Remember, your readers don’t know your characters as well as you do. Try to make characters’ names distinctive from one another, and be consistent in how you talk about the same character.When choosing names for characters specifically, there are a few guidelines it’s usually wise to keep in mind: Whether you’re naming your new baby, your new puppy, or your new protagonist, you’ll need to think about how distinctive you want the name to be, what assumptions the name will give to people who hear it, and what cultural rules underlie the choice you’re making.

Some of the guidelines are the same no matter what. Naming characters is different – the base assumptions, the considerations, the ‘rules’ – but not as different as you’d think, either. Most of us have named someone in our adult life: a pet, a car, maybe even a child or two. You know what those characters will have in common? They’ll all need names. And the bartender who appears in three widely-separated-but-critical scenes. And a main character or two, plus some supporting characters. Quick: what are the things you need to settle before you start writing your novel? Hannah was one of the first expert contributors to the Fact in Fantasy blog series guest posts on writing realistic magic academies and developing fantasy cultures remain some of the most popular articles. She also works as a baby name consultant. Though a sociologist by training, she has pivoted to community-building work for families in my local area and working to connect kids and families with nature. She’s taught courses on sociology, identity, and family. She wrote her dissertation on the social construction of identity, looking at how parents choose names for their children. This week’s expert is Hannah Emery, who has a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley. Please join the mailing list to be notified every time new content is posted. Each week, we tackle one of the cultural, historical, or world-building aspects of fantasy with input from an expert. This article on naming characters in fantasy is part of the Science in Sci-fi, Fact in Fantasyblog series. Image Credit: Leslie Wylie, Eventing Nation

Cool fantasy world names