I have to do something with this new revision of mine that I’m not too fond of (as in it make my skin crawl like millions of needles on a roller brush). World building. Fortunately, I have an in house expert and I just toss out some words and I get fantastic back story and universe tossed back at me.
Yesterday that involved redefining all of the gods’ relationships to each other, as well as who their children are, etc, etc. So I did something I thought I’d never do – I made an org chart. Okay, technically it’s a family tree, and if I think about it too much that means I’ve got someone hitting on their great aunt at some point in the series, but it’s different with gods, right?
I have a computerized version of what’s in the picture – but mostly because it was more fun to draw circles on the computer and fill them with color-coded names than to come up with the new names for my people. That’s the part that has me hung up now. I have to replace all the old names with new. I could just start writing with the old names and then do a find and replace, but I figure I need to get used to the new names now.
I have two new names so far. I have about 15 more I need to pick. I have a hard enough time coming up with normal people names, so this ought to be interesting to see…but I also have less than a month left for this revision so I really need to get to it.
How do you deal with world-building?
I love world-building, but I hate naming people. My names tend to sound either too ordinary “Bob” or too fantastical “Glenamariacloverfoot”. Bleh. Stupid names.
World-building can be tricky sometimes. You have to be consistent throughout or the reader won’t suspend their disbelief. I have an MG Fantasy I’ve been working on, set in a make-believe world and time frame. I draw on my background and real-life experiences for inspiration (I grew up in the Philippines). As for names, I usually search a baby name generator or something for ideas. But I keep it consistnt (again). The names have to reflect the type of world I’ve created. I don’t do hard-to-pronounce names but I do variations of common names.
Goodluck!
I realized recently that I absolutely love world-building, but it can definitely get difficult (and even frustrating) in places. I’m pretty much at the same place you are, where I’m working out all the relationships and family ties between my gods and goddesses. It’s been pretty tricky keeping everything in order.
As for the names, I have a pretty silly way of making up names for my gods/goddesses. I take a word or a name to use as a “base”, then I change/add letters one by one until I have something that looks nice and is easily pronounceable.