Hello everyone!
This is Alicia, and this is my first blog post. I seriously fail at blogs, I never seem to write in them and when I do my posts are usually boring. Maybe I can break that streak with this one, because I’m not the only one writing this blog, but we will just have to see.
There are a few things on my mind at the moment, but right now I’m going to talk about names. Or more specifically, coming up with names, because you need a few good character names to get your audience interested. Now don’t get me wrong, there are no bad names, and common names are fine to use, but if you want to change it up some I have a few ideas that I use to come up (or find) unique names.
First off is the ever helpful Google translate tool. There are many languages that basically have the same letters as English but have a much more unique ring to them. I personally have used Swahili and Latin the most, but you can play around with it! And the cool thing about translating is that you can use common words to get a cool name. For example, in a roleplay group I used the Swahili word for tear, which is Chozi. Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty good name, and it connected with my character’s back story, which is quite sad, thus ‘tear’.
The other main tool I use is mishmashing, which doesn’t sound like a good tool, but it really is. I used this for pretty much all of the names in my novel. All you need to do is pick a name you like, for example, I always liked the name Seth. It’s a simple name that could totally work for your character, but if you want to spice it up some, play around with the letters. Add some in the middle, play around with the endings. I did this and came up with Senith, the only difference about the name compared to Seth are the ‘n’ and ‘i’.
If you can’t think up a good starting name, just pick a letter and start messing around with it, trying to come up with something that sounds like a name. You may go through a lot of bad sounding ones, but in the end you could get a really unique one. A few of my background characters got their names this way, and to me they don’t sound that bad. One of them I came up with was Kendren, it’s a mix of elements from different names, but it really works.
I have one more tip on writing names before I go. Don’t be afraid to go into the strange sounding words, they could even be describing words, or just random words that you’ve always liked. I came up with one of my favorite characters this way. Vista had always struck me as a cool word, it sounded unique and I liked it as a name. But something seemed off, so I used a little mishmashing with it as well, and you know what the result was? Vistina. I love that name, it fits my character so well and I’ve never heard it before in any book. That makes it feel special, it’s seems to make my characters stand out to where I know I will remember them, and my readers will too.
Look at Vista…haha, I’m clever xD
That’s all for now I suppose, until next time!
Alicia
NovelSisters 
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