Language is a funny thing, and for all authors should be preoccupied with it, we sometimes seem to forget to reflect linguistic variety in our fiction.
Fewer Words, Longer Books
rigorous, quantitative analyses to confirm the trend, so what I really have is a suspicion based on inference, internal logic, and anecdotal evidence; however, it struck me as a sufficiently interesting observation that I should desire to share it with you. The trend is this: the English language is losing words (ironic, considering our post about word creation), and is using more of them to compensate.
Naming and Titles
When I first started trying to write speculative fiction, way back when I was in the fifth grade, I spent a lot of time struggling with names. There were a whole lot of aspects of writing that I was terrible at during that time, but naming is what I was aware of needing improvement. My only ideas of how naming ought to be done came from the books that I read, and so my names in some ways read like classic fantasy names, except that I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t too close to any “real” fantasy name, so my names were even less pronounceable.
