What About Worldbuilding? #27

Would still just be a rose.

That’s it, post over. Great, thanks everyone for reading!

See you next month.

A Rose by Any Other Name…

Is just a rose, seriously. Are you still reading this? Do I need to go on?

Okay, okay. I’ll keep hammering the point home.

Sauron could just be named Jeff and it would be… uh, fine? Wait, that’s a bad example. How about, uhm, if the starship Enterprise was just a serial number… that would be fine?

Okay… we may need to shift gears here.

The Power of a Name

Apparently, names ARE important. This is entirely the point I set out to make when I started this particular post. What sort of madman would question the importance of a name?

Absurd.

The naming of a thing is critical to the lens through which it is viewed, but it must be done with care. Think of it like seasoning something as you’re cooking, you need to be careful how much you use.

Too little? Well, you’ve got something bland and unappealing.

Too much? Hard to consume and likely to turn you off from the rest of the meal.

There’s a delicate balance at work and, on the off-chance I somehow stumbled into being subtle with the preceding simile, it can make or break the story you’re trying to tell.

So, what can we do about this? What’s the right way to name things be it in Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Fairy Tales, Mystery, Thriller, etc… carrying on down the list of genres by decreasing levels of suspension of disbelief until we arrive at the single salient point: Names are a part of the immersive experience being crafted for your reader.

There’s just one teensy problem... There’s no right way to do it. So let’s instead talk about mistakes that you might encounter along the way.

The Perilous Portmanteau

For those unaware (and lacking the willpower to Google it…) a portmanteau is the amalgamation of two words to form a new one. This can range from simple things like the humble cronut, which is forged from croissant and donut, to complex terms like cyborg, which came from a combination of cybernetic and organism.

Portmanteaus can be great fun, and they can quickly allow you to bash together names to make up something that, if not unique, can at least help to make a place or an idea stand out.

The trouble that arises here is that a portmanteau can suffer from blandness and overseasoning without it being apparent. Take, for example, stalactites; Stalactites actually have a portmanteau name associated with them that falls on the far end of the seasoning spectrum. They’re called “lavacicles”.

“Lavacicles”.

I’m not going to repeat it a third time, but you see the issue, right?

As for a bland portmanteau… well, just go look one up. That’s the first sort of problem you may face.

Hell with Hyphens

Otherwise known as the poor man’s portmanteau. Bash two words together and you’re home free… sometimes you don’t even need the hyphen. Kingslayer. Mistborn. [Another reference here].

It can work!

But, once again, it can also fall flat on its face depending on how you use it. Something awful…like... Hang on, trying to make something up. Doombubble? Turtlebombs?

Mermaid-slayer, that’s a bad one. See what I mean? You have to be careful with your hyphens. Some truly horrendous stuff can emergy. Galaxy-blaster, idk.

Just be careful.

Something Borrowed, Something Stolen

Okay, so here’s another way we can name things, and it’s got to do with words from other languages. You can borrow some, you can steal others, but you need to be careful how you dole them out in your story. The wrong loan word can really put folks off from what you’re trying to build.

For example, it might be fun to borrow a phrase from the Russian language and insert it into your Saharan Fantasy epic, but you’d be breaking the immersion a bit, no?

I’m not saying you can’t do something like that, but there’s a time and a place where you can insert loan words and not have it read as a mistake.

Okay, that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Next month we’ll talk about space?? Space is fun.