Writing a Novel in NovelCrafter

Skipping to the Good Stuff?

If you've been following this little series of articles, you've probably already spotted that I've skipped over some things. Mostly these are repetitive or boring tasks unlikely to inspire or enlighten anyone, and sometimes this is the third or fourth time working on an aspect of a novel and I forget which order I created things in.

But here is one of those instances where I rashly skipped ahead the first time I tried worldbuilding with an AI assistant and then regretted it later. Hopefully this will be a quick detour before I discuss the location frameworks this article is meant to cover.

The part I skipped and regretted skipping was developing a style of speech and language for different cultures. The reason I regretted it was I ended up making location frameworks first and then generated some interesting locations, but they all had insipid, derivative, un-creative names.

For many kinds of story, language or dialect considerations are irrelevant, so feel free to skip this section if that's the case for you. Either way, I'm going to keep this limited to one example of what helped me to guide AIs to come up with better terms for people, places, events, and other things. Once you see the method, and if it works for you, enhance it and make it your own.

My goal with this "language" detour is not to invent a whole language or to create obstacles for my audience. I want to set up just enough of a guide for the LLMs to do a passable job when I ask for a "dwarf-sounding" name for something. But for other authors and other stories, there could be reasons to use a similar technique to make a character speak always in an annoyingly thick accent. Note that my fantasy genre gives me a smidge of immunity when it comes to criticism of these synthesized language and accents if I get something "wrong"; who knows for sure what dwarf Gaelic sounds like? I would take a more considered, careful approach if writing in a proper historical genre.

Having the frameworks for the various languages and dialects in your setting makes creating characters, factions, locations, and really everything else, much better, since there's seldom any need to pause and replace poor name choices.

Also, for some important things like mountains or crossroads, it's handy to be able to enter the different names that object is known by in different regions. Dwarves who live under a mountain likely name it differently than the humans who look upon it from the land.

I'm not aiming for a completely fictional, unique-sounding language, but something that may be a touch familiar.

Also, I chose for this example to fictionalize, to fantasize "dwarf Gaelic" because:

1. It sounds about right, and
2. I've eaten enough haggis & recited enough Burns to own a 'pass'.
3. If I used Gnome Yiddish for an example, someone might be tempted to reach for a dagger.

I should quickly mention this technique is partly inspired by a similar technique Jason Hamilton (The Nerdy Novelist) discussed in a video.

That's a lot of build-up for something that's really pretty simple: I just describe for GPT4o a language I'd like to use as a base, then ask the LLM to re-imagine that base in a fantasy fiction context with simpler, anglicized spelling, then ask it to produce a framework that will help a LLM to consistently create names of people, places, and things, as well as various short sayings or emotional exclamations.

Just remember to select a creative and prose-capable LLM to execute instructions using the framework, rather than a model like GPT4o, unless you like the way it sounds.