How important are names to you?

Names are fairly important to me. Names sort of seal the deal in terms of creating a character. I don't like the idea that my characters are 'MC's or 'Pseudonyms's, like they are insignificant props than can be killed off or replaced or have a different gender if I feel like it. A name makes a person real, in my opinion, and I love creating seemingly real people.

I don't have some sort of symbolism in the names, because I'm always afraid it'll come off as 'trying too hard'. I also usually detest characters in novels who have very eccentric names unless they're normal words made into a name (like Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird). To me, an eccentric name reads like a big banner saying 'FICTION!', while I like my stories real and relatable, and I also sometimes feel writers give their character a very eccentric name to ensure some sort of uniqueness about their work, which I think the writing and story should take care of. And so, my characters are called Oliver, William and Daniel. And when they were still in college they called each other Ollie, Will and Dan. Simple!

In fact, come to think of it, it might also be the reason I seriously prefer Harry Potter over Lord of the Rings. I mean, Harry, Ron, Fred, Tom, Albus versus Frodo, Saruman, Gandalf, Meriadoc, Boromir... ugh. But that's a story for another time... ;)

Hope I haven't offended anyone who has eccentric names, it's just this personal issue I have. Come to think of it: Names are really important to me...

I also ramble on Twitter (though sometimes in Dutch).

2008: Junior Boys (won)
2009: Guilt (...?)

My characters generally speaking go unnamed, because a lot of the time they're all just me.

the world is ending and people are taking pictures
that won't last

I need them to tell the characters apart.

I did once try to write story with a bunch of unnamed characters. That ended up funny for that very reason.

Bodycount: 316 thereof 59 "on screen"
Lava: yes
Evil lair: yes
Dragon: yes

I usually play with names quite a bit. They aren't all symbolic, but I do try to come up with ones that suit the character and setting.

One of my current dillemas is that my MCs are based off of real people, and one of them has a name that's absolutely perfect - so perfect, in fact, that I can't figure out what to call the character she's inspired.

I've currently got a couple of characters that're going by temporary names - Magdelena is definately going to get a name change, Giesele and Gabe probably will too.

I have a lot of fun with last names in particular. Some of them are very deliberate and closely related to the character (often based on the name's meaning in its original language), others are intentionally ironic. I'm especially mean to ancestrally German characters because German surnames usually a profession or a phyiscal description that somebody's great-great-great grandfather got saddled with. Alternately, they can be descriptions of places (Rosenthal = rose valley, city names) or sometimes completely arbitrary (Oak, Gold, Eagle, Peace, etc). In any of these cases, it's a potential statement about the character.

I usually find a name with a meaning that suits my character or has some sort of symbolism. For example, my character (a female) is named Jude because her parents thought that they were going to have a boy, and were basically too lazy to come up with a different name after she was born. In the story, she's a bartender, which is fitting because she shares a name with St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and she's a lost cause herself. Get the symbolism? haha

Anyway, most times, I go with the meaning of the name for my character, last names included. For example, Jude's last name is Connelly, which means "great wolf" I believe, showing how strong of a person she is, despite all of her hardships. (More will come of that later in the story.)

I'd say be creative, but believable - and make sure that the name has some sort of meaning for you/your character. That's always my philosophy. :]

Words: 11,512 (38,488 to go) || Chapters: 9 || MCs: 1 || Freak-Outs: 2 || Sanity Level: 89%

Sometimes I do a great deal of research to come up with names that symbolically fit the character, but it rarely works very well for me. Names are still very important, though. I find that, when I'm working on the important characters, they don't truly form until I come up with a name for them. My characters are blurry shadows until I find a suitable name, then they become real to me. It's not an exact science, but it works for my brain.

I hate names. I can never think of any good names for my characters. I just cant seem to find a good name, and i can't use a name of someone I know because I think that if that person reads it it will think its based on him/her... and urgh! names are so annoying.. i wish i could just call all the caracters by numbers, lol...

...hmm... interesting..

Main Characters: 5
Characters: 7
Chapters: 7
Plot: starting to sprout

Normally I hate names too, and I agree with Japieee that very eccentric names can kill the mood of the novel. My MC's name is Ruth Nowicki- her first name a rather common, sensible name her mother would give her after The Book of Ruth, and her last name is Polish. Her brothers are Noah and Michael, sensible names too. Other significant characters are Gabrielle Rivers and Dakota Rivers, and the only character in my novel who is important with a slightly eccentric name is Pearl (I don't mention her last name, and I haven't thought of one yet). Usually, I reserve one slightly eccentric name for one character, and no more. A lot of weird names is just a red alert for fantasy or sci fi.

Names are what actually keep slowing me down, I keep having these characters pop up and a lot of them have no names and it drives me batty and I can't continue until they're named. Usually I'll just name them the first thing that comes to my head, but I'm rarely satisfied with that. Already Sally has become Saffron and one of my MCs started as Gemma, then Alice and is now sitting at Emily. It's great when the characters come to my head with names already, but some don't. I think the names help drive the story and are an essential element to it.

NaNo 2006: Untitled (Let's not talk about the epic FAIL)
NaNo 2009:

I think I'm more of a fantasy novelist in this sense: My primary concern with characters' nomenclature is whether it fits the in-world circumstances under which they received it (i.e. culture, linguistic trends, parents' substance usage). With main characters, I can become rather ambivalent on the subject of meanings: I do not wish to endow those who named them with psychic knowledge of their future attributes, but at the same time, incongruous meanings continue to grate on me.

Luckily, God in Heaven seems to have given me my main character's name--I mean literally. I was originally just going to give her a random, vaguely pleasant-sounding name I ripped from an unremarkable TV episode, but a couple of years ago when I was trying to read the Bible regularly like a proper Christian, the name of an obscure Israelite town (which sounded nothing like what I would usually name a main character) kept jumping out at me so persistently that I could not let it go and had to rename the main character to it. Then I looked up its meaning and discovered that it fit my character PERFECTLY. O_O

I am usually pretty good with finding names, I often look at popular names in the year my character was born and point randomly at the street directory to choose surnames. I tend to think of names last once I already have a pretty firm picture of the character in my head.

However, in my current novel I have two characters called Patricia and Christina, I did not think they would even meet but they ended up having heaps of scenes together and I find all the 'a' sounds really throws off my writing. One of them will have to change, but I am not sure who yet.

‘all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact are imagined’ Benedict Anderson

Important enough. I use names to convey either a sense of culture, or maybe symbolism, or eccentricity.

Like for instance: the name of my MC Joshua is symbolic (his role as a successor) and also a little cultural (Joshua is a common name too where I am). I change his nickname from Joshee to Josh halfway through the story to convey his newfound maturity.

Other symbolic names: Joshua's mentor is named Mark Angelo for the evangelist and also for a certain role he plays. Jun, one of my psuedovillains is a seemingly twisted version of "Juan dela Cruz" , the Filipino everyman.

Some of my characters like Marcelina, Pedering, Roderick, Violeta carry comparatively old-fashioned names, partly as a cultural throwback but also to show some of their more traditional and/or provincial roots. Marcelina for instance is one of my "old-style revolutionary-stuck-in-modern-world" personality typed-characters.

Another character of mine, Isadora, is the only character without a real Christian name. That's her eccentricity in this world.

My heart, my life, my praise is all for You

I made the decision to write mostly in third person. The main set of characters is a family and their names are Mother, Father, Brother and Sister.

While this may seem like a cop-out, it's a technique I learned with poetry. Third person allows quite a bit of freedom, particularly since much of the material hits close to home. It also casts these characters as universal - and (hopefully) will allow readers a more intimate identification with the characters.

Third person also goes hand-in-hand with the tone of the writing, which is a distant, somewhat unemotional voice.

If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.

Names are important because I'll have to live with them -- I don't want to type a name 100s of times if it annoys me every time I see it -- and because of how other characters would react to them.

In this story, I don't want to be threatened by "that's an unusual name" conversations every time a character is introduced. So I'm picking names like Robert, Carole, Sara, William. My main character's Laura, for no particular reason, and the other MC is Chloe, because of the Éric Rohmer film Chloe in the Afternoon (L'Amour l'après-midi) - a very distant inspiration.

However, it's a kind of fantasy, and so I'll probably give the "other world" characters unusual names if they ever make it far enough into the story. (So far, they've only been seen at a distance.) I'm considering some of the more obscure colour names.

(If an otherworldly horseman rode up and said "Hi, I'm Bob", I'd find myself in more of a comedy than I want to.)

I have an in-between character I'm calling Deirdre, a name from Irish mythology but not so unusual that I've never known one.

I make my names by the sound of the words. It depends of the rythm of the text. In germany we have often names that put together of two substantives. For exampel "firewall". I take the first part "fire" and put another word at the end, maybe flower. So I get words like "flowerwall". In german language it seems very real.

I love coming up with names. Sometimes they don't have any meaning and sometimes they do.

Usually when I have to name something off the top of my head I just string together sounds that I like, mostly 'Sli' or hard 'K' sounds.

I love exotic and weird names, when they seem appropriate. Otherwise they're just obnoxious...

NAMES!

I see what you did there

I just finished my names (finally): Brent (steep hill) and Matthew (child of god).

It took awhile but I am glad they do have some hook into the story...

My great novel already exists; it is just a matter of sitting down and typing it out.

Well I seem to be in the minority on this one.

Names just aren't that important to me. My first year doing NaNoWriMo, I waaay overplaned. The detailed outline, very detailed, and I did the in depth name searches so each characters name was a facet of their personality. Then I started writing and I lasted a day and a half because it was boring to write it all out, since I knew what happened and how it ended. That attempt was six years ago.

So, ever since, I don't do that. I end up taking parts of people I know and working them into my characters anyhow, so I tend just to name the characters after that person so I don't get confused while writing. For the massive amount of secondary characters that work themselves into my NaNo, they just get a name right on the spot or I'll either yell in the chatroom, or in real life at a write-in, "I need a male name" and go with the first one.

I want to worry about their development and seeing how they react to the ordinary situations I'm putting in them in, don't want to get hung up on a name. If I do plan to do something with it, I might go a little more in depth with the names, but not at this point.

Back for year #6, and MLing for the first time. Go NaNoLanta!
Co-Moderator of LitFic Genre Board

This year's Novel: "Just A Normal Thanksgiving."
Goal: 135k (9 chapters, 15k a pop)
Genre: LitFic
POV: Rotating First Person Stream of Consciousness

Things that are ridiculous include: naming a character after a facet of their personality/one of their talents/something important that happens in the novel, naming a character something that is wayyyyy culturally inappropriate (i.e. blond white girl from Kansas named "Yoko") , etc.

Things that make sense include: naming a character something their parents would name them, naming a character a name real people have. Most people in real life don't pay attention to the symbolism of names. There are many more suitable places for symbolism in a book than a stupid name forced onto a character. If you can do it realistically and well, good for you. But usually that's not the case.

I guess names are kind of really important to me--the majority of the time, I base the character around the name. When I decide I want to create a character, I look around for a name I really like--generally, trying to find something I'll be willing to type/say a lot. One of the few times I used the meaning to decide on a character's name (well, pseudonym), I ended up with Asrael, which is a variation of Azriel, which means "angel of death" and is rather appropriate for the character; as nice as it is to say, it took me ages to get used to typing it.

I also tend to form something similar to stereotypes around names, which is often how I decide what a character is like--for example, once my girlfriend asked my opinion on the name Adrian, and I replied "I don't like that name, because it makes me think of a tall, blonde, snobby guy with a big nose who plays golf at a country club in a white polo shirt." I have used the name James several times because those characters were all demure but intelligent, adventurous teenage boys.

So... yeah, names are pretty important to me. x3

Most of my characters in my current novel are Fae or other supernatural creatures, so even if they go by something else in the "human" world, they have a name that is symbolic to what and who they are. I might not take forever to come up with the name, but there will at least be some tangential meaning related to the character's personality or species.

Example: I wouldn't name a dragon "Drake" or similar, but a dragon that shows up later goes by Tristan Foley, both of which are Irish names and translate loosely to "a small bit of turmoil and a thief".

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My main character is named Benji Fasta. I picked it because it's the name of a character in one Terry Pratchett book who is mentioned for a sentence.

My supporting character #1 is named Cameron, after me.

The other is named Sally, in order to contradict her Latino heritage.

extremely important!!

At first I didn't have any names set, I couldn't think of any that would be really good, so I kept writing Her and Him (there were mostly just the two characters), then I would put initials to other characters like P. and Q. I didn't want to let the fact that I couldn't think of a good name halt my word count, and I'm very happy I didn't.

Now, I thought of few names but still many remain unnamed. I think if names are well thought out they add a lot to the novel's value.

I LOVE the character of Blanche du Bois from A Streetcar Named Desire - besides the fact that she is (IMO) one of the most complex character ever written, her name IS her. She would not be the same character with a different name, so much would be lost from her character and the whole play if it had been a merely coincidental "Sarah" or "Annie" (sorry to all of you have have Sarahs and Annies.. maybe in their novel they fit the characters.. :). Instead, Tennessee deliberately thought of a perfect name that would engulf and represent the whole personality of the character and what the character symbolized.

Exactly how I feel.

This.

I also ramble on Twitter (though sometimes in Dutch).

2008: Junior Boys (won)
2009: Guilt (...?)

Mine just have to sound right for the character (and time period). It's more of an "I'll know it when I hear it" than about the meaning. I don't name symbolically because, frankly, I find that silly.

That doesn't mean it's easy, though. My MC from last year still has no name. It's in first person, so I've been able to get away with it pretty well. From the year before, my MC is Florence Lastname. Hopefully, she'll eventually help me fill in that blank.

I come up with my names literally on the spot. My names mean nothing. My characters mean everything.

The named characters in my novel so far are:

Panda Bear
Sir Handsome
Pumpkin Head
Little Thomas
Funhouse Jack
Mr. Banner (this one's pretty normal)
Warm Onion (anagram of NaNoWriMo)
Friendly James

07 - the paxtangbo; or the birth, death, and violent emotions of arnold nawrocki and others like him (WINNER)
09 - the adventures of panda bear, the magic talking snake

My protagonist is as of now nameless, and she seems to want to stay that way. My other characters are all named, but they have real life names, as I find "unusual" names to take me out of a story. I hate reading something where the name just screams "author's creation" instead of "organic identifier." None of the names I've bounced around for my MC really fit, and the one that I hated the least still seemed really forced.

My main character has a name, and it was deliberately chosen to be plain and dull. None of the other characters have names, as they are all known to the reader only through the MC, and she never bothers learning people's names. So we have Monday and Wednesday (named after the day of the week that she sees them) and the target of the main character's obsession, her (italics essential).

In part, I couldn't really be bothered to make up names. But it also works for the character.

I pick names that come to mind easily, names that were in books I recently read, names I like.

This means that some of the names tend to get reused from story to story. It gets confusing sometimes. My FMC's name is Sophie but my MMC's name is Tim. But in another story I've written the FMC was Sophie but the MMC was Sam, so I keep wanting to write Tim as Sam.

I don't mind so much. I kind of like the idea of the same characters popping up in different bodies/universes because it relates to how I look at life. (And in the end they're all just me.)

I hardly ever choose names for their meanings anymore, but if I know the meaning, sometimes I find it acting on my character without me meaning it to. That's always fun.

themournfulduck