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good morning I'm Chris socks and today we're going to be talking about world building specifically how to create names that don't suck this is something that I wrestled with for a very long time how do you make cool named tiny make names that readers will like and understand and it's something that I think that will fuel the rest of your world building if you don't ground your world and easy to understand concepts that really count your reader but they're not going to read far enough to see the really cool stuff that you've created so today we're going to look at some methods that you can use to do that and we're also going to tackle the concept of a series Bible this is a first world building video and kind of the cardinal rule is get your stuff all in one place so we're going to take a look at how I've done that it's kind of a lot to cover in one video so why don't we go ahead and jump into the the meet events okay so let's talk for a minute about the concept of series Bible this is something that I learned that I guess has been around for quite some time and the idea is that you put all of the information about your series in one location and one easy-to-understand repository so maybe you use Dropbox maybe you use Evernote maybe you use a spiral bound notebook maybe like me you put all this information into a Scrivener documents you can see here I've got all sorts of information but the problem I run into in putting in discriminant is that when I start a new book book two in the series and three and four and five I create separate Scrivener documents because it's easier to compile those books and that means that I end up with notes scattered across the series and that's really come back to haunt me so what I have done on this go-around is created the magitek chronicles website and you can see I've got a world page here and what I'm doing is I'm putting all of the information about my world on this page so every concept that I come up with and flesh out will be here in a central place where it's easy for me to look at and I chose to since I had some great artwork created I chose to put this in public so that you can see as well and that fans in the series will be able to come and see it I love doing this world building stuff it is the most fun part of storytelling for me so having it all in one location like this is really neat to me and and serves so many purposes I'm not ever going to have to worry about where did I write about Emerald depths again I know where this information is and I can just find it so this is my way of organizing all the information you can do what however you won but I think it's really important when you're starting to flush out the world or if you've been doing it for some time it just don't feel like it's organized do you put it all in one location if you do that it's going to be easy for you to find your information and to kind of get around and add to it so don't be like me don't scatter it across many different documents and folders try to have one central repository where you're keeping all that information now we're going to see more of this website over the coming videos I'm going to tell you how I built some of the world building concepts that I have but for now let's jump into the naming portion that's or get up to stare at my face a little bit more ok so I've mentioned naming previously there was a video in my 12 weeks to a trilogy series where we went over this a little bit but this video is much more in-depth and much more structure and how we're approaching names in order to start with how your readers encode that information so you need to understand or I think it's beneficial to understand at a neurological level what is happening in your brain when you're learning something you know we've all been in a calculus course or you know some sort of higher math course where we're having to learn these complex topics and by the time we leave a 45 minute lecture we're drooling on ourselves and what's happening there is your brain is burning glucose in order to learn these challenging new concepts that's encoding that information into your brain it does the same exact thing when you're reading a book this is why when when somebody says war and peace students all over the world had a collective groan they don't want to read it because it's hard work you have to learn a bunch of new terms you are quite literally fatiguing yourself mentally and reading this book and for people who don't read for enjoyment oftentimes that's not something they want to do even people who do like reading for enjoyment often want to read a book that is easier for them to understand and as an author you can accomplish that by grounding concepts in a way that readers will understand them so to give you an a great example of what not to do when we've all done this don't make words that are unpronounceable if you can't read that out loud then it's probably too complex or not spelled correctly and readers going to wrestle with that word so sound it out when you're looking at these words they can definitely be too unique I guess one of the things that we strive to do is be delicate flowers and make every concept in our universe unique so that we're not borrowing from any other source and this ultimately I think is a mistake if you strive too hard to name things counter-intuitively to name them so they're unique to your setting readers have to work too hard to learn them so to give you an example of where I've seen this I have an author friend who wrote a wonderful novel the book was was a romp that kind of was Mad Max meets fallout with you know maybe some thunder the barbarian dumped on top of it it was really really fun I liked the setting but the problem that I ran into is that we met like something like a dozen races maybe and most of these races were just a series of continents strung together so you've got that yeah but he's got it's like well those Bantu click languages from Africa and my brain like couldn't hold that information I I didn't know which of these races was which and I was totally confused and as it turns out these races each correspondent to an insect if he had named the first race that I ran into the arachnid then my brain would have gone oh I expect these guys to have eight legs I expect them maybe in spin webs made it have poison all of which by the way the race in his book had so they were basically you know arachnids but they were named in a way that made it very difficult for me to distinguish them and alongside them were dozens of other concepts with these really weird words that my brain had a hard time grasping and and as a result I struggled with the bug I finished it and I really liked it but a lot of people didn't and I think that's why it didn't get kind of the long range success that it could otherwise had and when you look at the grades you can see that they're sort of subtly getting around this so if you read Frank Herbert for example dune one of the most iconic science-fiction novels of my lifetime at least this book does so much with so little so think about the spice the spice must flow we all know what spices you've all had oregano on your pizza you've had maybe so you know cinnamon on your but you've experienced spices and so you have a starting point mentally your brain is beginning to supply some of the imagery around what the spice might be and then all Frank had to do was deepen that understanding and show how his spice was different if you look at Star Wars Darth Vader didn't you know use some sort of eldritch deep focus power to choke somebody out he used the Force one simple word that you already know and you've used in your life a billion times in a billion different ways and all he's doing is adding another definition you can apply to that word another way in which it's going to be used but he's taking something familiar and adding something on top of that yeah that's something easy to do but if you do only one word concepts you're going to run into trouble eventually you can have everything in your universe obviously be one word if you can't always use a common word for everything but it's a good starting point and and you can build on that by like going with two word concepts so for example if you look at my matichek chronicles website you're going to see something called a spell rifle I don't have to tell you what a spell rifle is you know what a spell is you know a rifle is and when I put those two words together you have a mental picture of what a spell rifle might be you can see that in your head and it's probably pretty similar to what I actually created so I'm taking two familiar words and mashing them together into a new word that's really really easy for somebody to get their brain around if you want to you can even take this a step further and take a word that they know and a word that most people don't know and put them together so that they have to work a little bit harder to understand it but it's still grounded in something familiar so one of the ways that I did this was something like all the unreal depths so we all know what depths are like the ocean depths you may not know what the word unreal means although the astronomers out there certainly do but if you don't know what it is you can learn through the course of my book what it means and you're not going to have to work quite as hard because you already know half of that term umbral depths you knew what depth was and maybe if you're an astronomer you already knew what Umbra was too so you can you can take common everyday words you can take a few words that maybe readers are going to have to work at but you should be very careful when creating brand new words if you're creating something that doesn't correspond to a real-world concept that's fine make it pronounceable make it relatively short but if you're making a new word like for example I have the Shia Confederacy the word Shia is just fine it's sha yaa it easy to pronounce easy to understand there's not a lot of ambiguity there it's unique to my world and it's fine that I've created it but I'm not throwing dozens of those words at people and you'll also notice when you read the novel that I shortened it to the Confederacy in the book it's called the Confederacy because that is a name and a term that people can get behind it it's not accidental that really when you get down to it it's the Empire versus the rebels and star wars they're very simple iconic concepts and I'm doing the same thing so hopefully this is useful to you hopefully gives you some basic idea about how to structure names just a quick recap make sure that they're pronounceable try to use existing real world terms to ground a lot of what you create so that when you do create something truly unique that has no grounding in reality you're doing it less often and therefore your reader is not having to work as hard to learn those terms so it's sort of a juggling act but as a general of thumb the more understandable the term that you create the easier it is for your reader to understand and accept so hopefully that's useful next week I'm going to be back with a lot more information it is going to be another long video and it's going to go into some of the things that I've created for the magitek Chronicle so we're going to get into the meat of world building I'm going to show you how I go from we've got nothing to start taking concepts and grounding them and creating them in your universe in a way that readers will love anyways that's it for the video I need to get back to the writing because I've got a book to finish I'll see you guys next week