In yesterday's post, one of the overdone fantasy techniques I mentioned was using way too many diacritics. As far as I'm concerned, this includes apostrophes in names. Honestly, when I see those all over the place in a fantasy novel, my reaction is something like, "Okay, this author is trying way too hard" or (in the most sarcastic way possible) "Look at you with all those fancy letters/apostrophes. So foreign."
So what other ways can we go about naming our fantasy characters? Here are two ideas:
#1. Use what I call the cut-and-paste-names technique:
When I found this on Pinterest, the post didn't link to anywhere, but I found a similar name generator here.
#2. (My personal favorite) Take a regular name and change, add, and/or remove letters until you come up with something you like. For example, if we start with the name Geraldine, we can generate quite a few possibilities: Change one vowel --> Guraldine Change two vowels --> Geroldane Change all vowels --> Gorelduni Change one consonant --> Geralvine Change two consonants --> Leratdine Change all consonants --> Remapwize Remove letters --> Gera Add letters --> Geraldinex Change, add, and remove letters --> Perreld Obviously, some of these results work better as names than others. This technique can also work for sci-fi and for naming things other than people (planets, fictional countries, fantasy creatures, etc.).
Try coming up with a name using each of these techniques. Then comment below or use the links at the top of this page to share your results!
Write on,
Candice
(Photo by Nareeta Martin on Unsplash)
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