Writing and Wattpadding (a guide)

Naming Characters & Places

Something that people always struggle with is coming up with names for characters and places. This really has no right or wrong way to do it, but here are some ideas that you can possibly use if you're struggling with naming anything in your story.

One idea is to look up names with meanings. This can be for first names or last names. Languages tend to have meanings for all words, and that includes names. Things like Serenity, or even Electra can have meaning. In fact, Jaeger is a last name that translates into hunter, hence why Electra's last name was Jaeger (sorry, it was not an Attack on Titan reference... I don't even know what that is lol). Looking up names with meanings can be extremely helpful if you want to have a name with a meaning.

Otherwise, another good way is to look up baby names. You can always google boy or girl names and come up with practically an endless list of options for names that you characters can have. Now this doesn't necessarily work for naming places, but for characters, yes.

Naming places is a lot like naming your "evil" characters or naming your characters that are possibly magical or just not quite human (I'm sort of including werewolves into the human category simply because they really do act human... They just sort of shift at some point.)

Those characters sometimes need a more exotic name, and you don't want a place to be named Sarahville, that just seems weird. So this is when you have to dig into your mind a little bit more. The names with meaning can work well in this case, you can find some unique names using that method. However, for places I generally just look around.

I'll look at either my keyboard, sometimes deciding on what letter I want the name or place to start with, and then I'll just start selecting letters to see if they happen to make something that makes sense. Otherwise, look around where you're sitting.

I currently see two posters, an ISU flag, a desk, painting, chair, couch, TV... I think I want my next town to be named Helmont. I took the helmet that I saw on the football poster and Monte Morris from the basketball poster to create this new name for a town. It can be hard at first but with more practice, seeing those things within pictures, posters, or just lying around can get easier and become extremely helpful when trying to name something.

These are the different methods I've used. If anyone else uses anything else, throw it in down in the comments.

Unless anyone has any other questions, I only have one more section to post about... So if you want to know anything else about Wattpad (that I can answer with the knowledge I have) or about writing (same thing applies here) leave a question down in the comments and I'll make a section about it. Thanks all!!

~Red