Fiction Writing; The Necessity of Research

I am writing on a Christian fantasy novel, no no witches with super natural powers, no flying demons that can materialize as men, or anything like Obi telling Luke to "feel the Force,"— although it does have at least three monsters in it. But like most fantasy novels, one has to invent names for the characters and give them a history.

Now people assume when you write a fantasy novel, you can make up names like Feran Fainthearted or Lalia of the Limmering Light, but most fantasy are based either in the far past (like before the Flood), in the time of Conan the Barbarian, on another world, or in the far future after a nuclear explosion or other disaster has destroyed most of humankind and left the survivors, savages. These are being pursued by mutants, creatures who were made by excessive radiation — at least, that was what was assumed in the 1950s before they learned that there would be no horrible mutants, they would all have died.

Anyway depending on what era or what planet the Fantasy novel is based on, one has to make sure the character names fit. For instance, the past, you may have to go to a web site on the original Indo Aryan languages and make names that are pre-Romance and pre-German. If the character is, for instance, an English man from the Thirteenth Century who somehow was transferred to the future, you go on the website for Medieval England, and write it the way, he would, not the way we would write it. If you go into the future, you will have to make names that record the past, if they came from Earth, and if they survived a disaster, you had to marry who was left, so you mght wind up with a name like Jeavan, or a combination of Jean and Ivan. If your character lives on another planet, and is not descended from Earth people, you can get away with calling him Xerfry, or make any other alien name you want. But if you want your characters to have an Earth origin, you have to decide whether these were pre Norsemen or pre Latins, in which you have to get a book on ancient names or go to the website. The same applies if you are writing about characters who were kidnapped from ancient China before Genghis Khan or Nubians who were taken aboard a space ship before the time of Rameses the Second. In the first place, you cannot use any Mongolian names or customs and in the second case, the people will not mention Rameses the Second having trouble with the Hebrews when the great god took them into the sky.

That is why research is necessary even for fantasy and science fiction. You have to understand not only the name, but the food they eat, and the culture and any changes that you make have to reflect their origins. So go to the Library, get on the Internet, find those history books, your copies of the Illiad and get on researching.