Worldbuilding: How to Make Names That Don't Suck

in this video I'm going to teach you how to create awesome names for the characters places and things in your fantasy novel now I know that a lot of early writers struggle with this I remember one of my good friends telling me that he was procrastinating starting on his novel because he just couldn't come up with good names for his characters luckily as I've progressed with my writing and published more work I've come up with some tools that have really helped me quickly and easily create the right names for my story so in this video I'll be sharing seven principles that you can use to craft great names in your stories thank you principle number one use placeholders for Fantasy Riders there's this concept called World Builders disease and this is essentially where you spend so much time planning out your world developing the different cultures and the magic that you never actually get around to writing your story in fact the World building becomes this really easy excuse that you use to procrastinate from actually writing your novel I would argue there's a very similar thing when it comes to naming let's call it naming disease it's so tempting to think that you need to wait for the perfect character name before you can start writing but I would say that's a mistake because it's going to hold you back from the most important thing you should be focusing on finishing your damn novel and that's why I'm a massive advocate of using placeholders when I'm riding if I can't come up with a character name on the spot I'll just put a placeholder name in curly brackets for example in the first draft of the book I'm currently working on now Kingdom of Dragons I needed a character's name for a character who kind of founded this Kingdom of Alasia but I couldn't think of a good idea for this historical figure's name right away so I just put up a set of curly brackets and in those curly brackets without Alicia's founder the thing with this is that names are super easy to edit and change later readers are not going to know if you came up with your character's name on the first draft or the fifth draft of the book it's just not as important as the actual story itself and getting that down on the paper just to give you an idea of the scope of this I've got over 350 placeholders in the first draft of kingdom and dragons that as I go through the second draft now I'm in the process of turning those into real names and that's everything from like character names to country names magic item names and just a ton of other things as well by using those curly brackets I can really easily just control F to search it in word and then I can go through it and replace those one by one the really important thing to take away from this is that by using placeholders it just is one less thing you have to worry about in your first draft and instead you can focus on the most important the most difficult tasks that you'll encounter in the first draft which is actually finishing the novel getting something down that you can then refine into a great story further down the track principle number two Define traits a character's name should establish or at least suggest just a defining trait of that character obviously you can take that way too far and create names that are much too on the nose or too obvious you do need a degree of subtlety here however when you get this right it's a really powerful tool for creating this really good first impression on your reader when you introduce a character you'll just instantly tell them this is the kind of person that you can expect this character to be and of course you can play off that as well you can have a name that suggests a certain trait at the front but then as you get to know the character maybe they actually reveal themselves to be someone else entirely let's analyze a few really good names from various stories to see how they go about this the first one I want to look at is Neville Longbottom from Harry Potter right away you can tell that this character is probably going to be you know a little bit of a loser sorry Neville obviously he gets better later on and you can probably tell that he's going to be the target of a lot of bullying another great example is Luke Skywalker Skywalker suggests a certain Mythic Grandeur and greatness when you meet a guy called Luke Skywalker and he's a young Farm Boy on this desert Planet you know that he's not going to stay on that desert planet for a long time it's probably only a matter of moments before he is whisked off onto an Intergalactic Adventure across the Galaxy in my own book Kingdom of Dragons I've got this character who is this military commander who's very much characterized by his willingness to sacrifice his own personal desires for the sake of Duty and wanted his name to convey a sense of kind of gruffness and strength and proactiveness while also hinting at the kind of Valor that he displays so I started with the word Valiant and then transformed that into valinor strike when it comes to defining traits I'd say a key thing to consider is the emotional valence of different letters different sounds produce different emotional effects pulling from a really great 2007 article on superheronation.com which is now sadly vanished from the internet kvx and H are harsh callbacks and Havoc are probably not nice people b j m f and R are examples of letters that sound firm without being menacing l-u-s and o a smooth sock and sometimes essential principle 3 differentiate characters this sounds basic but I have to say it anyway we use names to tell characters apart from each other in a story you'll be surprised by how often writers stuff up with this so for example if you have a story and you have four main characters in it and they're called like Harry Henry Hubert and Humphrey then you've stuffed up I'm sorry but readers are not going to be able to tell those characters apart as a rule of thumb once you've used a ladder to start a character's name you should not use it again for other characters in the book now obviously once you go beyond a certain number of characters in your book you will start have to doubling up again but as a rule of thumb try to avoid repeating this same letter or the same sound at the beginning of multiple characters names you also want to be making them unique from other names and Other Stories so for example if you're writing a Sci-Fi book about a character called Luke it's going to be very difficult for readers to not think about Luke Skywalker and that's a bad thing because it means they're going to be pulled out of your story the immersion is going to be lost and they're going to be thinking about Star Wars rather than your amazing Space Opera instead personally I always make sure to Google the important names in my book just to make sure they're not taken by anything that could negatively detract from my story principle 4 develop linguistic rules developing naming rules or themes for how you name things in your story is going to give your names a lot of coherence and a sense of realism which is really important in fantasy so for example in my space fantasy book across the broken stars there are two main cultural groups you have the palens who live on these discs that float in space and are surrounded by force fields and then you have the variance who basically Rise Up from the planet beneath them in their airships to overtake the pines and colonize their lands now to make their names kind of feel distinct and to create a sense of conflict and tension between them I used sort of Spanish sounding names for parents so Leon de Velasco Alvaro Elena de Muriel Etc and then for the varians I use more English sounding names like Walter Drayton or John it doesn't just have to be ethnicity based your rules could be building on other themes as well for example here's Brandon Sanderson talking about how he did this for The Stormlight Archive in The Stormlight Archive symmetry is Holy and so I play with the idea names that are palindromes or nearly palindromes quite a bit now my next principle principle number five is a little bit controversial but before I kind of get into that I wanted to quickly tell you about my free writing advice ebook Five Lessons that transformed my writing it's a short book that you can easily read in half an hour and contain some of the most impactful useful lessons that I've learned from publishing three novels and a best-selling video game also I only released it a few weeks ago but already there have been over 200 writers who have gone ahead and downloaded that which is really awesome so if you want to join them just click the link in the description down below to get the book for free principle number five random generators and artificial intelligence alright so like I said before this is maybe a little bit controversial for some people but personally for me I found it to be really useful as a good starting place to use random name generators to basically just give me lists of possible names for characters in my book in particular these are really great for secondary characters who you know it doesn't really matter what their name is that much you just need something that feels sort of consistent and thematically appropriate for your book but even for main characters there have been times where I've come up with a name for a character and I'm like sort of happy with it and then I just tell myself look I'm gonna spend 20 minutes just going through a random name generator and just looking at like thousands of possible names basically until I have something that kind of stands out to me as being like yes that is emblematic of the character that I'm writing about it's basically what Brandon Sanderson talks about with his Atlas method of coming up with character names early in my career what I did is I would get a book in Atlas and in this Atlas I would go to a region of a country that spoke a language I didn't speak and I'd look at the names the cool thing about some of these random name generators is that you can actually get them to give you names based on ethnicity or gender and it's really useful as a way to kind of filter the different names that you're looking at these random name generator tools can also give you things like the names of cities or magical items or even magical creatures now obviously these tools are always changing and evolving but for me personally the ones that I found the most useful up until this point have been behind the name which basically allows you to filter for ethnicity really well and also fantasy namegenerators.com neither days are sponsoring this video these are just tools that I found useful now up until this point with my writing I've mostly focused on using the random name generators but recently in the last couple of months really artificial intelligence has been taking off a lot more and I've actually been playing around with using chat GPT to generate Fantasy names chat jpt if you're not familiar with it is basically a free artificial intelligence chatbot you type questions into it it gives you answers it's pretty cool and there's also a lot of controversy around it because some creators are concerned that it'll steal jobs and that sort of thing I actually made a video diving into this topic in more detail on this channel which you can check out I'll link in the description down below the really cool thing with chat GPT is you can give it a very specific prompt in order for it to generate the names that are most useful for your fantasy novel so for example the other day I was trying to come up with names for a portal that takes you into this sort of astral plane that allows you to travel between different planets in my soulscape universe which is where Kingdom of Dragons is set also Thunder Heist also seizure traveling all set in the same universe so basically gave it a ton of details about what I had already I would say saying how this astral plane is called the luandreal it's accessed by different portals and then I asked it to provide 10 ideas for what these portals could be named and I wanted them to have a similar feeling to the word luandreal so it was thematically coherent and then this was also a really advanced level prompt that I was very happy to come up with I basically asked it to create names that had no real world meaning so that they would be differentiated and unique for my story but still create a similar feeling to the word Lu Andrew and then for each name I asked chatgpt to tell me why the names were good it then spat out this list of 10 names here and I really liked this second one here silverion now you might be thinking right now and this is why I said this is a controversial tip Ah that's cheating if you use AI to come up with names or if you use a random name generator to come up with names you're just Outsourcing your creativity why not just Outsource the whole book as well well that is a wider discussion like I said I kind of got into that in my video where I was talking about whether AI will steal writer's jobs but I really think that this is no different to looking up a big phone book worth of names and then selecting the names that just jump out to you the most from there it's just another tool use it appropriately if you're not comfortable with it don't use it for me personally I think it's something that I'm going to be experimenting with a bit more in the future again readers don't really care how you came up with the names they care if the names have been carefully considered if they add to the characters and if they contribute to a really great story so use these tools to the extent that they allow you to do that principle 6 avoid rookie mistakes so the way I see it there are kind of five main amateur naming mistakes that fantasy writers make the very first one is to use overly exotic names so if you have like an alien species and your name for it has like a bunch of dashes and commas and like dots above letters and it's just really hard to pronounce and if you gave it to five different people they will pronounce it in five different ways you might want to think about using a different name in most cases you can still get this effect of a sort of alien or unusual name using the limitations of regular language that people can understand and pronounce normally the second mistake is names that sound too similar to each other again like I mentioned before you really want to differentiate your characters so I would advise listing out all the names that you mentioned in your book and just making sure that there's nothing that sounds too similar read them out loud as well because sometimes names can look different on the paper but when you actually read them verbally they sound really similar on that same note the third rookie mistake is difficult to pronounce names you really don't want readers struggling to pronounce your character names unless that's sort of part of the story or the effect that you're going for in most cases you want names that are very clear to people how they are said the fourth mistake is annoying main character names so annoying can mean a lot of different things but what you should just ask yourself is is this character's name something that readers will be fine to read or potentially pronounce or potentially hear in an audiobook book 50 times in the course of an hour because that's probably how many times your character's name is gonna get mentioned so if you have a really long character name or you have a kind of difficult to pronounce one or it's just something that if you say it 50 times it's going to be grating and a little bit irritating then you may want to consider changing that to something that you can say an infinite amount of times and it's not going to be a problem and then lastly mistake number five is relying on external references that readers can't appreciate so for example let's say you have a character named Susan all right Susan that sounds like a fairly normal name now let's imagine that your story hinges on the knowledge that Susan actually comes from the Persian word for lily flower yep that's the real thing I had to look that up for this video if you're just assuming that readers will know that you're going to be in for a rude awakening so be really careful about giving characters external references or symbolism through their names that readers can't obviously and easily appreciate principle number seven don't obsess I don't know this is maybe a little bit hypocritical to say after giving you this massive long essay about how to create good character names but when it comes down to names they are not the most important thing in your story so I think it's a really good idea to adhere to the 80 20 principle basically this comes from a Italian economist who found that 20 of Italy's uh population owned like 80 percent of Italy's land and wealth and basically it's saying that like in most cases eighty percent of your results come from 20 of your inputs so what that means is that like the first 80 of a task is usually achieved with 20 of the effort and then the remaining 20 of a task requires 80 of your effort so with your names I am very much in the camp that good enough is good enough don't let names hold you back from writing a great story or putting your story out there like World building it's easy to get obsessed with the names but always remember they exist in service to your story so names are important and I hope this video has helped you with it but you should be obsessing not over names but over plot over characters and over your world itself if you're new to the channel welcome my name is Jed Hearn I'm the fantasy author of these books and this video game and on this channel I share the best fantasy writing advice that I've learned along the way if you enjoyed this subscribe for more fantasy writing advice every week and you might want to check out this video cheers and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Jed Herne

Views: 202,058

Keywords: writing, writing advice, writing craft, story, fantasy, author, jed herne, authortube, booktube, wizards warriors words, self-publish, indie, publishing

Id: -5fjlhJSVbE

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2023