Intro

As I mentioned in last month’s How I Create My Characters post, the name is usually one of the first things I come up with when I make a new character. I come up with the basic character concept and personality that I’m going for, and then I either find or make up a name that fits that idea.

Whether you’re here just because you’re curious to see how I do it, or are hoping to get ideas for naming your own characters, read on!

Realistic Names

I’ll admit that, as someone who writes primarily sci-fi and fantasy, I don’t really have to come up with very many real world-type names. But, whenever I do, I usually just try to think of real names that I know I like and that seem like they suit the character, either in sound or in meaning. (Preferably both.) 

When ideas evade me, I start to look around for inspiration. A lot of the time, I try to think of names of people I’ve heard of—whether they’re real or fictional—that I could potentially use. The first people who usually come to my mind tend to be actors, musicians, and, because I’m a geek, superhero secret identities. I can almost always find a name that I like by doing this. I do the same thing for both given names and family names.

When I’m doing this, I also usually make a point of googling the name that I come up with just to make sure that there’s no famous person with that exact same name. There will always be someone out there with the same name as your character, of course, but I try to keep names that are strongly associated with a specific real person—and ones that are the names of popular fictional characters, for that matter—out of it. Because it would get weird and confusing—and maybe a bit legally-questionable—if I’ve got a character named Taylor Swift flying around in a spaceship with her copilot Harry Potter in my awesome sci-fi adventure novel.

Fantasy & Sci-Fi Names

These types of names are the ones that I have to come up with the most often. While people do use more realistic names in both of these genres—especially in sci-fi—it’s generally only for human characters. You don’t often see an alien or a dwarf named George, unless there’s a story reason why they have a more human-sounding name. (Like if they were adopted and raised by humans as a kid, for example.) 

I come up with most of my fantasy and sci-fi names from scratch. I read a lot of both of these genres, so I have a basic understanding of how people generally expect those sorts of names to sound—and how I expect those sorts of names to sound. It took me a bit of practice—a lot of my older characters had names that were kind of awkward and hard to say—but I’ve reached the point now where I’m pretty comfortable with it and confident in my ability to come up with a good, relatively-pronounceable name. (I mean, let’s be real here, sci-fi/fantasy isn’t sci-fi/fantasy if your names are too easy to pronounce.)

But, just like with realistic names, there are times when ideas evade me. When this happens, I have a couple strategies. The first is just to think about the names of different sci-fi/fantasy characters and see if I can think of a way to mash some of them up into a totally new name. The second is to just go onto Fantasy Name Generators and look at what names they’ve got on there. Sometimes, I just use the names as they are but, a lot of the time, I try to mash those up too, especially if it’s for a character who I want to have a more unique name for whatever reason.

Outro

That’s all for this one. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing how I come up with names for my characters, and that maybe it’s been helpful in helping you figure out some strategies for naming characters of your own. Until next time, thank you for reading!