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It's all in a name...
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Carole
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Apr 23, 2018 01:59PM
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I base them on Victoria Beckham’s children. He.
I use a book people use to name their baby... and I still change my mind later sometimes!! Hugs
Not telling... make of that what you will!!!
I hate naming things. I google everything. I've had to rename characters who are also people appearing on reality TV that I don't watch but have managed to infiltrate my consciousness. Writing science fiction means I can use odd names for people. Mothball is one. Track is another. I have no idea where Jarner came from. I try to avoid giving people two names in case someone complains I've used them in a book. Although, if I was someone called Mothball, I'd probably apply to change my name.
Like Alex, I've ended up with characters whose names all start with the same letters, or more generally that sound too much alike, (same number of syllables, same ending sounds, etc.).In recent years I've started looking up names online based on nationality. I decide my characters' primary ancestry and then search for " surnames" and " given names". I try to pay some attention to the area in which my story is set. For my Howard County Mysteries, I try to get a reasonable amount of diversity but focus a bit more on English names, since Maryland was settled by the English and those names are more prevalent here.
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Carole wrote: "Do you think a name gives people a preconceived idea of who they are? Do they shape the characters?"A name can give readers a preconceived idea when a name is used to hint to ethnicity/nationality, I would guess.
Otherwise, not really, no.
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I remember reading for 1984, Orwell named his mc Winston Smith. Winston after the Prime Minister and Smith for the every man.
Carole wrote: "Do you think a name gives people a preconceived idea of who they are? Do they shape the characters?"I haven't generally found that the name affects the way I develop the character. There can be some extreme cases, however. In Space Operatic I've given all of the opera company employees relatively silly stage names, and some of them are reflective of what the characters think of themselves, although mostly they're just silly.
I've read some books in which names were rather painfully symbolic of the characters' roles in the story. The worst case I've encountered--and I'm not making this up--was a reporter character named Frankly Unctuous.
Just typing it makes me feel ill . . .
The MC of my urban fantasy is a young millennial/gen z girl. I deliberately gave her a name that would be familiar and ordinary but uncommon in that age group (but not in a cool way). She's called Barbara. Most of her friends have names that seemed to come up a lot when my kids were in school: Travis, Whitney, Jackson, Storm, Justin, Zach. In my wizard fantasy, I derived a handful of names from a name generator in a game my kids were playing a lot at the time, then made up similar style names going forward. The naming scheme is that people have names made of pieces of their parents' or other relatives' or friends' names, so I reassemble the syllables till it sounds like a new name (or backwards engineer the parents' names from the child's). My current MC, Luskell, is named for her grandmothers, Stell and Lukett. Sometimes I end up with too many similar names and have to change something I've been working with for years. Argh! Mostly it works, but I always hate it when I have to name a new character. It never ends.
The best naming story I have: a new character had entered my story and did not have a name yet. I asked my then-teenaged son, "What's a good name for the captain of the boys' basketball team who is secretly in love with the main character's gay best friend?" Without missing a beat, he said, "Justin Hornbaker." We don't know where it came from, but it was perfect.
I collect them! Whenever I hear a great name I note it down for later use, one even came from a parent shouting their kid :D If I'm coming up with fantasy names I try to follow a convention within a species, my sphinxes have origins in Egyptian names like Sadiki and Asenath and my rock elementals have double-barrelled names like Bander-tock.
If I'm really lost for ideas I write out the whole alphabet down down one side of a page and just come up with something random for each letter. You sometimes get something cool.
My urban fantasy series has the usual dragons, unicorns, vampires, etc. I've determined in advance what sort of Earth culture they (very loosely) follow, and I pick names from that culture. The dragons, for example, are Norse/Viking, so their names come from that source. Makes life a bit more easy.
I create my character then see what name fits with his or her personality.
