Characters

As Katrina and I began to workout the main premise of our novel, one of the first points of contention for both of us seemed to be, what to name our characters? It’s a fantasy-thriller so in that respect we have a lot of room with what we could potentially name our characters, but the main character is mostly-human, so we really didn’t want to give her a name that would be too out of the ordinary. We also didn’t want to give her a name of anyone whom we knew and disliked (because honestly I can’t read a book if the character’s name reminds me of someone I find annoying, let alone write it) and something that was unique enough to make her a little more than average.

I’d spent so much time on Secrets of Witches that I’d completely forgotten how difficult it was to come up with completely new character names. I’ve never had a set system in place for doing so either. Occasionally a name would just come to me and that would likely be the name I stuck with, other times I used a baby naming website or even better the Writer’s Digest Character Naming Sourcebook. The best part of the book is how it organizes names based on region or nationality. So if you want your character to have an Italian name simply flip through to the Italian list of names and voila. There are also a fair amount of traditional surnames for each nationality if that’s something you need help with as well. This book has been an invaluable tool and I can’t even begin to tell you how much I recommend checking it out.

For a more diverse list including fantasy related names check out . Like the Writer’s Digest book, it includes meanings of names and where they traditionally come from as well as I believe a few surnames.