names?

I know this feeling. Most of my names develop naturally out of something I connect with the character... somehow.

This might occur instantly or somewhere in the course of writing an entire story.

If all else fails I pick up a list of names and go poking around to see what might inspire other ones. Baby name lists tend to work best for me in that case.

There's lots of ways to do that. You can just put together syllables, a lot of ERB's Martian names have that feel, unless someone knows the secret origin of "Dejah Thoris" & "Tars Tarkas".

HP Lovecraft went even further naming his weird beings with names that weren't meant for the human tongue: Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Yuggoth, etc. That was the point, they had no connection with anything human.

You can just steal 'em from history. More or less every personal name & locality in the Conan stories comes from either history or legend. That fed into the premise that Conan's era was a forgotten past of our own.

Or you can make up your own languages like Tolkien did. He was a scholar of philology so he was able to adapt Welsh & Old English into his made up Elvish, Orcish & Human dialects.

I prefer to pull a random word out of the dictionary - preferably one or two syllables - and play with the lettering (specifically the vowels) to see if anything catchy comes up.

Some names are random products of my mind, others are slight variations on common names. I have one character that is named after a backpacking tent. I just changed two of the vowels. Others come from relevant historical figures.

Recently I've been consulting a book of baby names, which is great to work from. Some names are so unusual that they work perfectly without changes.

I ask the character.

If the character's Iranian, I google 'common Iranian names.' If they're Korean, I google 'common Korean names.' If they're living in a fantasy land, or they're aliens, I make it up, keeping common sounds/conventions for separate species. It works for me.

Depends on the story i'm writing. Generally I draw on my knowledge of various languages, make up something that works for my story, then keep the naming conventions consistent.

I tend to make mine up, I keep a notebook full of scribbled names but i'm also heavily influenced by the gaelic language, plus, if my characters are related i try to keep their names similar, with the children's names being derived from their parents

Once I know what that country/language's core is (ie: Egyptian/Mesopotamian/Pittsburgh which is my current MIP), then I go to a name generator and write down what appears that has the same feel to me. Then I hit refresh and do it a zillion times until I have a whole pile of words that all seem to fit what I want.

From that list (usually 300 or so words), I select place and people names whenever I need them. Usually I'll end up playing with a name to finesse it, but it's a base that I can jump off of.

Names, for me, led to some extreme world-building and etymological discovery that I won't go into now. In short, I picked a language for all the names from so they all had internal consistency. When I got further in, I worked out what the languages of other countries were and worked out where names would cross borders, influence each other and change. If a king or prince marries a foreign princess, her name or variations on her name may well become popular in the first few years after the wedding, or by courtiers seeking to ingratiate themselves. S'what makes the Tudors so confusing with all those Catherines.

But sometimes the characters will suit a specific name from that language or, like me, you might have a fondness for the meanings of names, so look broadly.

Personally, I find naming countries and places much more difficult.

For me, it depends on the race. I usually make mine up. If I pull a race from my imagination I choose names that have the same flow or feel. In fact a lot of times with an alien race I'll alter mythological names or names that are common to me, such as Ultimus Dragonus. Ultimus is derived from the spell Ultima in final fantasy 6 and Dragonus is derived from Dragon.

Works for me anyway.

I use names I've heard. One problem is when a name ends in 's'. The plurals and possessives can be correct according to the rules of punctuation, but they can be cumbersome to write in narrative. I recently chose Sproles for a married couple because I knew a girl in 2nd grade with that name. Sproleses and Sproles's and Sproles' are unwieldy. I'm about to do a global paste. Smith has a nice ring to it.

I usually settle on a few sounds I want, usually because of the feel I get for them. For example, I recently named a character Cairu. I wanted the "cae" sound because it makes me think of Iulius Caesar, a powerful conqueror. Using "cai" as a more visually appealing way to write "cae", I got the name. Just experiment and see what looks and sounds right to you. You can use normal names as a jumping off point. For example, I could take the name "Laura" and add a "ru" sound to get "Lauru". It's not the prettiest looking name, so I could change the spelling to "Loru" or something of the like. I could even have just used a different spelling of "Lauren." Eventually you'd get something like "Loerin" or "Loren." Good luck.

I mishear things at first sometimes.

This leads both to interesting names and story ideas.

If names are hard to pronounce, readers will tag the character with whatever they come up with. I once read a story where a character's name was something like Zogfpher. I just called him zog...

thothguard51 said:

If names are hard to pronounce, readers will tag the character with whatever they come up with. I once read a story where a character's name was something like Zogfpher. I just called him zog...

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I personally can't stand long, unweildy names. I tend to simply key on the first letter or something notable about the word, then gloss right over the rest.