Character names

[inkdust]

How do you name your characters, and how important are character names to you?

I love names. For me they're an essential part of a character. But I don't usually base them on name meaning - though that's a bonus - for me it's more of an instinctive fit and feel. Most major characters I invent seem to come with names built in, or else the right name comes to me very early on, and it's almost impossible for me to try to change them later. If I have trouble finding the right name, I stew about it for a long time until I land on the right one. Minor characters are a little more flexible.

Character names are also important to me in what I read. I've gotten a lot better about it, but when I was a teenager if I didn't like the main character names on the book jacket, I wouldn't read the book. Not a habit I would recommend, because I know I must have missed out on some good stories. Nowadays I'm more bothered by character names that don't fit the setting or time period, though I still prefer to see ones I like.

How significant are names in your writing?

Comments

[agilebrit]

If I'm writing secondary-world fantasy, I hit up my Character Naming Sourcebook for names that would be semi-exotic-but-still-pronounceable. I'm using Ukrainian names in my Latest Thing, for example.

Sometimes I go to NFL team rosters and pick the first name of one guy and the last name of another.

It really just depends on what kind of feel I'm going for in the story.

[belacqua]

I love naming characters. I'm the opposite though—I always like to look up meanings and alternatives before deciding on one. I've recently been trying to branch out more, as I noticed I've been overusing the same names.

[sarillia]

Names aren't really that important to me but I think that's just because I'm easy to please. There aren't many names that I don't like.

I mostly write fantasy and I used to have fun coming up with unique names but now I tend to use real names from our world. I figure all the dialogue is "translated" from whatever language they speak in their world so I'm okay with the names being translated to more familiar ones as well.

I'll admit that it's partly motivated by the overwhelming feeling I get from thinking of coming up with thousands of new names over hundreds of stories. The number that I've written or started to write is only in the dozens but I have another few hundred that are pretty far into the planning stage and I've had to come up with a lot of names.

So anyway, I use real world names. I make sure they all come from the same culture unless it's a society with a lot of immigration and it makes sense for some of the names to sound foreign.

[inkdust]

That's a ton of stories in the works O.O
Seriously, wow. I've had a lot of ideas over the years and have more that might actually turn into something, but only a few of them are as far along as character names. I guess that's a novel vs short story difference? Man, I wish I could think in short stories.

[sarillia]

I don't even know if most of my ideas are for short stories or novels or what. I've said before that I'm bad at gauging how long something will be.

The reason I have so much is that I just love coming up with new ideas and I love the planning stage. It's practically a separate hobby from the actual writing part. I probably won't write the vast majority of these ideas but I've still had fun thinking about them.

[badass_tiger]

I always try to hit on something that just sounds right, too. I find it difficult to work when a character and their name don't match up in my head. I think some names just fit certain appearances too, so that might affect how I pick names as well. If I'm having trouble coming up with one, I'll usually browse for names with certain meanings and so on.

[serria]

Most of my fantasy names are made up, or "altered" from real historical/mythological names (rarely for specific meaning, but just because I like the sound and it feels more authentic). I do have one pseudo-fantasy story where the names have more meaning, though I don't think the average reader would understand it, but all in all, I don't like names to have too much meaning. I don't mind hidden trivia in a name, but when the name has so much meaning it's either a) cheesy or b) telling the story/fate of the character, I get turned off. I'd rather my characters set their own legacy with their names rather than live up to one.

That being said, finding the right name is definitely important. Even if it's pure nonsense, it has to look right and sound right. In fact, I try to make sure my names don't accidentally have any meaning (particularly any bad meaning). And in normal world stuff, I try to get away from overused literary names (never even accidentally will I allow my characters to have the initials J.S.!) And I know the fantasy genre has a bad reputation for flowerly, silly names, so I try to go for solid names without too many syllables, haha.

[inkdust]

I agree completely. For me it's about look and feel and sound (spelling differences are huge for me). I also double check for accidental bad meanings or unfortunate sounds/initials. And I love creating fantasy names, but I like to keep them just barely on the fantasy side of the line, so they hopefully won't throw a reader off. Some of the ones I think I'm inventing turn out to already be names.

[serria]

Yeah, some of my made up names are inspired by other languages - for example, I used Japanese syllables/sounds to model the names of one country's people. But I checked every name to the best of my ability to make sure they didn't have meaning. Sometimes it happens in English, too, they sound too close to something real, or I didn't realize that saying them out loud sounds like something really unfortunate. But I guess something will always slip by!

[ayumidah]

It may sound a little silly, but I select character names based off of characters out of TV shows that I like, or some other medium. Say, the character I like's name is David Heyward-- my character is named Daniel Howard or some other D.H. combination. So similar, but not exactly the same.

[serria]

I don't think that's silly at all! I mean, if you take the exact name, people might think it's a fanfiction, but an "inspired by" name... I think that happens all the time in published works.

[ayumidah]

Good point :D

[siofrabunnies]

I normally write fanfiction, but I'm fond of throwing minor OCs in, and they and their names have to fit the story. For normal names, I use generators and phone books, a holdover from the Sims (naming a household always took forever). Sometimes it takes inventing a background to justify the name, and I really enjoy doing that. I'm writing something from ACD Sherlock Holmes, and I had a French first name Portuguese surname pop into my head, and I decided she should be a dressmaker's apprentice who was the daughter of a Portuguese immigrant father and English mother, but she was born while visiting the mother's distant relatives in Burgundy. That actually makes writing the character a bit easier, since they were wealthy enough to vacation fro that time, so maybe the daughter works because she enjoys it, maybe the father's a merchant, etc.

I guess names are pretty important to me, because they jump start a lot of the world-building and background.

[inkdust]

I like it best when names feed into the creation like that. It makes the whole process very organic.