10 New Dark Fantasy Romance Prompts (to Inspire Your Writing)

The last time we posted dark fantasy romance prompts to help inspire your writing the post blew up! Because it was so popular, we're giving it another go, this time with all new dark fantasy romance writing prompts! These are all free to use for your writing projects. You may change them if you like, or simply use these prompts in your story or to give you a head start on your novel or whatever else you may need a little dark fantasy inspiration for!

If you do use one of these prompts, we'd love to hear about it, so shoot us an email at info@freeflyingpress.com with your story or teaser and let us know! Your story could be featured on our blog.

Without further ado:

Your 10 New Dark Fantasy Romance Prompts

(Designed to ignite your imagination and get you writing!)

How to Name Your Fantasy Characters Like the Best of Them

We all know that characters are the life blood of any story, no matter what the genre. Here's a brief guide designed to help you find the best names for your fantasy novel's characters. Even if you have a concrete character design with a fully-fledged backstory, realistic strengths and weaknesses and you can write beautifully from their point of view, they are still going to fall short if they don’t have the right name. You know how important your characters are, and they need to be named accordingly.

Names can serve many purposes in your story. Your characters names can be used to set the theme, foreshadowing, or even irony. Take Buffy the Vampire Slayer for instance. In case you haven't seen it, it's a TV show about a teenage girl who slays vampires and deals with other forces of darkness and evil. Although “Buffy” seems like a silly name for such a dark theme, it really brings out the show’s ironic and joking element. Since it's actually a comedy show at heart, the name is very fitting. In popular teen novel Divergent, we are introduced to a character named Four. Although no initial explanation is given for this seemingly strange name, it’s later revealed that this is because this character only has 4 total fears in a society where bravery is praised and having only four fears is legendary.

Be sure to take your book’s setting and time period into consideration when naming your character. Be aware of when certain names where first used and gained popularity. If your novel is set in the 1700’s, a modern name like Tiffany of Jessica would be out of place. Do research into your setting and see what some believable names are for that era.

If your setting is purely fictional with no direct correlation to human civilization, you can get away with any kind of name that you want. After you’ve decided what kind of a society you want your fantasy setting to have, then you can begin to brainstorm some good names that might be given to its members. A good way to do this is to think about what is valued in this society. Is it religion? You can base many character names on the figures on your universe’s religion, just like many names in our society have biblical roots.

If your fantasy setting is based on water, like an ocean or river, then more aquatic themed names can work. If they have their own language, like an alien society, then their names can literally translate to things like “deep water” or “gentle current” or “skilled fisherman”. Depending on what sort of a feel you want your society, you can choose names that give off a certain feeling. Like if you wanted to have your society to give of an unsettling vibe, use more macabre names that variations of the words dusk, skull, shadow- even regular names that just sound creepy or are associated with that theme, like "Poe".

A less blunt way to do this is to look up synonyms for words like “shadow” or “black”, or even the translation of those words in other languages.

Once you’ve decided on a name, say it out loud. See how it sounds. Try different pronunciations. What are all the ways a reader could pronounce it in their mind? Consider a child seeing this name. would they have trouble with it?

Google search the name and see what comes up. If you’re writing a happy and uplifting story and your name search comes back with a serial killer, then maybe reconsider.

It’s important to have a name that fits your character. A hardened bounty hunter rouge would need a tough and sturdy name, or at least an alias to go by if they need to be taken seriously by your readers. An affectionate or childish name like “Timmy” may not be fitting. Of course there are exceptions like Davey Crockett or Billy the Kid, etc. Just keep your character's nature in mind, and how you want the audience to view him or her.

This isn’t to say that you can’t use an inaccurate name to describe a character. “Little John” from Robin for instance, was a larger character, making his name ironic, like mentioned above.

Fantasy writers have a lot more freedom when it comes to naming characters than other fiction writers. While some fiction is grounded in reality and meant to take place in our human society, past present or future, fantasy doesn’t have to follow this rule at all. In a fantasy novel, all of the characters can be named after a color in a certain society, or a race of aliens can have their own unique and complex naming system of your choosing. Fantasy writers also don’t have to be restricted by time period either. Even if your story does take place when the pyramids were being built on earth, if you’re writing about a different reality than you make up your own rules for how things work in your novel. Just one of the many perks of writing fantasy. Anything is possible.

While it’s true that you can get away with so much more, you still have to keep in mind how much readers are willing to believe or go along with. Everyone has their limits for suspending their disbelief, so in general just try to keep it coherent enough for people to follow along.

But since you since you have this freedom, why not have fun with it? Some readers might even expect you to use outside-of-the-box names. All in all, just do what feels right for your book.

How to Write Fantasy Like Neil Gaiman

Who better to learn from than the very best? Neil Gaiman is a gold mine of information for other aspiring writers. Here is a collection of his best advice and tips.

Neil Gaiman's 8 rules for writing fiction:

1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you somethings wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But its definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

From this article in The Guardian

Be conscious about your writing materials. Neil uses nearly every form of media for his writing for different reasons:

For screenplays, I work directly on screen – novels I write in longhand. For novels, I like the whole first and second draft feeling, and the act of making paper dirty, whereas, for screenplays, I value the immediacy of a computer...I try to change my superstitions with each project. Working in fountain pen is good because it slows me down just enough to keep my handwriting legible. Often I use two pens with different coloured ink, so I can tell visually how much I did each day.

From this interview in TimeOut

On his website, www.neilgaiman.com, he has an entire section of his FAQ devoted to advice to writers. In it, he writes a fair amount on how to get a book published. Here are just a few of his pointers from that dialogue:

How does one get published?

How do you do it? You do it.

You write.

You finish what you write.

Meet editors. Even if you haven't met any editors, send your stuff out.

Use The Web. Use it for anything you can - writers groups, feedback, networking, finding out how things work, getting published. It exists: take advantage of it.

Believe in yourself. Keep writing.

For the full, much more helpful version of this FAQ click here. Also in his FAQ he answers the question "How to write comics" and "How to handle revisions of work". Follow the same link for the answers to those questions.

Another helpful gem from the internet is this podcast featuring Neil Gaiman and his thoughts on writing. It's only 4 minutes, so give it a listen! The maker even included nice videos and graphics fro you to look at so it's not just audio:

https://youtu.be/drMuQqLLEe0

Lastly, if you're having trouble writing your novel and are ready to give up, here's a peptalk he wrote for the blog National Novel Writing Month. His encouragement is really inspiring and helpful, and ends with the simple words:

One word after another.

That’s the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it’s the only way to do it.

So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

Pretty soon you’ll be on the downward slide, and it’s not impossible that soon you’ll be at the end. Good luck…

Read the entire peptalk here on the National Novel Writing Month website.

As Neil would say, never stop writing and good luck!

How I Organize My Writing Process

As a writer, I’m always coming up with new ideas for my stories, but these ideas don’t always come up at the right time. When I’m standing in line at the grocery store is a less than ideal time to have a revelation about one of my characters, and I can’t just sit down in the middle of checkout lane #2 and write it out. That is why it has become essential for me to find ways to organize my many ideas and writing. So without further ado, here are helpful ways to organize your writing and ideas in a more effective way:

• The first thing you can do to help organize your writing is to write down every idea that you have AS SOON as you can! I can’t count the number of times I’ve had a story-changing idea and was too confident that I’d be able to remember it. Well now those ideas are lost no more, and all because I started using my cell phone's notepad app to quickly type out an idea to remember later. If your cell phone doesn’t have a notepad app, or you don’t want to use your cell phone, I recommend that you carry around a tiny note pad and pencil in your pocket or purse. Most book stores or stationary stores have small pocket sized notebooks, some of which even come with their own pen/pencil attached! I’ve recently started carrying around both a notepad AS WELL as my cell phone just in case I ever forget my phone at home or it has low battery. I still tend to use my cellphone more though because I’m less likely to forget it at home, unlike the notepad. The only thing you have to think about with the notepad is making sure you have enough pocket space and a usable writing utensil at all times.

-Once you have all of your ideas written down, you can then decide whether or not you want to use them later. The most important thing is that they are recorded at all so you have the option of using them at the very least.

-After you've complied your list of ideas/concepts from your phone or notepad, the next step is to prioritize them. Prioritize them as you see fit- maybe by which ones need to be cleared up first in order to move on with your story, or maybe just which ones you feel like doing first. You can even break them up further in to categories if needed. Then work through each idea and then cross it off the list. This will give you an accomplished feeling and motivate you to cross more of them off.

*Bonus Organization Tip*: If you know you get distracted by clutter, open a new word document for each new part of your writing so you can have a fresh start without distractions from what you’ve already written.

• Sometimes the idea itself needs organizing. Often times I’ll be stuck between to different ideas, unsure of which one I want to use in my story, or I need to work through a particular idea or problem that arises from the idea before I can move forward. When this happens, I sit down at my computer and just type it all out. I basically type my stream of consciousness as I think about the issue, weighing the pros and cons of the issue and etc. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar or punctuation-just get all of your thoughts down on the page. This is a great way to work through an idea or problem/conflict in your story, especially if you’re having doubts about it. Express your doubts and feelings and analyze them and fix them. Working through the problem by typing it all out makes your jumbled thoughts much clearer.

Since you are reading this blog post, presumably you are a writer. I think this particular method of working through an idea works best for writers in general, but there are variations of this same activity that may work better for you:

-if you’re more of a visual person, you can also draw it out.

-if you’re more of an auditory person, workshop it/talk it through with someone else.

Feel free to try it my way, but ultimately you know what’s best for you.

• If you’re on the computer doing research, bookmark every web page you find useful. In my internet browser I'm able to make folders for my bookmarks, so I always make one folder per story/project so everything I need will be in one place. Make sure you bookmark everything that you read, even if you think you won’t ultimately use the information. This is especially helpful if you do end up referencing or quoting something in your story that you weren’t originally planning on, but you don’t remember where you got it from. Now you’ll have all the websites you looked at in one place to make it easy.

• Speaking of folders, I recommend that you have all the documents you write for a certain project in the same folder on your computer as well. If you prefer to use a type writer or write by hand, consider buying physical folders or even use a file cabinet (if you don't have one already). But for those of you who write electronically, you can make a filing system that works best for you, but personally I make one folder per separate story / writing project and save everything I need in that folder. If your computer gives you the option, it can also be helpful to color code your folders for even more organization. This can help you identify folders at a glance and save you time. Organize your documents in a way that makes sense to you- but try to keep simple to minimize confusion.

*Bonus Organization Tip*: Make sure you name every document with something memorable so that you’ll be able to recall exactly what’s in it. Most people don't realize this but sentence-long titles are fine! I find that the more specific the title is, the better.

• My last tip is: use note cards! If I’m trying to figure out a plot line or the sequence of any given events, I find it helpful to write each event down on a note card or small piece of paper to arrange and re-arrange on a table until I’m happy with the order. This can also help me see if any events or ideas are unnecessary or redundant, where I might not have realized it before.If you’re having more trouble with the sequence of your story beyond that, sometimes it helps me to try to explain a common fairy tale to someone who hasn’t heard it before. That way, you have to think about which information to give first and how to say it to make the story the most interesting and coherent as possible. Make sure you choose a story with a loose plot that you have a general understanding of. Like Little Red Riding Hood- you know the basic plot points: going into the woods, meeting the wolf, arriving at grandmother’s house, etc. But this time think about how each part relates to each other and how to best tell the story so the other person understands. Telling kids stories works best for this, since they most likely haven't heard it and you'll need to simplify it to only necessary information for them, while keeping them interested.

So there you have it! I hope you enjoyed my tips for better organizing your writing.