Simply put, for authors starting out, or even sometimes experienced ones, coming up with names can suck.

You need to create something thematic for your universe, something that fits within the age-group that you’re aiming for, sometimes something original, sometimes something similar. You need to avoid those that can be seen as derivative of the huge successes that are out there, without seeming far-fetched within your world.

What do I mean about derivative? Well, if you’re going to write a story about a dragon-prince, and you call your protagonist Daemon, I think you’re audience is going to quickly connect the dots, and perhaps not be too thrilled about the amount of effort or originality you’ve expressed there.

On the other hand, originality and thematic matching are important too, because you don’t want to stray too far from fantasy accessibility, without crossing over into that derivative nature we mentioned earlier. Some obviously poor examples are along the lines of ‘Bob’ - good name, not terribly inspiring for fantasy.

I have a need little trick, that has been around for a wild, and that I have found success with when struggling with a name, even if it just is a placeholder!

Let’s look at Kevan Lannister, as a good example of this method. Kevin, similar to Bob, is not a terribly inspiring name, nor would it really find it’s way into a high-fantasy setting, or a medieval one engrossed in history, typically. So, what happened? We change a single letter, and in this case, add a highly fantastical second name.

By changing one or two letters, you are giving yourself an easy starting point to a fantasy name. You have people all around you with names that can be adapted this way, but if you’re struggling for starting points, baby names are good place. Google popular baby names for a year, this year, ten years ago, it doesn’t matter - then, adapt!

As an exercise, we’re going to do that with baby names for 2023, and see if you can’t get some interesting fantasy names, from that, using our method. For that, we’re going to use ‘Babycenter’ for their top baby names of 2023 thus far, and see if we can’t spot some that might work.

We’re going to take number three from the girls list, and number nine, which are Amelia and Luna. And from the boys, we’ll take number three also, and number ten, which are Oliver and Asher.

With Amelia, let’s at a common suffix for names in the ‘eth’ or ‘ith’ range, and we’re working on a character, from here, called Ameleth, or Amelith, whichever takes your fancy. From there, having been given that name at birth, we start to get an image of our character, and their history and nature.

Luna is a pretty common one that we see in fantasy, so let’s tweak that to make it more unique, and ‘ours’. We can try simple spelling adaption, like Lunar, or even add some letters so that we achieve Lunari, on Lunet.

The boys! Oliver, I like the spelling adaption trick, and giving our male protagonist the flair, but familiarity, which will make him easy to remember in read, as we create Olivar. Fantasy name, but easy all the same for the reader.

Asher is a little different, much like Luna, it is something we see in fantasy from time to time, so let’s work it a little to make it uniquely ours again. We can add another suffix to create Asherine, Asherai, with the latter perhaps lending to a change of race in fae or elf. Asherai the elf? We’ve adapted!

-LP

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