In the same vein as the Roger Zelazny quote I posted yesterday, here’s another of my favorite little bits of really common-sense, practical writing advice. It’s an excerpt from a letter that George R. R. Martin sent to his collaborator Lisa Tuttle, which she reprinted in her book Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction. On the issue of alien names he says:
“The best way to handle it, I think, is to avoid naming things gizzuks and smerps, and to run together real words and use them in context in such a way that they’re self-explanatory. Besides, human colonists would never name anything a gizzuk. Thusly I have stories that features windwolves and tree-spooks and rock-cats and plains devils and such.”
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