Naming Characters?

angeliz2k said:

I like this topic.
Mostly, my characters kind of come with names. I write historical, so I just choose names that seem appropriate.

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You're lucky that your character names that just sort of happen are appropriate. I have a character who's supposed to be German born and raised, but who keeps clinging to a very British sort of name. I ended up giving him a whole family history to account for the discrepancy, a history that resides only in my head because it has no bearing on the actual story.

Good thread. I've been known to use Fake Name Generator on occasion. It helps with foreign names, as you can select a particular national origin.

Well, it depends on what you're going for, I think. If you're doing something contemporary, (half of my WIP is contemporary New York), then I factored in that my MC is half Hispanic and born in the 1980s. So ethnicity plays a part in choosing a last name and I like to try to name characters based on when they exist.

But in my historical fiction, I kind of just went with whatever sounded right for the era and the country. Sometimes when I'm watching TV, I'll make a note of people's last names from the news or something.

Tazlima said:

You're lucky that your character names that just sort of happen are appropriate. I have a character who's supposed to be German born and raised, but who keeps clinging to a very British sort of name. I ended up giving him a whole family history to account for the discrepancy, a history that resides only in my head because it has no bearing on the actual story.

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Well, it's not luck! It's having some knowledge of appropriate names, and consciously/subconsciously digging through that those names for one that fits my character.

You story about the German character reminds me of a minor character in one of my WIPs. She's an American living in Georgia in 1858, and her name is Ophélie. I just kinda liked the name for her, so I used it and explained it away as an amusing eccentricity.

One thing I can't stress enough is to Google your MC names. I've come up with great-sounding name combinations a number of times, and discovered they probably weren't a great idea.

Mostly my characters come with first names, but last names are a whole other kettle. I was writing a lot of Appalachian characters, and I developed a good system for it. First I figured out a character's interests, and then googled interest + location. For example, I had a male character who liked to play basketball, and he lived in West Virginia, so I googled 'West Virginia local basketball teams' and read through the lists of player names. Lots of authentic last names--some of which can be very local to the region--and plenty of ways to configure them. Also found some great first name trends which I could store away for later.

I also like to think about the location. If any name will do, so long as it's good, think about the place's history. The town in my story has a lot of Polish names because it had Polish coal minors 150 years beforehand. A lot of minors also were from Wales, Italy, and Scotland, hence my other last-name stores for anyone local. My town is also completely made up and that fact is never mentioned in the text, but it makes sense for the region, and gives a bit of cohesiveness to the characters.

cmhbob said:

One thing I can't stress enough is to Google your MC names. I've come up with great-sounding name combinations a number of times, and discovered they probably weren't a great idea.

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There is a historical romance in which the hero has the same name the current British PM because the author did not check...

I'm lucky that the majority of my characters don't have last names. They only have a first name that I am pulling off a list of Scottish or Irish first names.

I don't worry about character names much. I'm working on a story (it's a historical) in which, pending decision on names (will do some research for this) I'm using (BossName), (FiefName), (Chief) etc.

lianna williamson said:

One of my other big naming bugaboos is a whole cast of characters with anachronistic names. TV shows do this a lot. The female names Janet, Jennifer, Jasmine, and Jayda all belong to different generations. .

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By overall popularity, may, but in no other way. All you telling me you don't know young people with each of these names? I certainly do. These are all still very common names. They certainly are not, in any way, anachronistic.

If you didn't look at some census or social security info, you wouldn't have a clue one way more popular than another in a different generation.

One or two of my characters have names based on Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

My reasoning goes, "Character A does B, just like C person. C sounds like K, which is also another name for X..." and so on.

Others just have names that sound cool.
That, and puns. Lots of puns.

I've found genealogy useful for naming historical characters. One of my WIPs features distant relatives and currently I have kept their real names, though I may change them. I'm not 100% set on my made-up names for my current WIP. One of them I think I may be erring on the side of way too ordinary, the other may seem too modern (though I have found it in period sources for her ethnicity). But the first character is a conventional everyman and the second is a progressive agitator so it makes sense.

I look through historical lists of names from the time period I'm writing about.

lianna williamson said:

The female names Janet, Jennifer, Jasmine, and Jayda all belong to different generations.

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Janet and Jennifer remain pretty common names for young people. I teach university classes, and 20-ish people with these names abound. On the other hand, I've never met a "Jayda". That has never, ever, been a "common" female name. Not that it would be bad for a character in a story.

Certainly there are some badly anachronistic, used-to-be-common-in-the-U.S., first names for characters in a contemporary setting:

For females: Maud, Gertrude, Helen, Alice (my mom's name), Winifred, Minnie

For males: Harold, Clarence (two of my uncles), Chester, Arthur, Merle, Edgar

But for something set, say, between 1850 and 1920 or so, they'd be perfect.

caw

blacbird said:

Janet and Jennifer remain pretty common names for young people. I teach university classes, and 20-ish people with these names abound. On the other hand, I've never met a "Jayda". That has never, ever, been a "common" female name. Not that it would be bad for a character in a story.

caw

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I haven't come across Jayda, but Jayden and its variants are pretty common child names and to my knowledge mostly used for boys - Will Smith's and Britney Spears' sons probably the most famous examples.

One thing that irks me is when authors (more often screenwriters) give adult characters the trendy baby names. Though, my dad's name is Mason which was unusual until it became one of the most popular baby boy names just a few years ago (damn Kardashians).

Names usually come from things that inspire you. In many cases they can be references to a real or fictional person.

I use name generators constantly. But I also modify and tweak the results so that I get something that matches the aesthetic of what I am writing.

LJD said:

There is a historical romance in which the hero has the same name the current British PM because the author did not check...

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Apparently the main character in Star Trek: Enterprise was going to be called Jeffrey Archer until all the British people collectively said NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! and they changed his name to Jonathan Archer.

blacbird said:

On the other hand, I've never met a "Jayda". That has never, ever, been a "common" female name.

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Then you probably don't know anyone under the age of 10. Jada/Jayda/Jaida was in the top 100 for female names in the U.S. for babies born in the mid-naughts.

This is why I recommend looking at the SSA site. Just because you don't personally know one doesn't mean the name isn't used. It's like when first-time expectant parents tell me they've found the perfect undiscovered classic name for their child: Jack! Or Olivia! They honestly have no idea that the names are epidemically popular among kids, because they don't know any kids yet.

Wikipedia has lists of surnames by ethnicity. If you want to check if a combination of syllables is a real last name, Google "Michael _____" or "Jennifer _____" and see if anything comes up.

I use Behind the Name (http://www.behindthename.com/) which is wonderful, and there's one for surnames as well. Sometimes characters just emerge into the world with a name that fits perfectly. If not I keep a weather ear out for names IRL or bounce around a handful of names from databases until something clicks. I'm a keener for historical/cultural accuracy and plausibility.

Interesting... I did almost all of these for my first foray into writing a novel. My protagonist's name is the name of a girl I dated briefly as a teenager, spelling slightly changed, and she apparently isn't famous enough to turn up in a search. For a couple of French supporting characters, I Googled the top 100 most common French last names. All the other names came out of a ten year old phone book.

But definitely Google them up; I have a character that is a former pro football player, and his random phone book name really WAS an NFL player, so I found him a new name right away before I got used to typing it...

LJD said:

There is a historical romance in which the hero has the same name the current British PM because the author did not check...

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I've read another historical romance where the hero's brother was named David Cameron--although I think that one's from more than ten years ago.

For me, naming male characters is more like choosing an everyman kind of name, something that the average reader can relate to. Most of the names I choose--Paul, Carl, Bill--sound average, whitebread, and the family names are invariably Christian sounding.

Please understand, this is not to knock anyone or start a holy war, LOL. But I've noticed that the majority of novels have names that sound like Christian ones, reflecting the majority of people within North America as well as the world. With Catnip and its sequel, Catnip 2: Rise of the Transgenics I deliberately chose a non-Christian sounding name for the hero--Goldman--and as to why, it just popped into my head, as all my characters' names do.

As for the women, a tad more difficult. If they're from Earth, again, I choose a fairly common name--Lindsay, Myra (sort of old-fashioned, but I like it), Megan, Amy, Anastasia from Catnip (she's of Russian descent) ...but for alien women's names, I usually end it in an -la...Angella, Angyalla, Shayala...sounds more poetic to me. Meddee (she's an alien but supposed to be somewhat like a woman from the Middle East) is the one no -la exception. I let my instinct guide me. If it sounds right to me, it's going to fit. If I dither over the choice, then it gets dumped and I think of something better.

Sorry for the long post.