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Notes -
Anyone here have any advise for writing a fantasy novel?
I've been inspired for some reason in ways I've never before been inspired to write. Originally as a "Fixing" of a novel I read with an interesting premise, but it's slowly been mutating as I branch more and more away from the original other than the beginning framework and aesthetic veneer (that I want to make deeper). I've written about 15k words so far over 6 chapters, sort of haphazardly strewn over the book. I have a general plot outline and a deeper epic fantasy authorial cannon + magic system that I've conceptualized. I even have a nice complex romance subplot sketched out with some "Sapphic yearning".
But I seem to suck at coming up with names, or fictional idioms. And apparently I suck even more at making engaging descriptive dialogue. I've been having my alpha-reader-slave (ie my GF) read my chapters and then quizzing her on them. The general pattern is that I'm actually ok when things are happening, but my dialogue is bland or non descriptive. Several male characters read through my voice instead of their own. Things like theming or subtle clues seem to alternate between too subtle and a bag of bricks.
[caveat, I've only been published in short story, and in pretty entry-level spaces.]
For names, the two useful schools of thought I've seen when you're stuck. The first is to pick historical or allegorical names for major characters, and then twist them. Jude is a betrayer, Lance is faithful paragon who falls to temptation, so on. The other is to grab a sheet of common names for your setting's historical time period (or its nearest alternatives), twist them if desired, and just full send it.
Other guidelines: avoid two primary characters starting with the same letter (and especially starting and ending with the same letter!), if your setting is even slightly cosmopolitan or trade-oriented then mixing historical languages or having main characters with names originating from different historical zones is an easy differentiator, don't have main characters that are impossible to pronounce (even if wrong) in the reader's head. That said, also don't overthink it: avoiding awful names matters, but perfect ones aren't going to buy you much.
Fictional idioms are something to be careful with. If your setting is magical, baking the rules of magic into how people talk helps reinforce the primary of those matters and can be a good way to seed later relevant aspects of the system's rules without simple direct explanation. But 'hold your hippogrpyphs' is an insult for a reason, and just taking an existing idiom and twisting it is a fast way to break suspension of disbelief, especially where the original idiom would apply in-setting as well or better. Switching 'take this info with a grain of salt' for 'take this info with a grain of spice' doesn't mean anything in a generic setting, and it means something entirely different in Dune.
Ideal tweaks are a) something both participants in a conversation handle regularly, at least once a week if not once a day, b) have a term that is explicitly magical/scifi/whatever, and c) have a meaning that's only obvious with the knowledge of what that term means. With those constraints, it's a great way to leave readers thinking they're clever for catching something; without them, it's just gilding.
Voice is harder, because it's genuinely one of the most important parts of writing fiction, and where guidelines are the thinnest. It's easy to spell out where characters don't sound right, or sound too samey, but very hard to actually spell out why. Worse, it depends on your characters and setting. A wooden and overly formal register is a standard problem for first-time writers, but it's also characterization for an android or someone that's presenting to royalty. Surfer dudeisms read painfully for a full work, but if you want a kinda oblivious one-scene wonder, they're a pretty easy go-to.
My big recommendation is getting a list of your main characters, the ones that show up in a majority of scenes, and start with their background and character, then draft how they'd handle an everyday situation in your setting and an emergency one, both in voice, how they hold themselves, and how they act. A reserved day laborer is going sound drastically different from an outgoing magical academic, and vice versa, and both of those traits are entirely separate from whether they'll handle someone being injured well or freeze up. This is also a good place to check if anyone seems too good; if the character flaws can't show up, at least a little, here, they're going to come across as fake in the actual story.
After that, reading the character's lines literally out loud helps surprisingly well.
Great pieces of advice thank you! I think the voice/Character creation first + speaking them out loud looks very helpful!
I’m fucked here though. I went with a roman republic setting and apparently roman naming conventions were such that it was fairly common for you to have the exact same name as your father, your sons, and sometimes even your cousins. Gaius Jullius Caesar had the same name as his father and the same name as his grandfather. There were also only a small handful of personal names even available.
Further more, personal names (the first one) are only used intimately so most people are going to call you by your cognomen (third name), which you practically share with all your male family members. Combo-ed with the fact that since a cognomen is what friends casually call you, it needs to be something that sounds like a first-ish name to the reader in my opinion.
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