Meaningful names....

megan_d said:

I have to be honest and say that I find the idea of giving your MC your name is a little strange. It just seems too mary sue-ish, and even if that wasn't the intention it would turn me off of reading if I noticed the author and a character in the back blurb shared names.

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Darren Shan did it and it was awesome.

I think it's more sue-ish to give your character a super aweseome exotic name when they come from Slough.

Some yes, some no. Some just sounded right for the character. Some characters, I started out looking for names with a specific meaning and found one that worked, just because I couldn't decide what I wanted to call them.

I do make sure their names are generationally appropriate.

Please don't do the whole 'Look! This is a meaningful NAME!' Names to avoid are things like Grace, Faith...anything that is distracting in its symbolism. This includes dodgy translations.

For the most part, I've managed to avoid this, as the majority of my character names are born from generators or mashing sounds together in a way that sounds like a name. An important character in my WIP has a name that resembles the name "Cain," but most of the name's significance has no bearing on the story or character. He has no brothers to be jealous of and gets along quite well with his sister.

I'm not wholly averse to meaningful names, but so far I haven't found any that don't come off as weak and corny.

Lady Ice said:

Please don't do the whole 'Look! This is a meaningful NAME!' Names to avoid are things like Grace, Faith...anything that is distracting in its symbolism. This includes dodgy translations.

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Or Lucy Honeychurch. I have no idea how Forster got away with any of that at all.

I don't have particular meanings for my characters' names, either, but I do like to stick in "inside" jokes or, in the case of my James Bond-esque spy novel, bad puns. In one novel, I had three separate characters named Mitchell, Phil, and Grant after the thug brothers Phil and Grant Mitchell in the British show EastEnders (one of the MCs in this particular novel is a huge fan of the show and he did a double take after having been introduced to all three), and in the spy novel I had a secretary named Helen Highwater.

In my short stories, I have fun with names. I named one character Mary-Lu Snurfrotten, just to see if I could get away with it and I did, by immediately acknowledging that the name was absurd and commenting that she'd come from a town so small that nobody laughed at the name there. In another story, I named a guy Edsel Moran and had him realize that he was destined to be a loser because he was named after a loser.

As a reader, I get offended when writers use meaningful names to feed their ego, and I know that parents sometimes name their children to feed their own ego. They forget that child will at some later stage appear before one of life’s assessment boards who will not be impressed with an applicant named after a famous porn star, or a long-faded pop idol.

I pick my names from the telephone directory, but take some care to ensure they are not inappropriate or already in popular use; there will only be one Harry Potter for years to come.

I wouldn’t name a Spanish character Jesus, unless I was writing for a Spanish audience.

I am a big believer in letting characters' parents name them. That said, some parents do try to choose meaningful names/nicknames. Hence in the book I have on sub the Ugliest Girl in the World is named Shona. (a phonetic equivalent for "beautiful" in German.)

Dickens used meaningful names, didn't he? J.K. Rowling did, too, and it never distracted me. There's nothing inherently wrong with it. Same as always, whatever works for your piece, works. As for me, sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. Depends on my undependable mood.