It’s been a while since we’ve updated here, so we thought we’d go with a simple writing tips post aimed at authors and anybody else who just loves exploring the writing process.

Names can be either really easy to come up with – the character walks in and pretty much has a name badge attached that you can’t get off them no matter what you try, or… it just won’t happen, nothing fits and writer’s block kicks in before you’ve even got around to writing anything much.
There are probably as many solutions to that as there are authors out there, but here’s one of our favourite tactics – name websites!
Baby names, name generators, lists of names from history – all of these are great starter points even if the initial result is a list of names you want to avoid! Here are our favourites and why.

Historical names can be found wonderfully on Medieval Lands, which is a huge sprawling project that literally tries to list every single member of nobility in Europe during the medieval era. You get names, which lands and a snippet of the personal histories as known from historical records – sometimes it’s not even enough to be a stub on Wiki, but the name is the fun bit here and the snippets can prove to be inspiration. It’s a great option if you’re looking for historical names or just like to draw on those for ideas.

Behind the Name is somewhat a more classic name site, which, whilst not just simply a baby name site, covers the usual expectations for those – namely a supposed meaning and etymology as well as cultural background for each name listed. This is a really well-structured resource for authors that just can’t decide on the right name for their hero or a random side character that just can be referred to as X for the whole of the book. There’s a matching Behind the Surname site to complete the naming process.

Some stories just can’t quite be imagined with seemingly ‘conventional’ names like Tom, Lauren or Rachel and that’s where the Fantasy Name generators can come to play. Whether you’re simply looking for something like Ilerae, Zav or Orbul that you’re going to just add in as such or you’re going to be looking through to get an idea of what type of naming style you’d like to develop your own names from, this site is quite useful and has so many generators that you may fall down a rather deep rabbit-hole of fascination and not get any writing done for a completely different reason!

There are plenty of other sites out there – these are just a few to get you going with – and, if names aren’t your strong suit, then you should hunt down a few such sites as your go-tos for inspiration.

Of course, once you’ve got the naming sorted, you may have a new problem, especially if you’ve gone for a less well-known or fully invented name – spelling and the spellchecker. Sometimes no matter how well a name fits to a character, goofy fingers, tiredness or fast typing will mean that you end up mistyping the name and that can soon turn into a headache for keeping things consistent. Let’s not even get into how confusing it can get if you’ve got an invented language in your story too!
Our favourite solution there is teaching Word to recognise these as valid words. Most of us probably know how to tell the spellchecker to ignore a particular ‘error’ and some of us have probably noticed the ‘add to dictionary’ function. But, even better is the option to literally create a dictionary that Word will refer to in addition to the usual English (or whatever language you write in) one that is originally installed. You can literally just label it by the name of your story or the world it’s set in or whatever makes you happy, and then just add the names and words into the dictionary.
The setting you’re looking for is ‘Custom Dictionaries’ in Word. You can literally just create a ‘new dictionary’ and edit the existing ones. We don’t know if Google Docs has a similar setting option, but it’s worth a look!

Tell us about your favourite tactics to get through the writer’s block about character naming!