Charlotte Ruan

Giving a name to your beloved characters seems like a simple enough job… until you’re scouring websites endlessly for a fitting name.

There are many, many ways to name your characters. The first is simply liking a name you’ve heard of before and naming one of your characters that.

Another is finding out some names online, especially baby name websites! I have a habit of sometimes searching for names by meaning, e.g. for Zilla, I searched ‘girls names that mean darkness’. You can adapt the spelling a little, but that is one simple strategy, especially for fantasy books.

Another thing – fantasy books commonly have unique names. A strategy you could use is literally just a keyboard spam and see if you like the random word it forms. Or, translate a word into a different language. That is how I’ve come up with a few words and names. I’m especially fond of using Latin, but did use Albanian for vjollcë (it means purple in English, which is a pretty accurate description for the power). Just use random names and see what happens.

You also have to pay attention to genre. If I was reading historical fiction about England a few hundred years ago, I would not expect all the boys’ names to be ‘Bob’ ‘Percy’ ‘Justin’ but rather ‘William’ ‘George’ ‘Henry’. In fantasy there are also many unique names which require some creative thinking.

Overall, the names of characters are up to you, but obviously as writers we feel compelled to make the name match the character. The character will develop over time, but the name will always stay. It’s up to you what you ultimately name them!