For authors, naming characters is more than just a task—it’s a crucial part of breathing life into their story’s world. A character’s name can indicate the character’s origins, moral values, or purpose, and it can hook the readers and help them focus on the story from that character’s perspective. Most discussions about the naming of characters focus, understandably, on the main characters in the story but when an author creates a world for those characters to traverse many side characters pop up and they too need names.

This is especially the case in fantasy settings where the author (usually) can’t just slap a “John Smith” or “Jane Smithe” on a side character and be done with it. The names of these side characters need to be true to the story’s world and can serve to strengthen the reader’s sense of the culture of that world and the tapestry of the narrative.

In my struggle to find names for the many characters that enter the story and exit it just as quickly, I have come up with some sources of inspiration which I will explore in this mini-series of posts.

Naturally, the first place I looked for inspiration was the library, and it worked quite well, though very possibly not in the way you might imagine it would. I was roaming the youth and kids aisles of our local library when my eyes landed on the following sign:

Almost immediately I fell in love with this as a name for a specific side character I had been dealing with for a while:

The name fit so perfectly that it was a reminder that inspiration often strikes when we least expect it. I found myself going from aisle to aisle grabbing pictures of the other aisle signs in the hopes of finding more characters hiding in the library. And indeed, there they were:

And the library, as libraries are wont to be, still had more to offer:

But we weren’t done yet:

As you can see, inspiration can be found anywhere and everywhere. We just need to be open to the hidden stories all around us.