Hey, uh, you seem like a reliable source. How do I create fantasy words? You always have such great names for places and I'm wondering how you do it
It's not as complicated as it seems, honestly. There's a few different methods of creating places and building names that I use interchangeably.
One is what I call 'old reliable'. It's my go-to when trying to create words that are particularly fantasy-esqe. That would be simply grabbing a word search (like you'd find in a children's magazine or any one off a shelf will do) and pretty much just trying to read it across until you find something that's vaguely pronounceable (Treyal, Nadoc, Kueom, and Catak all came from that method).
Another is to have really bad spelling/pronunciation. I'm not kidding. Some people will do this by stuffing a bite in their mouth, saying a normal word, and having someone else write down what it sounded like they were saying. For me, my dysgraphia can actually help me create words at times due to the letters scrambling in my brain and coming out in a different order than they should. (Lgona is actually just a really bad try at spelling 'Logan'). I know of dystopian prompters that prefer this method for creating character names, just messing up regular names. I actually have a list somewhere on my computer of just 'words I've spelled so badly that they deserve to be new ones'.
One I found on tumblr (and, admittedly, don't use all that often), is to take the placeholder name and turn it into the final name. The example was using the summary of the location (the house on the cliff where she fell in love with him) and turning it into the final name by pretty much taking all the first letters and running them together before playing around with them until they sound like a word (I think the final product was something along the lines of Cliffthrowe. If anyone remembers the post I'm talking about, they're more than welcome to link to it)
Another one that's kind of silly is to say a word or phrase for so long that it no longer feels like that word or phrase. Part of that could be dropping letters or pronouncing syllables differently. ('strawberry kiwi' can become stabery ki'i).
That's all the methods I can think of off the top of my head.
That's mainly for creating words, but to create place names (businesses, locations in a more modern setting, etc.) is a bit harder to describe. Personally, I really just wait until inspiration strikes. Legends can be created based on existing ones with modifying the names slightly. In a fanfic series I did a while back (that I'm slowly turning into an original fiction series), I named the legend of a ghost ship the Flying Droman. That was entirely based on the real world legend of the Flying Dutchman. I don't have any 'Dutch' civilization in that fantasy world and Dro was the first thing that came to mind. A place in that same series is called The Silver Snip and it's a hairdresser. I had an image in my mind of a pair of silver shears as the symbol for the shop so I just used that to create the name.
Almost every reference to places/words I've created can be found in this series tumblr | AO3
