So, I’m creating a story that revolves around magic (I would include a description of it if I had a more concrete version of it right now, but it’s still very early in the writing) and I was just curious about peoples thoughts on using a generator for names of people, places, spells, etc., or if I should just go all in and create names all on my own! I’ve never made a story with a magical centre the way this one will be so I’m not very familiar with naming things to sound magical, but I absolutely adore creating names out of nothing or finding very character specific names. Naming is one of my favourite aspects of character/world creation, but I’m quite hung up on how different it will be to make names for a story like this ^^;
I was just wondering y’alls opinion on if this is something you would do (whether you’d use the generator or create your own names!) or if you’ve done this yourself and how it worked out :o
Any discussion is appreciated, and I’d really like hear other peoples opinions on this 
I personally do both! Some I make up, some are misspellings that sounded cool or two names combined in an interesting way, and others are from online generators.
I recommend collecting a few from generators, making up some of your own, and then choosing from among them.
I do a little bit of both. I try to make up my own first, but if I’m just completely stumped, I’ll look into a generator.
If I did ever do anything like this it would’ve been a long time ago. I’m the type of person who needs to know my characters’ names in order to connect with them and their story so I tend to figure them out as soon as possible in the planning stages. This doesn’t give me a lot of time to mull over trying to combine sounds to produce new names.
A couple things that popped into my mind to consider
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If the names are difficult or less than intuitive to pronounce, maybe consider including a glossary. I, for one, love it when authors include glossaries and will use them frequently to make sure I’m saying things correctly, especially when I can’t look up the meanings of names online because they’re made up. However, I know people who refuse to use glossaries and will continue to pronounce names how they originally read them or how they want to (or not at all and just insert a blender noise in their head when they read) so you can’t always win. Personally, I view those people as not the intended audience for my cool names and say they can stick to only knowing basic names if that’s how they’re gonna be.
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Continuity is important to make the names feel part of the world instead of something created by an outsider. I’m gonna use the Avatar universe from Avatar: The Last Airbender because I think the creators did a really good job with the names. While some of them are obviously names that we see cross over in our world (Mai, [name_f]Kya[/name_f], and [name_u]June[/name_u] for example), they don’t feel out of place with the other names we see in the universe. If the show introduced a random [name_f]Elizabeth[/name_f] though (or something like Elixyvettel), it would draw attention in a negative way.
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Are you going to consider real names or languages when creating these names (such as the aforementioned ATLA universe using names inspired by various cultures in [name_f]Asia[/name_f] and natives of northern [name_f]Canada[/name_f] and [name_f]Alaska[/name_f], or [name_m]Tolkien[/name_m] using Old [name_f]English[/name_f] roots to create names for The [name_m]Lord[/name_m] of the Rings) or would you go more the keysmash route? While I think the keysmash would take less time, it could lead to more continuity troubles than the other way.
I wish I could be more help and speak from experience. When it comes to place names, I love using the [name_f]Fantasy[/name_f] Name Generator website because it essentially does the creating for me. Sometimes I’ll find exactly what I need from the generator itself but other times it will lead me to realizing like “oh, I want to have a T and J in this place name, I like how those look together” and I’ll create from there.
I’ve never done anything with true spoken spells but as with any other thing I’d say about magic, just make sure to keep it consistent.
[name_f]Hope[/name_f] this helps!
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I like to generate a bunch of names and then just shove them together until they look good