Monday 4 July 2011

Research and language creation

Looking at the title I've just realised that I'm absolutely rubbish at coming up with titles, for blogs and for stories. I need to work on that.
Anyway, back to the task at hand. Last night, while watching Lord of the Rings, extended edition, I was inspired. It was great. I was just sat on my bed, surrounded by paper and writing stuff about the world that I'm planning to set most of my stories in. I ended up doing lots of organising, which let's face it, I love. I've finally found a way to bring in the elves and dwarves and other crazy creatures that make fantasy more fantastic. I blame Terry Brooks for this of course. Him and Tolkien. First I had to figure out what kinds of creatures I wanted to include within Geniania (that's the world, yes.. the name needs a little work) and then I had to figure out why they didn't appear in the history of the countries I'd already written about. I've got the first few figured out but may well include others later as I write stories in other countries.
I'm also, dare I say it, looking at creating languages for these other races which is both exciting and nerve-wrecking. I probably won't use much of any languages I do create, just a few words. Either way though I'm hoping that it's going to be a fun and interesting thing to do, even if it has little baring on the stories themselves.
People are probably reading this and wondering why am I putting so much research and work into backstory that won't be relevant to the stories themselves or that the readers may well never hear about. People could think "it's fantasy, why do you need to research anything? You can just make it up and say it's that way because the world says so" There's a simple answer to both of those questions. It makes the world and its people seem much more real. I could simply start writing without doing any of this research but I'd probably get stuck halfway through and get my facts all mixed up.
There's other stuff I need to research too but it's not really world specific, more story specific and it would give things away. All this research could very well see me in the library at some point though so I need to track down Nottingham Library as well as Cotgrave and West Bridgeford so that I can have a wander around.

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