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I will start by saying I am trying to write a fantasy story in a world I made up and this is mainly about the silly problems I am having with it.
Naming things, I should have realized that I would be terrible at naming things. I used to play computer games with my little sister(she is one of those computer geek types who can spend endless hours playing them) in some of these games you have to name an avatar. If we just randomly decided to play one of these I would spend 4 or 5 hours trying to find a name I liked(if I rushed and got a 'bad' name I would often delete the character after awhile), looking at baby names, using a random name generator, going through the alphabet over and over thinking of names with each letter... We usually decided a few days ahead of time because of this slight problem. Now I have to name of Countries, Regions, cities, towns, deities, and people... so luck may be needed if I want to finish before I am old lady.
evil questions that seem to demand answering if its all going to make sense anyway(reader wont ever really encounter a lot of the stuff and only really see pieces of all these questions)
How does the...work
Tech(cellphones? computers? electricity? castles?)
government(local(elected or appointed?)mayor or councilors, both?)) country(royalty, gods, church, elected, ect)
religion(to many choices to list)
school system(I was trying to find how many children are generally in a town of 300ish because of this one)
magic system(basic rules anyway don't really like it to be all powerful)
economy(what does your average citizen do to win their bread(do they have bread? bah))
travel system(horses FTW! or maybe magical teleporter stones and horses?! better yet I want to fly everywhere(on a horse!))
fashion(leather? satin? cotton? magical grass woven skirts and everyone goes shirtless?)
Bathrooms(how do I give them modern bathrooms without being to farfetched because chamber pots are gross)
Law(prison? banishment? death?)
all that makes up just a tiny piece of the story but when you send your characters to school(like I just did) then don't have a school system.... once I am done with this story I think I will stay really far away from fantasy! Until I am a better writer anyway.
Comments
be careful - details can kill you
You can spend all your creativity on constructing the world... and not have any left for writing the story.
Not holding up Agatha Christie as a paragon of writing, but as a project I took one of her stories apart. This story took place in a big house, and when I tried to map it, I found that all she'd described or mentioned was the front door, the stairs, and a room at the top. Nothing else. And it was the site of all the action.
They sure seem to be
I actually know what I want to write as far as story goes but keep getting caught by these details... a series I was reading recently had characters I liked but, the author stated that "vampires cant use magic" then the big bad was a magic using vampire w/o so much as a "well golly gee I guess some vampires can use magic" I forgave her after a week or so. I would prefer that the world be consistent simply so that readers will not have to forgive my bundle of inconsistencies in order to enjoy the story. I guess I will move the story forward explaining as little as possible while I figure out some of the mechanics.
Just a random rant
Simple, if the story is set before modern conveniences, there can be a war or other event that leaves story in a mixture of old and new. The Pern series is about a colony that regressed and in time reclaimed it's former tech level, yet still is a mixture of medieval and modern. And in the road warrior series, the modern world is replaced with ravaged version.
May Your Light Forever Shine
Rule Number One
If you've read Somewhere Else Entirely then you know I'm facing exactly the same problem. As time goes on the problem only becomes worse...
One rule that I think has helped me enormously writing this, and it seems to bring out the best reader response, is:
Don't explain anything until you really have to.
This means that the reader is in the dark, of course, but she keeps reading in order to find out what's going on. (It also means the writer might be in the dark, but we won't go into that...)
In my case I posited a sort-of medieval society just about to break through into the Industrial Revolution and my heroine helps that along. Now, when I started, I had absolutely no idea that was going to happen, but it all sort of logically followed on from the initial story setup and so I was stuck with it. It has meant that I've been side-tracked several times into helping the society along, at the expense of the main story development. Cue lots of reading, visits to Wikipedia, and a surprising number of spot-on science programs which were shown on BBC4 here just as I was writing that particular chapter...
Keep a file of everything that you name or describe. I started doing that and it survived for about 20 chapters. I'm now up to chapter 52 and relying mainly on the plotline in my head, which isn't funny. I hope I don't get Alzhiemers before I finish! (In my case I seem to have acquired an archivist who has been very helpful jotting down all the things I've neglected to; an Honorable mention must go to Payter Eketta for her sterling work. This will be added to the story page at some point.)
Of course there's actually no reason why you need explain everything in detail. Your readers are (usually) bright enough to figure out unmentioned details for themselves or to make up something which works just as well for them. You need to know such things if only to make sure your tale is consistent; you don't have to explain anything unless it progresses your plot.
Penny
the one advantage is
You're in complete control but make notes as you go along or you'll forget.
Use minimal descriptions, I've done 1700 episodes of Bike and no one knows what the house looks like but all those who've read it will know their way around it on their own map.
Everything works with magic--when all else fails--it's pure magic.
Map your plot first then describe what's required to make it work. For names, just turn ordinary words backwards or jumble them, the name Anne could become Enna, Nena, Nean, Nnae or even Nnea. Just make notes or you'll forget and it's off putting for readers to find the hero's name changes half way through because the author got amnesia.
Anything goes in fantasy, which is why so many are total rubbish, you need a strong story line and make everything else fit it.
Angharad
Toilets
In the middle ages some (many/all?) monastries had toilets with running water to carry the waste away.
If it helps, there are
If it helps, there are actually word generators, (password generators, mostly) that create pronouncable words based upon English syllables and phonemes.
Nobody says you have to make names like kttktchk. Tkatipan looks funny, but it's just a relatively phonetic spelling of the last name of a woman from Thailand that stayed with my family 25 years ago.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Technology etc.
If you're in a world with magic, you can immediately forget about electricity. They can use a mixture of good old-fashioned conventional technology and magic to do things. It's likely buildings will be constructed of the four basic materials still in use nowadays: wood, stone, brick, dung.
Water systems usually work best by gravity, so if settlements are based in valleys, that makes life easier (as long as all the buildings are lower in altitude than the water source, then it will naturally rise up pipework - the siphon effect). Cooking and heating can be done on wooden fires, and you'll probably want glass to exist (maybe even a primitive form of double glazing) to reduce the effort needed to heat buildings (alternatively, set it in a relatively warm climate so they don't need to light fires to keep warm...)
One way of creating names could be to grab a list of ordinary names, then mix up the 'head' and 'tail' ends.
Meanwhile, for simplicity's sake, it's probably easiest to just draw up a rough set of rules for the environment / technology, then only go into more detail as / when the story demands.
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!