I am in need of a little advice as to how to come up with character names. I'm working on a fantasy novel now and am trying to come up with some names for the characters that sound interesting and mysterious to go with the genre. I'm not a very experienced writer and so I was wondering...how do you more experienced writers come up with interesting character names?
Phonebooks Baby name websites If you are looking for names with deeper meanings you can google those easily.. If u want russian names..google russian names etc etc
I make my fantasy names up - but to make the names seem genuine I think of pre-fixes or suffixes on those names that are peculiar to the region in which they live. For example, two of the countries in my world follow the Latin thing of having men's names ending with -us and women's names ending with -ia Another country in my fantasy world has people's names that always seem to end with an 'x' (Malux, Goobliax etc) When I wanted to write stories in the region of my world where there used to be ancient societies similar to Canaan, Babylon and Egypt in our world - I toyed with ending names with -ezer, -iel or -ses - to give Babylonian, Canaanite/Israelite or Egyptian flavour. Try researching the way names sound in different real-world languages - and then use the basic structures to basically make up new names that have the right kind of sound to go with the character.
you know simplicity is at times the key to a great name like A character my brother name my brother chose "strength" To display that this character is strong But at the same time give him a characteristic that contradicts the whole idea like Strength is a child and he slew a huge army but afterwards he weeps yes?
i don't know, i tend to think of names of things that allreay exist, like planet names, or star signs. they always sound quite exotic to me, lol. one i liked a while ago was Saturn for the name of a lass. hope this helps any heather
I simply see my character in my mind, find its strengths and weaknesses and think of a name that fits it. i've named mystical animals monkey- Kopna Dragon- Orfen and regular characters jared ethan jim just look at the character
I always do historical fiction and so I look up the country and time period associated with the character I am writing for and find names that way. Babynamer.com is a great website for finding names with meanings, and usually fantasy novels switch up spellings of regular names, 'Peter = Petyr' etc. Hope this helps a tad!
Yes, this thread is old, so be it. Anyway, a method I use is to look at the character and their driving force. For example, one of my characters strives to be free and be his own person. Once that is determined, I go to naming sites to search for names with that meaning. You can keep it centered around one country of origin, et cetera as those options apply.
I also like to read map indexes for the region the character is from. People are often named after places and places are often named after people. Of course, you wouldn't have a character from Paris named "Paris" (unless you had some good reason to , but you might make his surname "Giverny." - Evelyn
http://www.20000-names.com/ The site URL speaks for itself: there are thousands of names in different languages. Each name has a meaning, too. In the past, I have found this site to be extremely helpful.
What I usually do is think about characteristics about that character, and then go to a baby name website, and whatever race that character is, I look at which names in that category fit the characteristic--it usually works, but sometimes you have to kin of wait--they come to you after a while. For example, a character in the book I'm writing with my friend's name is Cirred. and the way we got that name was Derek, kered...cerred...cirred!!! Then again, we're partially insane. ;D
