Authors Creating Worlds in Our Books



I'm wrapping up my next novel, a story set in a magical realm with skin changers and people who can connect with animals' minds...and other things...and I searched for hours and hours for the terms for some of the magical folk who live in my magical world where the story takes place.

It was not an issue at first, until I needed a character to discuss his talent with another character and suddenly I realized that I did not know the name for a person with that talent. I initially used warg but the word niggled at my mind with doubt. I had never heard the word used in any other work until I first encountered it in Game of Thrones books back in the 90s.

Yes, I was one of those who started reading the books long before HBO was kind enough to make it into a televised series. Stop and think about it, I have been waiting for the final books for a long, long, long time. I appreciate that HBO has gotten ahead of the released books because I would love to finish this series.

Well, George R.R. Martin created the word Warg himself, sort of. At the time I read about wargs in his books I was not familiar with the meaning because wargs were used to describe Tolkiens wolves, some really bad dudes, not someone who could enter the mind of animals completely and become the mind of that animal.

So I searched, researched, and searched some more for any historical reference to people who can connect with the minds of animals. The idea has been around forever yet I found no specific terms for such people.

Then I had an ah-hah! moment. I am not sure why I was so determined to use a historical term for a mythical creation that was born from my brain. Unlike the wargs of Game of Thrones, my character does not enter the mind of the animal, he connects. A fine distinction but a difference. He can access their memories as well as see, hear, and smell through their senses but he does not actually enter their minds.

The ah-hah! moment was realizing that it's my world. I created it. I can name the fictional beings in that world, just like George did with his wargs. It was a brave new empowering moment. I have control of what happens in my books.

We try to follow the rules before we break them. We research, rely on memory, and stick to the familiar as much as possible but in the end we are in control of everything that happens in that fictional world and we can set our own rules.

We can even define our own terms, give a name to something that is uniquely our own.


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