[TOPIC] Character Names

Well, when you name a child or a pet, you're pretty much inventing their names, too.

For my characters, I tend to go to baby naming websites and do a name search by personality traits (strong, feminine, etc.) and see what comes up. For one book, my characters were mages aligned with elements, so I searched out names that had something to do with fire, earth, water and air.

I've read that some authors give their characters names they would have given children, but didn't for whatever reason.

How about naming them after real people, people you know or have met? I admit that my last two novels had pretty odd names in them ... this time around, I still have an odd one, but I also have a main character named after someone I actually know, and his name sounds pretty normal.

Two lousy novels under my belt. Third time's the charm, eh?
2003: "Stet," a rather awful romance story
2004: A metaphysical adventure story, so bad it never even got a title
2008: "Rebirthday," a tale of political intrigue

When I'm creating characters, I'm also one for looking at baby naming websites. A few of them even have tips for writers looking for character names, which can be really helpful. www.babynames.com is a favourite of mine.

I also like to look up things in other languages sometimes, if I'm looking for a more unique names, and often I also look to religious or mythological characters for inspiration.

I do that too :D, also, if I've got one name but I'm having trouble coming up with a first of middle name I often use www.babynamegenie.com to come up with suggestions. I have found it very useful in the past.

this has been so helpful, the websites provided, (: thanks

i tried pursuing happiness; happiness sought a restraining order

Baby naming books and other languages are a Godsend, but I've also found that random name gen sites can be useful too. Not usually for the actual generated results necessarily. What I tend to use them for instead is to find 'sounds' or syllables that seem to fit the type of character I'm looking for, and then I mix and blend until I get the right name for the character.

My favorite name gen site is: http://rinkworks.com/namegen/

It has some nice preset generators as well as a completely customisable advanced generator (which takes a little bit of getting used to, but it so very useful!)

Hope that helps :)

Here's a great website that I use. You can specify for names from different countries, too, so if you're writing a fantasy novel you can still get a good name.

www.behindthename.com

I use my friend's middle names, one of my best friends has Elisapeta as a middle name which always sounds made up when I hear it.

Another way I come up with names is I imagine one of my other characters having a conversation with them and saying 'Hey, _ _ _ _' and a lot of the time their name just appears.

I mark all my characters A, B, C, or MC1, MC2, BF1, CM (classmate) or CW (co worker) depending on how many characters I got, usually as I write more of the story, the names sort of come to me, then I just hit hte 'replace' feature on my toolbar

Now is the time to go AWOL

If I'm not incredibly picky about a name, I'll pick something out of the phonebook. Open the white pages to a random spot, close my eyes, run my finger down the list, stop. It usually takes a few tries to find something that works. Other times I'll use a baby names book and a genealogy book which lists surnames and their origin. I'll also use the Internet and do a search, epecially if I know the ancestry of the character.

Movie credits are a good source of names, epecially if you mix them around first.

Also, when I'm ready to name a character I NEVER think "What would be the best name for this character?" becuase that's not how it is in real life, I think "What would the character's parents name the kid?"
I've seen stories in which hte mom is portrayed as an uber-conservative, non-nonsense type woman, who was very traditional. In logic she would have named her kids something very vanilla, like "John" "Adam" or "Christopher" but the character who would later become magical, with special control over causing sleep was named "Morpheus" (the roman [greek?] god of sleep.

I don't mind this, really, but unless I"m specifically using the name as foreshadowing, I take the parents more into consideration.

Now is the time to go AWOL

Sometimes I actually START with a name and build it up from there. I think "What kind of person would have this name?" And for some reason, these names come from really random places.

I would recommend buying a Baby Naming book. Take a bath and read through as much as you can handle. READ THE DESCRIPTIONS. That's what I would reccomend. (Since for some reason, baby naming sites are harder for me to read. I like to skim around in my own book.)

For instance, I have an insane serial killer, Reginald, also known as Reggie. I also have an Eimin, an Albin, an Ernil and of course, a Yacht. Oh. Let's not forget Bob.

Random objects ALWAYS make good names.

I like all these names, wish I could name my children strange names such of these, but wouldn't. Nice sensible names need more love in real life. It doesn't hurt that my characters are not the best of role models.

I name my characters based on people I know, or would like to get to know. Even when I "make up" a name, I'm borrowing a word -- I had a country boy in my fantasy world named "Range". His brother was "Skip", for skipper, because they were a fishing family. (Lame, but, hey, his brother was a minor character).

I like baby name websites. Or names stolen from spam emails are great, or college professors/classmates I've had. These are especially good for people I want to kill in my novels. This past November, when I was running high school detention, students who pissed me off were killed in my novel in brutal fashion. It was awesome. It will also be edited out before I ever think about submitting for publication.

I don't like naming my characters after people I know *too* well, though, otherwise I can't separate fact from fiction and my characters stop being my characters and start reminding me too much of the real-life person.

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Despite my username, I really am female.

NaNo04: Dawnheart Tane - win
NaNo05: untitled - win
NaNo06: Giving Up It All / Half the Man - win
NaNo08 : Dog Fight / Dog Run - win

i find names that look interseting, and then combine them together until i get a name that i like. Sometimes it could be 2 names, or 3 names combined together to get what i like.

I like baby name books. I've read three of them from cover to cover.

I've compiled a list of hundreds of names just in case I come to a point where a character needs a name and I need one fast.

My writing teacher pounded it into my poor little head not to have characters with names that are too similar. But I understand his reasoning. I read one scene in a novel with characters with similar names (beginning and ending with the same letters), and I could never keep them straight.

"Be nice to the imaginary people. Don't kill too many." -- e-mail from my youngest sister, June 23, 2008

Baby name websites aren't really great sources because most of them are jam-packed with really odd, made-up sounding names. What I did a long time ago was grab a bunch of DVDs from my collection and mix up some of the names on the credits, as well as throw in the occasional relative's or friend's name, people I've met or at least names that I know exist in the real world, and wrote down about 90 original names (first and last) that I can use at any time.

I don't think it's important that a name fit the character, because if you portray the character well, then slowly the reader will start to associate the name with that character's personality traits. For example, I used to love the name "Parker" until I read a book with an incredibly irritating character named Parker. So the name will change to fit the character. I agree with the person who said that you have to take parents into consideration.

Another thing to take into consideration is nationality and family traits. If somebody is Caucasian, chances are they aren't going to have a name in Korean/Greek/whatever unless their parents are oddballs. If somebody is an immigrant, they'd probably adopt a simplistic English name that sounds similar to their native name. It all depends on the person's history.

On the other hand... naming a character just to illustrate or foreshadow character traits is kind of annoying. =/

I like to figure out the character's birth year and look at lists of popular baby names for that year. I'll also use the middle names of people I know as character names.

It generally bothers me when the author tries too hard to avoid ANY overly common names. While not a book, the best example I can come up with off the top of my head is the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There's not a single MC with a generic name--Buffy, Willow, Cordelia, Anya, Oz, Xander, Spike, Angel, Drusila, Kendra, Faith, Dawn, etc. It's a different story if your novel takes place in a made up setting, but for a contemporary book you need to toss in a(n) Ashley/Megan/Jenny/Chris/Bruce/Jonh/Sara here and there. Not every important character has to be named Tristan, Arabella, Wilbur, Josselyn, etc

And be careful about the ages of your characters. If your character is 25+ in the year 2009, she should not be named Mackenzie or Dakota or something that has come into vogue only in the past decade or so. I don't think I've ever met anyone over the age of 15 with one of those names, but any 5th grade class in the country probably has at least one Mackenzie. A middle aged woman would not be named Taylor, Riley, Briana, etc.

+1 to whoever said you need to think more about what the character's parents would name them if the character's upbringing is ever mentioned in the book. If your character is an even occasionally practicing Jew, she probably won't name her son Christopher.

I like to name main characters after a real, relatively well-known person who I find relatable to the character. For example, I have a female character named Jamie who really loves animals; I named her after James Herriott, an author who wrote about his experiences as a rural veterinarian.

For more minor characters, I often pick names that I've always liked, or names of acquaintances who remind me of the character in some small way. Sometimes names just come to me out of the blue as well, or (as someone else mentioned) after imagining a conversation with the character. When I'm really out of ideas, I like to name on a theme. A lot of the very minor characters (mostly elementary and high school teachers) in my current novel are named after counties and towns in Oregon and Washington (Clark, Stevens, Canby, Douglas etc).

AnneBonny - I see your point about Buffy (and Willow and Cordelia and Drusilla), but in all fairness, many of those characters did have normal names. Dawn, Anya, Faith, and Kendra are all normal (I've known at least one person with each of those names), and Spike and Angel were named William and Liam, respectively, before becoming vampires. Oz's name is actually Daniel Osborne, and Xander is a not-unheard-of nickname for Alexander. I always thought of it as taking average names and making them a little more memorable, IMO. Good point about giving people appropriate names for their age, though!

I usually just dig around on Babynames.com until I find something. To keep the name from sounding contrived, I try not to fit the name too closely to the character's personality or Genre - I.E., if I have an action hero and his name is Flint McBurly, I'm probably doing something wrong.

Depending on how realistic your fiction is intended to be, you may want to avoid giving characters names based on meaning.
My name means "Tall and Graceful"; I am only marginally taller than average, and have the special ability to trip over a completely flat surface. You have to remember that names are given long before the personality completely rears it's head.

(Now, if you have a fictional culture where names aren't given until the kid is old enough/active enough to start showing their uniqueness, it could work. But unless they waited until toddler age or beyond, they'd be stuck with meanings like "quiet", "loud", or "throws up a lot".)

What I've decided to do, especially with older characters, is find a number generator, http://www.random.org/integers/ works for me, and then lists of popular names for certain decades; I use http://www.behindthename.com/top/ for that purpose.

Then I decide on the character's age, use the number generator to give me two numbers between 1 and 1000, and those are their first and middle names.

Then I get creative with last names. My current favorite is Keye... heh, Vanessa Keye. Favorite name... though her's was thought up in a burst of creativity, as with most names I think of. I just use this for minors.

For majors I actually put some thought into it. :D

LOL. I do several things. For me, finding names can take *forever*, because if I'm not careful and choose the name of someone I know for a character that's not like that person, I get confused and my character ends up being more like their namesake than like who they're supposed to be. So unless my character and a real life person are very similar, I try not to name for people I know in real life.

I look around on name sites and stuff - I love those - but don't search for meanings of names unless I'm desperate. I look for names from where the character came from (Ireland, Russia, etc), or I look through the most popular names list ()usually picking something from somewhere in the middle). Usually that's what I do for first names.

For last names, I've compiled a list - but I also look at other peoples' last names lists (you can find them online if you google "last names list"). I also listen to the intercom at my school during passing periods (when I can hear it over everybody else chattering, that is), and that can be useful too.

Ashe

Meet my Muse.
Now meet my Inner Editor.
Now watch my muse beat the crap out of my Inner Editor.

I use baby name websites as well.

Every year, someone publishes a list of the most popular baby names. It's very interesting to go back and look at how naming trends change. It also explains why so many girls in their early to mid-20s are named Jennifer (myself included) - it was one of the most popular names in the 1980s.

I figured out roughly when my characters were born and chose from that list accordingly.

Biblical names are also very good, especially if the parents are religious.

You can do a lot with names.

In my novel, my MC feels out of place in her family, so I gave her a different first initial than that of her siblings.

I became a writer and worked on a lot of things that were almost incredibly successful, but, in fact, just failed to see the light of day. Other writers will know what I mean.
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2008: With a Saber and a Gun
2009: No Direction Home

My 2 MC's Both have rather unique names.

The first is Samtha Ceres. The first name, Samtha, comes mostly from the name Samantha. I'm kind of big on abbreviating with nicknames. The last name Ceres comes from the small dwarf planet that I wrote a comic about a long time ago. That name comes from the roman goddess of harvest/corn. Originally I had her using a nature magic (called Harvest element). In the end I decided to change that, but I liked the name so much I decided to keep it. She was a wolf-girl, so when she fully became a wolf I had her be called Cerius, a play on Sirius.

The second is Antonio(Ant) Andres. The first names from a friend, who liked to be called Ant, and I always thought this was the coolest thing in the world. The last name did come from a baby site, but I still like it.