Coming Up With Fantasy Names

The easy answer? Name generators, the many many baby name dictionaries...

However, that's always the patronizing one, isn't it? It doesn't show much consideration for the deeper aspects of why a name resonates, why an original name can make all the difference, in fantasy especially.

So what are you looking for? Here are some of the basics I consider while hunting for a name:

• Meaning: even if you want a wholly original name, you might want to consider combining names with cardinal meanings. I use names meaning flame and rain in UnSung (Aiden and Talia). If they had a child, I might name it Aylia or Talen, some variation of combination. It doesn't have to be so cutesy an arrival, but combining can give you the aesthetic base of a name that is still uncommon without being nauseating.
• Regional consideration: this can also combine with racial/cultural difference but if you have vastly different people, you may consider distinctions in preferred sound and language. Commas might become a cultural trend. Warlike tribes might favor harsher consonant sounds while scholarly cultures might embrace the cadence of vowel sounds.
• Unconventional: in certain cases, names are not loving or considerate. A street urchin may have a common name or one akin to an object, even a nickname. Goblins might get names with odd compound word combos (Nobcorn or Henpeg-- just play with it). The more you can distance it from Earth culture, the less you have to suspend disbelief.
• Accent marks: I'll throw out a name like Kvothe. Most people won't say this 'right' but then most authors are fine with that. (It's something along the lines of lines of keh-vohth, but a quick transition between the kv and just a hard 'o'. The e is ignored). If there's some insistence on a pronunciation, accent marks can be a good guide, but you'll have to remember to type it every time. Accent marks may present formatting problems since not all fonts support or display them properly. You can also use conversation, someone teasing how it's said deliberately or something along those lines. PRO TIP: if you already have a uniquely spelled name, you can control/command-F to find it, then Find and Replace the unaccented name with the accented version. Unless you're a natural at the keyboard shortcut for accents, this will keep you from breaking the flow in drafting and save time in editing.
• Test: even once you find one you think you like, test it out loud. Names are rarely actually said in natural speech. Names are more for introducing or getting their attention, scolding or teasing.  You'll use descriptions more often to direct who is speaking and to whom. I've gotten sick of a name I thought I liked or something just didn't sit right once used a lot. Remember though, that in real life, people often have unsuited names so you can poke fun at that too. He might not 'feel' like a Bob, but he just is.
• Common: nothing wrong with Bob, John, Karen, Ann or Sue. Except the presence of a great deal of common names tends to disinterest readers. If your main character is lamentably just regular earthling Joe, then his trip to a fantasy world with Celestyne, Van'Hanara and Jekoura stands out. Even his attempt to nickname them Tina, Hannah and Joe to simplify would be interesting (and rejected as absurd to them).

Look at the many colorful examples of languages already available. English is one language where 'consonant clashing' happens. Languages like Japanese are heavy on the flowing vowel sounds. Kleb sounds abrupt, yet Kaleb softens it tremendously. Women's names are often light chains of vowels. Men's names tend to end in rough or final consonants. Many names that don't follow this area gender-neutral where they originate-- or it's a masculine choice in one region but heavily feminine in another.

Remember, when you set the norms for your world and regions, you can also set the name outside of convention to use as part of the conflict or development of character. I know it's not chronologically organic (worlds exist before the people shaped by it) but a writer often benefits most from creating out of order. I personally tweak worlds and characters alike to ultimately fit the story. Yes, it can be a massive edit to tweak worlds and characters for that purpose but I also feel it's up to me to struggle for what I think is best for my work.

It is worth it to follow your own rabbit hole here but I hope this brings up some helpful points to consider. Sound has a mood, a meaning, an intent, so I get why people struggle to convey what they mean when they ask how to pick a name. They don't need the lazy pseudo-intellectual assholes with their Google-send solution. They're looking for the visceral connection a name bears on the character itself. 

Aw, hell, why not end on some color porn combo fun? From Encycolorpedia, I give you Rienna's hair and eyes color combo: Chestnut brown and a 'polo' grey with a green undertone. I like to cool or warm greys and browns to saturate them a bit and because her hair is warm, I wanted to polarize her eyes to visually reveal aspects of her character. Since writing and drawing are not always about imitation but optimizing the possibilities of fantasy, I like to cement characterizations with color quirks like this. She is a simmering and restless woman that tries to emulate her father's steely authority. She wars with earning respect on her own merits while maintaining her identity as a woman.i didn't write her to be a 'strong woman' in the sense that she truly thinks she can meet men on their own level, but she does believe she has the unique ability to best them with her own advantages. She has a streak of recklessness and sometimes takes on more than she can actually handle but the follies of youth don't prevent her from adapting to new lessons.

Next post, I'll throw in Dinsch's hair/eyes combo. He's an interesting one, my Bryfolk-- a rabbit-human hybrid whose albinism only affected his rabbit genes.

What significance, if any, do color choices have on your characters?

Me Encanta Google Translate

I am not fluent in any language but English. I'm sure people have a lot of things to assume about my culture-lacking white American ass, but assumptions are about as fluent in understanding your fellow humans as Google Translate. 

Yet I. Love. Google Translate.

I tap something mundane in my only-lonely English and whirl it through every language and return it to my own, usually mangled beyond recognition.

"You've got to be kidding me" can become "You need to make a joke". The more colloquial or regional or local the saying, the more likely you are to tip it over its limits. Somehow, I managed to get 'whore' to translate into 'niece'. Them's fighting words.

Or as they never say in Catalan...

Okay, so it's not exactly news that the thoughts you spend a lifetime translating into your understanding of the spoken word are not universal. Ideas can translate over language barriers, but sometimes, learning the foreign words of a language (expressing ideas your mother tongue doesn't have a single word for) or a new language altogether is directly related to your aspirations or thirst for knowledge and not a gold card in being more 'cultured'. Nowadays, we can almost instantly learn how to say 'poop' in every language and using one of those simplified words usually bears explaining when it's not common use anyway. So it's probably more useful to learn 'pretentious' so you can confirm someone mumbling it in response.

Fluency in more than one language is impressive, I won't lie, but mastery in anything is no less so. The difficulty of learning a language highly depends on your mother tongue. Hungarian is said to be one of the most difficult for English speakers in terms of pronunciation but Japanese is actually one of the simplest to speak. Written, it's opposite, since Hungarian uses the same alphabet, unlike Japanese which uses simplified Chinese characters formed from picture mnemonics. Fluency is also highly dependent on immersion, so you can learn how to speak, read and hear a language, yet be completely lost in practice.

Mentioned before in another post, but I'm 'fluent' enough in Japanese and standard Spanish (español, for the PC bullies) to pick up on what's being said sometimes. It's odd because it's difficult for me to put my words into another language, but hearing someone doing it, something clicks and I'll contextualize enough of it to understand sometimes. More so in Spanish. With Japanese (wait, technically 'nihongo' but I'm not digging out the characters), it's more in the reading where I pick up characters I couldn't recall just by being asked. Years of attempting to translate manga will do that. I mention this for a reason...

Google Translate isn't completely useless or purely entertainment. It is still capable of guidebook-level translating of a mildly helpful nature. Meaning most of what I'm typing here would be a hot mess, but if you just want to know how to say 'where is the restroom?' it's probably pretty accurate.

Well, how else do I ask Catalonians if they even lift, bro?

There are certainly those more proper expressions in every language that we don't realize are not as down pat as we'd like to think, way too literal in translation than intended. Luckily, it's probably not going to deeply offend someone. Unless you're pretending to be an expert, most people are understanding of your little foreign hiccups.

Digital translators tend to latch onto 'safe' chains, or things most commonly in sequence, with no regard for usage. Your best bet is to drop in one word at a time and actually reference if this is the proper word for what you want. The intended language may not have a word for 'puppy' but also might not default to 'little dog' either, but instead decide that 'pup' might relate to a human child. 

What translators can help with is syntax and word order once you find the correct keywords (this is my experience with English to most other languages I've played with at least). Even when the words it flips back tend to deviate, the word order does stay true to the language, which can be a helpful device in the rules of grammar at least. Word order was one thing I struggled with when learning basic Japanese, especially when it came to questions. My English brain kept insisting that the 'question word' comes first, but in polite form, the subject always leads. You can jump straight to sentiment in informal/basic speech (Ganbatte ne!)

Disclaimer: this is how I formally address my sushi.

Now you're just being needy, Catalan...

As much as I love learning and playing with language, admittedly, there's no practical reason for being fluent in another. I do know the language of crochet terms and reading charts. I also know HTML, Flash and Basic computer languages to some extent. Each of those had some practical usage in developing skills. While it is immensely helpful to learn a language where you want to work or live, most efforts to learn something well need to be cultivated to be useful or remembered.

There are a lot of things to consider when looking at languages, but really, it's allowed to be fun and there's no shame in admitting you're only confident in the fluency of one language. I'd still encourage you to attempt your scant knowledge in friendly company and to take every opportunity to learn language from another. Take the opportunity to even ask if your Google Translate mess is redeemable.

Again, I don't see anything wrong with knowing one language. There are a great many languages where even the verbose never master every word of it. It only seems ignorant when the one language you know is very poorly done, almost to the point where you're incomprehensible. There are certainly plenty of people who are grateful to ASL (American Sign Language) or Braille-- languages that allow them to share and absorb ideas that can be distributed into other languages.

Crazy, I know, coming from a chick who is insane enough to insist on doing all of her publishing endeavors herself, but I am willing to admit I won't be the one to translate my work into 47 other languages.

Sometimes, a single discipline is more than enough. I endeavor to understand English better, but I do need to hit the dictionary sometimes and try not to send others running for theirs. However, I'm not going to pitch a fit when people speak another language I don't understand. Unless you're throwing shade at me. Bitch, I understand body language just fine!

Does anybody REALLY understand anyone? WARNING: Philosophy has been breached. ABORT! ABORT!

More Fun with Words

Since I put in a few thousand words today, I'm allowing a little break to blog. Don't worry; I'm keeping this one light. We're all entitled to a little venting here and there, but fixating on it is poisonous. Get it out, let it run its course, get back to what moves you to make the world a better place.

My current book is a challenge in that I not only threw in a mute bard that found magical ways to communicate (I discussed that he was why I was playing with bracket use HERE), but there are also other creatures and characters that needed special ways to announce their thoughts. Communication is something we struggle with in its simplest forms, so how do you create special differences in creatures that speak with their minds or other languages or even different emphasis.

Sometimes your big dumb guy gets all CAPS when he talks. Because only your grandma who can't see the screen (teach her how to zoom the screen with accessibility options, you ungrateful offspring) and egotistical morons on Twitter use all caps, it stands to reason that maybe the ones that aren't so good at volume control would too.

I know some people enjoy integrating fantasy languages they make up, but I'm really not trying to assume anyone is trying to commit that much to reading a book. A new language is risky. Often, I might ease this burden by italicizing the conversation in two languages under certain conditions: 1) No one else can understand what one of them is saying. 2) It's communicated in a way that no one else can hear it (minds or inaudibly). This person is speaking the common tongue, this one the other-- one understands the italicized language, but the other speaks so that anyone overhearing would only understand the non-italicized language. In this way, I use font styles to communicate very specific events that the reader can pick up on. 

Many people wonder about the strengths and weaknesses of using different media and this is one way that books have an edge over other media. I wouldn't advise getting too creative with alternating fonts if you're going to use digital (keep in mind unless it's fixed format, the user gets to mash it all into the font of their choice-- if you do use different fonts for the print, I'd advise double-spacing the unique font into its own isolated paragraph, maybe even with indents removed, so it still stands out even in flex format. This applies to font size differences-- those might also be stripped in ebook flex formats). The best way to play with language appearance, is to stick with your chosen font (usually one of three defaults-- please look at your publisher's preference before you end up with a mess to reformat). Remember, if you're using italics, make sure you're not switching font types or those could get removed by your word processor and you'll have to hunt them down again. One way to make it easier to relocate any italicized sections-- use a symbol within your chosen fonts that you will not use anywhere else in the document and CONTROL/COMMAND+F that symbol to check your italics. When you're done messing with fonts, just make sure you remove those symbols before publishing.

I don't want to make it sound too technical here, since I do have posts for that. It's mostly my intention to open people up to some of the many ways you can style your manuscript for ideas that might get too complex in the description of them. Making a concept simpler is one of the many skills an author should endeavor to strengthen. If you don't know if it works, get someone to read it and offer suggestions. I'd make sure you keep the original copies and any changes and have future readers read each sample. If you find there's confusion anyway, you might want to attach some notes in the foreword explaining the usage. Tread lightly with that even-- you don't want to info-dump a 'how to read' section. Ouch. Big no. Some people will be able to follow it just fine. Even a little glossary in the back might be a useful addition, but also be aware that some people will just bail if you make too much homework for them. Your primary goal is still being an interesting storyteller. You may just have to approach it differently altogether if it doesn't take.

Sometimes a thing hasn't been done or isn't popular for a reason. It's great to be ambitious but when you're having fun with your ideas, ultimately you want the readers to have fun too. Reading is an escape, and one that is even losing its appeal with video games and movies and shows becoming so visually stunning. This is why bestsellers tend to be simplistic reads, quick, easy, done. It's wonderful that some writers go bigger and more complex and those can certainly succeed too, but this can be very dependent on genre and your storytelling abilities.

Do you have any fun ways of working with styles and words?

Music and Language

Ah, music... okay, and ah, language. Two separate words that can be the same thing. Music IS a language, after all, and many languages have a musical quality or rhythm to them, especially to foreign ears. It's a little odd that I haven't really blogged about this yet, since it's both a heavy theme in UnSung and a huge part of my creative growth. Perhaps it's more the latter. Either way, observations about music are one of those topics both with a sound base in reason (pun intended) and a whole slew of subjective opinions. I'm sure there have been more eloquent opinions, but I enjoy wandering outside of the bubbles of research to give honest impressions.

A little about me first so you get a little insight into the bigger observations. A little blood for the offering. Listening to music is not actually something I do a lot of these days either. My iTunes library is super small compared to most people these days, but I guarantee I have at least 50 songs on there that not a single one of my friends will have anyway. I don't go looking for weird or obscure music on purpose and it's actually very accessible artists-- it just tends to be a song towards the end of an album that went overlooked or underappreciated that I latched onto right away. I whistle constantly, a habit I picked up from my dad who also sings in the shower. I hum and sing songs that I've never heard, just whatever occurs to me. I play piccolo and flute and a passable alto sax and I have a violin waiting to be learned (a project I'm eyeing for after I've finished UnSung). I'm obsessed with music but not in a 'who is your favorite band' kind of way. I don't immediately assume I will like everything an artist does over one song. I love a lot of Kanye's work, but I don't snatch everything up immediately because he's rather eclectic so it might not hit me like the previous album. Like with most of my tastes, music is an impulse and I'm not a fact magnet. Sometimes I'll listen to a song for years before I bother to find out what it's really called or who does it. I can usually get that info from anyone within two seconds when I sing a line from it. Or an internet search, but it's a great way to strike up a conversation about music with friends, so win-win.

That being said, what do I have to say about music and language? The music theme is going to be subjective in places, but I want to steer clear of the theoretical or creative ways I'm using it for my unpublished book. Perhaps I'll touch more on that aspect after publishing but for now, just some observations-- some while speaking to non-native speakers of English. Which leads me into where English, my native tongue fits.

One thing I hear a lot about the English language-- it is the language of writers. Do not take this as a claim of superiority or that it should be a universal language. English, first off, is a language that borrows words from other languages it didn't initially have in order to enrich the understanding of communication. The verb and tense structure is both thorough and difficult, a constant subject of debate. Also, because of how immense and diverse English is, it is also one of the most difficult languages to gain mastery of and also why English spelling bees enthrall people all over the globe.

Throwing in an anecdote here, but we had a foreign exchange student from Iceland in our high school and he saw the enormous current version of the English dictionary and marveled over how thick it was. He opened it to a page and asked her a random word and she had no clue what it meant. He laughed and told her it was stupid that we have so many words that everyone doesn't know. 

Professions tend to carry a great deal of specialized words not in common use-- doctors and scientists use a ton of Latin words and lawyers have quite the list and like doctors, often specialize to focus on refining one area of law rather than carrying the whole massive glacier. English is one of those languages rife with slang and area dialects and there are such massive style differences between American, Australian and British English that it can amount to a lost-in-translation moment. 

I know that Chinese has separate divisions as well (Traditional, Mandarin and Cantonese, off the top of my head) and African dialects are extremely vast, but China also carries most of the world population and Africa is the largest mass of land in the world. English doesn't get the win there, but it's the fact that it can so easily borrow and integrate it into spoken AND written form that makes it so appealing to non-native speakers. I know Japanese borrows quite a bit of foreign words and developed the katakana system to integrate it into writing. They use our words for car (kuruma), remote control (rimoutou) and kiss (kisu), among others. Again, English isn't the only one that does it, but Japanese structure is also a more difficult grammatical structure for many non-natives and the specialized writing system borrowed from China makes reading it a whole other learning curve. Japanese added hiragana to simplify the complex kanji. If the Icelander thought we were 'stupid', I've learned that most Japanese people only bother to learn a few hundred of the kanji (100 are the staple of primary school) and that even scholars rarely learn all of the characters. I'd love to show you my Japanese translation dictionary to press home just how complex this system is, both in terms of the different ways you actually pronounce each character depending on context (the characters around it and whether it is used in a family name).

I've dabbled in Latin, Romance, Germanic and Asian language but I'd be stuck talking to 3 and 4 years old in most cases since my interest went into structure, rhythm and cadence, picking up a few keywords or phrases only (first things first-- try to learn the phrase 'I don't understand' or 'speak slowly' in every language you might want to try with a native speaker). Again, creature of impulse here; true master of not-a-damn-thing and curious about everything. I cannot remember for the life of me which comedian said it because I absorb stand-up comedy with no reference, but I also laughed at the idea that Russians secretly use a backwards H because fuck you. I know Chris D'Elia did a sketch on Russians, but I don't know if it went there (definitely a lot of 'fuck you'), but there are a lot of comedians that do alternate takes on the same basic theme and the attitude was similar. One thing is certain-- I've never met a subtle Russian and when they're quiet, it speaks volumes.

Yes, I did say music so I'll get to that. Mentioned above, I love to sing, nonsense or otherwise. English is the biggest pain in the ass when it comes to singing. It is a language with consonant clashing so often it requires you to use alternate words or ditch a beloved phrase or idea altogether because it just doesn't work musically. It is VERY limited and challenging in music. There are three languages in particular that are absolutely darling to sing in-- Italian, French and Japanese. These are vowel heavy languages and all of them can use rolling r's which is both amazing to hear and fun to do. I could not roll r's to save my life until I was taught in French to do a 'dry gargle'. That's all I needed to learn how to place my tongue correctly for even the Latin 'rr'. (It was actually my Dominican friend Fermín that was impressed that a white girl could do a Latin roll, but I sheepishly told him I 'cheated' and tapped into my French). If you've never sang in any of those languages, they have all branched into modern music and you can even find some pretty kick ass covers of English songs to give it a whirl. Do this (if you love singing, even alone).

Chinese is a language that sounds VERY melodic to most non-natives (a statement that some find offensive, but when can you not offend someone with a truthful observation?). In fact, when I dabbled in the structural study of Chinese, I believe 'ha' had 14 different meanings depending on emphasis and slight intonation, ranging from meanings like 'horse' to 'teeth'. Many native Chinese speakers don't really hear it or think about it since, like many native speakers, you absorb language by the chain of context and even sound becomes easy to dismiss unless it is very dissonant to what is the norm. For a non-native to 'form' a native translation of their mother tongue, we try to learn each word in isolation so that we can develop our unique voice over time. Sure, in the beginning we stick with the stock phrases including asking where things are, basic household objects, how much something is, food and drink etc. But as we delve into interest in a culture, we begin to wonder how we are different and the same in thought processes, if culture makes certain ideas difficult to communicate. Colloquialisms, slang and swearing are also fun ventures in friendly company (i.e. not most strangers or acquaintances).

If anything we already have a universal language and you know what I'm going to say: music. However, I have also run into my share of supremely logical people who don't like music. Yes, I know it's a shock to some people and even comes with extreme doubts: is that person a serial killer or boring/dull or just hasn't found anything yet. Hey, that sounds exactly like the sort of thing people come up with when you find out someone doesn't want sex and equally bullshit. The first guy that ever told me he didn't like music was a Japanese penpal. Even then, I knew what it was like to be an 'other' in human society, but I still hedged at the unknown. He was a smart, hard-working guy and even though I did find it difficult to avoid talking about music, it was doable. In fact, as time passes, I actually need not a damned specific thing in common with anyone I'm friends with. If we both like video games, it's okay if we don't share a single one in common. It's a terrific challenge when you have to struggle for common ground, but still share things that are important to sustain the connection: a sense of humor, a favorite pastime, a love of wine or animals or tacos. It's not the same for everyone (although a sense of humor does tend to be something I look for in everyone-- doesn't have to match mine but an absence of one means they're not going to get me very much).

With music, if people do like it, it doesn't need words to 'enhance' it. However, music can be used to enhance the power of words and that sort of music is sometimes a repetitive beat with occasional swells and techniques to infuse emotion into the words being said. Some karaoke instrumentals are absolutely dull without the words, but the combination is so much more. Musicians usually understand that certain songs really shine if they utilize their range, voice and style to its advantage. I find that there are some songs I just don't give credit to when I sing it. My voice has gotten deeper in range and power so I can really dig on some Toni Braxton or Annie Lennox in ways I couldn't before, while my favorite Japanese pop songs by Hamasaki Ayumi are almost painful to sing now. Like in my last post (What Draws You to Story Telling?), like with stories we love, sometimes we are drawn to songs that we can participate in or understand more intimately. We are often draw to certain tempos, tones, notes, ventures and experiments in music that we can't always explain. We don't just connect to the artist sometimes-- sometimes we find similarities in the fanbase. Or not. Fanbases can be a nightmare, sometimes the artist's personal life is the last thing you want to know, so you take from it what you will.

A very layered run of subjects and one I would need to write books about if I needed something to write about (I don't) and wanted to smack around some non-fiction (I'm poking at a how-to-draw book before I ever think about that). I hope I didn't mangle that. When I reread these before posting, I try to catch the parts I might have muddled when I'm racing through and attempting to clarify. If I didn't choose such vast and wandering topics, I could be more sure I'm not making a mess of it, but I find that a lot of my novels are rainbow spaghetti in planning too, at least until I sort them by color and straighten them out.

Short posts are not so heavily edited and scoured though, so it's possible to lose sight. It's difficult to otherwise explain my love of language and music with no mastery of either (okay, I've at least got my piccolo, flute, and English games strong...).

As usual, I'm open to responding if you have thoughts to add. I love hearing from anyone on their takes with subjects I bring up. Again, I'm limited to my experiences, conversations, and approach, so there's always room for J-E-L-L-O. (You may be disgusted to learn my favorite flavor is lime.)