundred miles further north, in Yorkshire, we could have been in the fantastically named Ravenscar (the ‘scar’ being evidence of the Norse influence in the region, deriving from the word for a cliff or a steep, rocky slope) or Stainforth.

Every one of these names is suggestive of a history, a location, and a culture. Just by their names, they conjure little stories.

By contrast, the fantasy novel I started reading was full of the far-too-common fantasy nonsense names, like Blargh and K’ching (I made these up, to save the blushes of the author of the book I’m reading now). These randomly made up names do absolutely nothing for a book. They don’t give a sense of place or culture, and they certainly don’t give any history. They make a book feel thin.

Tolkien, of course, was the master of using names to lend verisimilitude to his books (look at how the names of places reflect the history and the nature of their peoples). George RR Martin does it well, too, with names of places in the North and Dorne being quite different from those in the Riverlands, and different again from those in other countries. (There is a reason Vaes Dothrak is not next to Riverrun; the names tell you about the people, their culture, and the place; they’re not random names.)

There’s not really any excuse for using random combinations of letters as names of places in fantasy novels. It’s simply the equivalent of shouting, ‘Hey! I couldn’t be bothered to do any real worldbuilding for my book!’ Which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly a selling point.

Anyway, because we were on vacation last week, I didn’t do any work, so this coming week, I’m on super-extra focus to make some real progress in figuring out my next book.

Oh yeah. And I’ll be setting it in the real world. Where the names have already been sorted.

And the obligatory links:

An awesome webcomic by The Oatmeal about the mantis shrimp. The mantis shrimp is awesome. And hard. Really hard.

If you use WordPress for your website, almost every plugin you use will load extra junk into the site, slowing it down. This plugin can help you control that and speed things up again. I’ve been doing this manually, but for my next site, I’m going to try this.

A new type of Tyrannosaur with a long snout found in China. We love dinosaurs. Yes we do.

The image of the map in the header is an old map of Yorkshire from a photo by Richard used under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic license.