Okay, so my story is about this race of winged humanoids that evolved on a separate continent, like something majorly drastic happened in the past and so for whatever reason a huge chunk of land broke off of an ancient landmass in the distant past and it is inhabited by this sister race of homo sapiens that evolved wings and such, but now I'm trying to develop different locations and I basically have nothing. I've got some names and basic areas like 'this area is covered in snow' or 'this town was build inside of a mountain' but that pretty much it. I'm having a hard time trying to flesh out in words what my locations are actually like. Literally any help would be huge.
I'm not certain what you're asking for, but I'll give you a couple of tips.
For worldbuilding, you should go as in-depth as possible about what the land is like. What type of temperatures? Precipitation? Biome? Elevation? Is it in a river valley? On the coast? These sorts of things often say a lot about a place and the population that lives there. For example, people tend to live more densely around water, especially if you're talking about a port town. That's just a starting point. I don't have a full list, but I encourage you to either search for forms that have a bunch of questions about the places in your world, or find a wikipedia page or other informational article on the geography of a particular place and follow their format, but fill it in with your own properties. Alternately, you could just model it after a real place that you find interesting. Another part of making a place is making the people within a place. Culture is super important to a place. For that you've got the type of people living there, population, law, crime, common pastimes, and the list goes on. You could probably also find a site with an outline for that.
As for naming places, that's much tougher. What I've taken to doing personally is mashing together foreign words that describe the geography, people, or location of a place, and each nation gets a different language basis. (Country A is named in Italian, and so are all its cities; Country B is named in Greek, and its cities are too.)
Worldbuilding is probably the hardest thing about writing for me too, but I'm sure you can do it. It just takes a lot of practice and thought.
wow, this is really helpful, thanks!
I'm glad I could help you out!
Hi, am a new writer and I have no idea what to do for locations. My world has Werewolve, Demons, witches. And I'm trying to think of a name of a city for any of them.HELP!
Like I said above, you might want to borrow from other languages and just mash words together until they sound right. For your case, Fantasy Name Generator might be a good resource, too. It randomly generates names of places if you go under the places section, and a lot of people use it to name characters, too.
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