Ok, so as I'm kind of stuck here, I thought I'd ask for some help.

For a long time now, I've thought, or rather tried to think, up names for people in Tevo. To no avail.

You see, I don't want regular names, I want to be creative, but I don't want the names to be completely outlandish. Well, to be honest I have no idea what I want, but I just can't see myself calling my Te Warrior, Elves and Dwarves Jack, Phillip, Henry or Joe. You get my drift?

And I want the different races to have very different names; but apart from that no inspiration will come. At all.

So, how would you suggest I go about it? Any suggestions, even though this probably makes very little sense!

I just refuse to start my story without some names, I can't go One said to Two and so on, I need to think up some names before I start.

I have this same problem.
One thing you can do is use names that are real, but are not common. You could use uncommon spellings as well.
What I do most is figure out a few things about the character (gender, occupation in story, vague description) and then name them based on their essence (just my perceived essence of them).

I hope that helps some... *awaits better answers*

I like giving characters names that have a special meaning that somehow relates to their strength or to what they are eventually going to do. Or to something significant that happened in their parents' life. Or to something that will eventually happen in their life. To come to that, though, I usually have to do a lot of research ( )

Sometimes, for fantasy names of a place or a person, I get a name (or two names) that I like and then twist it and morph it into a new name. It's kinda difficult though, especially since it requires much thought and a lot of imagination.

Malshia is a possibility...

You could pick a real world culture and use names from that culture. As random examples, it could be Japanese names for the elves and Russian names for the dwarves.

That's a good suggestion! *makes a mental note to do something like this*

When I pick names, I try to take the names of general things and turn them into a name. For example: Knob, Step, Rush, Fall, etc... That way you can have an original name, without having to use a whole lot of imagination. Though, if Rush were to rush, you would have to write 'Rush rushed...' which would possibly make it a bit difficult to understand...

Ooh, you guys have been so much help! Thanks for all the helpful replies!



I really like that. Mind if I decide to use it?

So many neat ideas! What seems to be working for me best is the using Russian/Japanese names etc; I hadn't thought of doing that, but I looked into it this afternoon and liked what I saw. I'm not 100% decided, but I think that I'll probably go with something like that. I might not stay with one name group, but might use lots from many different countries, so it's not just Russian names for one race and so on.

That sounds like a good plan! Hope that works good for you!

Thanks!

Hey, sounds like you've more or less decided, but one thing I like is to take names and combine them. For example, Jessica and Genevieve = Jesiveve. Or names backwards: Abagail = Liagiba. Also, taking normal names, changing the emphasis and using ys instead of i's and k's instead of c's can make them pretty neat. To distinguish between races, one thing I've tried is having the name end in a common syllable. For example, among my elves the type of elf affects the end of the name, so Nytstar for a starelf and so on.

Thank you, Frystar. Those are all really good ideas, thanks for sharing! I definitely might use the differing ideas for some names.

Another thing I've been doing (I'm creating a new race for Tevo you see) is looking up words that represent them, and playing off those for names. It's fun, and they end up being quite original I think.

That is cool! I sort of am doing that with my Werewolves, I think.

Great!

It will be neat to see what you come up with.

I should send you the names I've come up with.

Okay.

I love that Liagaba, lovely.
Anywho, I'm telling ya, baby name websites are the way to go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This blog post may help to give you some ideas for how to come up with names... I've never used this method, but it looked interesting: http://worldpen.wordpress.com/2012/04/0 ... wikipedia/

I found that Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic works AMAZINGLY for Elf names. Or you can use Elven name generators; I've gotten quite a few amazing names from there.

For Dwarves, you can turn to more rough languages, like German.

Thank you for the link!



Hmm, I might look for an Elven name generator. Sounds like a good plan. I haven't brought the Elves into my novel yet, but they're due to appear soon.

*laughs * I think of more Celtic names for elves, and German ones for dwarves, too!