Characters

[Amy Eye]

When you name your characters, do you name then based on chance, try to tie their names into a bit of their personality, go for something strange and bizarre?

What kind of thought process goes on when you write your character?

[C.S. Splitter]

Naming is difficult and some of it depends on genre. For fantasy, the name needs to sound right and you have a million options because you can make them up. That presents its own challenges.

I write contemporary fiction and names were giving me fits. So, I decided to have some fun with them. Behind almost every name is a joke.

Tiny's last name is Johnson
Tom Cradyder. Last name sounds like "crater" which is something a pilot wants to avoid making.
Lorena...the first Lorena that comes to my mind is Bobbit...
Jenny is Forest Gumps love interest.
Lloyd was a sheriff that almost got named Andy. Instead he got named after Floyd the barber...but I didn't want it to be that obvious. His last name is Howard, btw.
Tuttle was an imaginary doctor that the cast of MASH made up in a famous episode. Everyone always just missed meeting Tuttle and no one could nail down what he looked like.
Notoriously evil people must have three names. John Wayne Gasey, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth.

In book two I went random with bad guy names. I pulled names at random from baseball rosters and then combined first and last. I still ended up with a joke or two.

I know names are important, but I also know authors often struggle with them.

Splitter

[Cambria]

Names are difficult. I try for something different, but not hard to say or read. (although i do have one of those names in Tirade and Renegade) but I shorten it and the characters give her a nickname becasue they can't say her name so i worked it into the story.

Heven is my main character in the Heven and Hell series. I acutally have a friend who named her daughter that.
Sam- i just thought it fit him.
Cole- a good name
Kimber- different and kind of trendy, but the girl is trendy so it works.

Some characters name themselves. I have one character, Riley, who I went through baby name sites for hours finally picked a name then went and wrote his first scene and when Heven said "whats your name" he said Riley. That wasn't the name I picked out. He refused to be called anything else. So there ya go.

Names are hard but ai try and pick something that kind of 'settles' in me and I know its right. strange but true.

[Barbara]

I usually have a virtual cast in mind and try to keep the initial of either first or family name of the "actor". I have a notebook of names and then I found some names generators online.
For Silvery Earth, I try to use names from different countries for different kingdoms - so the north of the Varian Empire would have Italian, French and English names, the south Indian and Arabic names, the Black Empire African or Arabic names, the Islands Empire Japanese names (even if there's some China in there, but Chinese names... ugh!) and sometimes I just use random names found... in the spam folder! :-)

[J.A.]

Excellent Barbara! My mum once got a spam mail from "Prometheus F. Gushy", but that's another story for another time....

For me the sound of the name has to fit with the sort of character. I keep a list of names I like,esp the odd ones, and sometimes make them up from words I come across or things I've misheard or words in other languages. London's quite good for that as there is such a cultural mix that you can't help but come across new names and new words in all sorts of languages. And also if I'm really stuck I get out the atlas and look through the placenames until I hit the right sort of word.

Importantly, I do have a quick Google before using them though, after reading about a writer of erotica who had to assume a pen-name because her real name was the same as a family councillor from conservative America who thought it was a deliberate smear and threatened to sue!!

One name that's on the list and has stuck in my head (so will be quite important I think) was basically what the numbers in a car registration plate looked like. I haven't got a character to fit it but I know it will be a bad tribal witchy type from a hot country who will attempt to derail things in ODS somewhere along the way. I know she will be wearing a kilted cloth of a particular colour of red. But I have no idea where she'll turn up as she doesn't fit into any of the locations I had them going to at the present time!

Possibly interesting fact; for a lot of years Nereia was called Mina; but when I started to get serious about publishing it and passed the script round for initial feedback about six people said "Mina, Mary and Mickel? Isn't that a 60s pop-group?" so of all of them, Nereia's name was the one that got changed.

With Cambria re the "feel" of the word though.
JAC

[Amy Eye]

I love the name Mina, too! Although I couldn't think of her as anything else but Nereia now...

[Amy Eye]

Barbara wrote: "I usually have a virtual cast in mind and try to keep the initial of either first or family name of the "actor". I have a notebook of names and then I found some names generators online.
For Silver..."

I love this idea too, keeping things sorted like that. Keeps a good feeling of continuity to it!

[A. Frank]

Call me anal, but I've been building a file of character names for 6 years. Online lists are fine, but noting good names from the daily newspaper as part of my routine helps me recall them as needed. However, I often find I name my folks without refering to lists. For example, I wrote a short story about an artist and the name "Reb Morgan" popped into my head on the second draft. My writers group loved it, as did the editor who accepted it. I only go to my list when I'm stuck.

[Cambria]

I think that happens a lot. Making lists of names but then making up new ones. It really just depends on the character you are writing!

[[deleted user]]

The names of my main characters tend to come to me naturally but secondary characters can end up being a pain in the behind. I have to make sure I'm not re-using the same names over and over and try to make them a bit diverse (so a list sounds like a really good idea). Sometimes I look them up as well so I can find something that has the right meaning to suit the characters personality but it's not a rule I stick to.

Recently, I've been working on a dystopian idea so I wanted the names to be futuristic but not sound completely alien and I've based them around things like personality traits, numbers and other nouns with a bit of a twist. So far my main character is called Aspa, her best friend is Drave and the love interest is Zero.

[Cambria]

Thats a good idea, Emma. I like the name Drave!

[[deleted user]]

Cambria wrote: "Thats a good idea, Emma. I like the name Drave!"

I think that's my favourite so far too!

[Cambria]

:)

[C.L.]

I really don't know how I come up with a character's name, I just go over different names until I find one that fits. But you have to be careful, once you chose one you're stuck with it. Change the name and the character changes along with it. Sometimes I have to rewrite an entire character just because the name doesn't fit. It's weird.

[A. Frank]

I've recently run into a similar problem: trying to avoid an Italian cliche when naming 2 hit men, I called them Peter & Paul. I think you see the obvious! Many years ago I clipped out an article by Theodore Sturgeon. The title was the capital letter Q with an arrow imbedded in its middle, pointing to the right. Translation: ask the next question. In other words, to keep a reader's interest, you need to make him/her ask, "Why"? As soon as you answer that one, ask the next. I keep the article because it's good advice for good story-telling. But in this case it also applies to our structural and character-name concerns.

[Adam]

I usually go with happenstance as I'm first starting. As I begin to develop my characters more, I start to look at name meanings and how they fit with the overall theme of the character.

[A. Frank]

Adam, I agree. I often get story ideas from names. I conceived a tale about the Yellowstone supervolcano blowing because of the name Phoenix...you know, rising from the ashes, etc. In the actual story I used her name just twice; otherwise her father uses her nickname, Princess. My point is that her name was the springboard for the whole thing.

[Cassie]

The last story I wrote, the names just came to me. They were just there. *shrug* Sometimes I like to use family names... I haven't come across anything yet where I felt a name I picked out didn't fit any longer.