Character Creation in Fantasy Novel Writing: Naming Characters

One of the biggest challenges in fantasy character creation is giving them a name. Choosing a name for characters is important - aside from their initial appearance, it's what tells the reader and other characters the most at first. This article is intended to give a few hints as to how to pick good names for your characters - choose well, after all, it's almost like naming a child.

Although fantasy novels are rife with a lot of different races and cultures, I'm mainly working with humans for now. Male or female - that's the question to answer about your fantasy character before a name is created. As a general rule, male names tend to be sharp, staccato and full of hard-sounding letters like 't' or 's'. The length of a male name can portray honesty and accomplishment. (Oh my, the Freud...) After all, think about the uber-rich businessmen of the 19th century - weren't they often named things like Albert Percival Ryans III? That's not an actual person, just an example. Female names, on the other hand, tend to be more rolling and fluid, made of softer letters like 'd' 'b' and the dipthongs.

Although fantasy novels are rife with a lot of different races and cultures, I'm mainly working with humans for now. Male or female - that's the question to answer about your fantasy character before a name is created. As a general rule, male names tend to be sharp, staccato and full of hard-sounding letters like 't' or 's'. The length of a male name can portray honesty and accomplishment. (Oh my, the Freud...) After all, think about the uber-rich businessmen of the 19th century - weren't they often named things like Albert Percival Ryans III? That's not an actual person, just an example. Female names, on the other hand, tend to be more rolling and fluid, made of softer letters like 'd' 'b' and the dipthongs.

The next factor to consider in your writing is the culture. Males in fantasy can have flowery-sounding names, like many of the Elves in the Lord of the Rings novels - Elrond, Legolas, Glorfindel, and Feanor are a few of them. Meeting a character who introduced himself as Rofanian, what would the reaction be? Likely, this guy would be thought to be rather effete at first, even if the reader or other characters know nothing about him.
Names do make a first impression, especially in fantasy.

If your novel is historical fantasy, the popularity of names in the era of choice is important - after all, how many medieval knight characters would be named Aleksy? Hint: you can count them on the fingers of one foot. The best way is to look up etymology of names online, or go to the genealogy section of the local library. Along this note, know that surnames didn't exist in Europe before about the 12th century (other cultures, such as the Orient, are a different matter.)

In fantasy novels, many characters, rather than having surnames, may often be given a title, or a nickname. Erga the Swift, Gerta Oneleg, or something similar. If your fantasy culture is advanced beyond the level of 12h century Europe, like the typical fantasy society, then there's a handy exercise to do in writing.

Decide that all the characters in a particular setting are going to have the naming conventions of, say....14th century Italy. So, you'd go through a dictionary of common Italian names, write at least five down for each letter of the alphabet and look up their etymologies online to see how the name may have changed over the centuries.

An example in my writing: I have a character named Tomoe Michieru. He's from Japan (obviously), from a samurai family. He is the descendant of the famous samurai woman, Tomoe Gozen, who fought in the Gempei War to unify Japan back in the 1100s. His name is rather fluid, and has a certain rhythm to it. This is in keeping with the (as yet unfinished) novel portraying his somewhat femininity. The nickname Michi (which I didn't find this out until later) is a Chinese girl's nickname, that means 'righteous'. Because he's part angel, this fits better than I thought it did at first.