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

[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.