Coorlim’s Guide to NaNoWriMo 10: Character Naming
Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month
Coorlim’s Guide to NaNoWriMo is a multi-part series on writing, creativity, and the work-life balance throughout the month of November. Today we’re talking about naming our characters.
It’s easy to get hung up on the search for the perfect character name, tweaking and tilting to get something perfect. It’s important to remember the words of Voltaire:
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
We’ll return to this concept again and again, but for now you don’t really have time to dwell on names. You have a lot to do, and only a month to do it.
Tips for effective character naming
Your names are an opportunity for worldbuilding. Approach them from the perspective of your characters’ culture. Decide on a scheme for naming characters, and stick with it.
Don’t go overboard, though. Giving characters unpronounceable names just makes it harder for your readers to get a grip on them.
An easy trick for science fiction and fantasy is to use an Earth culture as a template. Maybe switch some letters around if you want to feel exotic, but different cultures usually have identifiable naming patterns.
…but remember who your readers are. If you’re writing for 21st century western first-worlders, keep in mind that regardless of what connotations your character names have in their native culture, centuries of pop culture and literature have already created connotations and associations within your readers’ minds. They already HAVE a resonance. Don’t pretend they don’t.
Your characters’ names should “read” differently to remain distinct in your readers’ minds. The simple fix is to avoid important characters whose names start with the same letters unless those names are otherwise very different. Bart and Brad will blend. Dan and Dmitri will be distinct. Brad and Dmitiri would be best.
Naming Resources
is one of any number of baby-naming resources. I like this one because you can search by culture of origin and gender, but really, any of them will do. If you just need one name, they even have a .
Chris Pound’s Name Generation Page holds a bunch of scripts to generate words from linguistic data. It won’t give you “authentic” names, but if you pick a data set it’ll give you a lot of consistent strings of letters that correspond to a language’s patterns. It’s pretty cool. Scroll down to Data Sets and pick the “sample output” that matches the theme you want to go with, and pick the names you want.
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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