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How do you choose your characters' names?

DragonOfTheAerie

DragonOfTheAerie

Istari
I have no idea. :p

My last main character ended up with the name Temerity. It's a fricking SAT vocabulary word. It's just a word I really like...There's an explanation for it in the story, but I didn't have an explanation for it when I came up with it. I think I thought "Huh, this word sounds like a girl's name."

I should probably stop naming my characters after my favorite words...A dragon named Pandemonium is a bit weird, is it not?

Yeah. Last book was just a mess of random names and random words I liked. (Many of which, including the MC's, are unfortunately apt.)

In the project I'm taking a break from, I was more conservative with naming, which is to say I made up names myself rather than use random words...Unfortunately, lots of the names (including the villain's, the love interest's...) are copied in other books. So...not sure what I'll do about that.

I never seem to think about meaning. With poor Temerity, I think the name helped make the character rather than the other way around.

(Come on! The word sounds like a name. Admit it.)

Helpfully enough, in my upcoming WIP, NONE of my characters HAVE names! (I'm going for a kind of distance from the story, as if you're looking at it through the dust of time and memory. I think it fits.) Fun way to circumvent the problem.
 
Michael K. Eidson

Michael K. Eidson

Grandmaster
DragonOfTheAerie said:
A dragon named Pandemonium is a bit weird, is it not?
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Not at all. It would be interesting to see exactly how that dragon behaved, given that name. In a dark tale, a dragon named Pandemonium, who spread fire and chaos everywhere, would be aptly named. In a humorous tale, a dragon named Pandemonium, who squandered her treasure hoard visiting different pubs across the land, buying beer for strangers, might also be aptly named.
 
DragonOfTheAerie

DragonOfTheAerie

Istari
Michael K. Eidson said:
Not at all. It would be interesting to see exactly how that dragon behaved, given that name. In a dark tale, a dragon named Pandemonium, who spread fire and chaos everywhere, would be aptly named. In a humorous tale, a dragon named Pandemonium, who squandered her treasure hoard visiting different pubs across the land, buying beer for strangers, might also be aptly named.
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Fair enough.

My main problem with the name, to be honest, is probably not being able to shorten it to any kind of nickname her rider can use. Five syllables is cumbersome.
 
Ireth

Ireth

Mythic Scribe
DragonOfTheAerie said:
I settled on that for forever, but I don't know how to pronounce the first one and the second is just a bit weird...especially for a dragon that's striped rather than panda'd. :p
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I imagine they'd be pronounced the same; the 'e' in Pande is like the one in 'the', just an unstressed "uh" sound.
 
La Volpe

La Volpe

Mystagogue
DragonOfTheAerie said:
I settled on that for forever, but I don't know how to pronounce the first one and the second is just a bit weird...especially for a dragon that's striped rather than panda'd. :p
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Are there pandas in that world? And even if there are, it's very obviously a shortened name.

I'm more partial to "Pan" myself. It feels like that would be the natural shortened version. And the maleness of the name shouldn't be an issue either. There are girl names that are shortened to something that sounds/is male without any issues. E.g. Samantha to Sam, Alexis to Alex, Jo-anne to Jo, etc.

But in the end, if you don't like it, you don't like it. Alternatively, the nickname doesn't need to refer to the normal name. It could refer to a feature.

Helpfully enough, in my upcoming WIP, NONE of my characters HAVE names! (I'm going for a kind of distance from the story, as if you're looking at it through the dust of time and memory. I think it fits.) Fun way to circumvent the problem.
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That seems like it can be incredibly confusing. How many characters are we talking about here? And how long is said story?
I've read almost zero stories where name-withholding aided the story. Though The Road managed to pull it off without being confusing, but you should just be aware of the landmines you're setting up for yourself.
 
DragonOfTheAerie

DragonOfTheAerie

Istari
La Volpe said:
That seems like it can be incredibly confusing. How many characters are we talking about here? And how long is said story?
I've read almost zero stories where name-withholding aided the story. Though The Road managed to pull it off without being confusing, but you should just be aware of the landmines you're setting up for yourself.
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There are really only three, possibly four important characters. I refer to them as "the boy," "the girl..." I suspect a novel of about 65,000 words, but it really shouldn't be too confusing. And I think I know what I'm doing. It definitely doesn't feel right to give these characters names in the story I'm going for.
 
Graceless Liar

Graceless Liar

Apprentice
I tend to use real world names, but I choose them from a culture that has similarities to the world I'm building.
For example, my current revision in progress uses a lot of Welsh and Irish Gaelic names and terms. Many of these are real names, but I will make up my own once I get a feel for how names sound in my chosen language/culture. Another WIP takes heavy influence from India, and so the names I chose were Indian or Hindu in origin.

My published work has naming conventions that seem to be all over the place, which is deliberate. Most of the characters have modern names (Audri and Izak, for example) but some have latin based names (Octavia and her mother Septia) because of their heritage, and others still have totally off the wall fantasy names (like Ikarios and Dieos) that follow no real naming system because those characters are so old they predate most current cultures.

As for name meanings...well...unless there is an in-universe reason for it, I wouldn't put too much stock into the meanings. It just seems a tad to contrived if your hero ends up with a name that actually means hero, unless that's the point of course.
 
R

RedAngel

Master
I have somewhat of a system I use.

1: Where is their race?
2: Where are they from?
3: What is their role in the story?
4: Do they require any extra symbolism?

Ex:
1: Human male
2: Small farming community modeled after the celts. Possible name: Shamus
3: Mc in a fall from grace role
4: He will cause harm in the story
Harmus comes to mind when considering those factors.
 
Ireth

Ireth

Mythic Scribe
RedAngel said:
I have somewhat of a system I use.

1: Where is their race?
2: Where are they from?
3: What is their role in the story?
4: Do they require any extra symbolism?

Ex:
1: Human male
2: Small farming community modeled after the celts. Possible name: Shamus
3: Mc in a fall from grace role
4: He will cause harm in the story
Harmus comes to mind when considering those factors.
Click to expand...

That seems just a tad "on-the-nose" for me.
 
TheCrystallineEntity

TheCrystallineEntity

Dark Lord
I have two name books, two Japanese dictionaries, an Irish Gaelic name book, a Latin dictionary, a Greek dictionary, a thesaurus, and an etymology book. I go through and pick out names/words that I like best, and all the names have some sort of important meaning to the story [Kurea, for instance, is the Japanese pronunciation for Clare, which means 'bright/shining/clear'].
 
Simpson17866

Simpson17866

Journeyman
Brute force. I look at websites with thousands of names, add minimal restrictions based on culture, and then go through as many of the names as possible, each time trying to think of something specific that I don't like about the name.

After I have a few names that I haven't found any problems with, I look at the whole list, try to rule out a few more in comparison with / contrast against the others, then I pick one at random and use it until I like it :) I've never worried about trying to get The Perfect Name ahead of time: once I've used a good-enough name for a character enough, it becomes the perfect name.

"Harry Potter" and "Walter White" would both be incredibly boring names if not for the stories about the characters, and "James Bond" was picked because Fleming wanted the most boring name in the world so that Agent 007 would be emphasized as an uninteresting person that interesting things happened to. The Milwaukee Cannibal was not terrifying because his name was Jeffrey Dahmer, the name "Jeffrey Dahmer" became terrifying after being associated with the Milwaukee Cannibal.

The only time I distinctly remember feeling "This is the perfect name" before getting heavily invested into the character herself was when I was adding a bunch of extra restrictions that I normally don't:
Two of the characters in Doctor Who / Torchwood were made superficially similar so that the fundamental differences would stand out – one is a heroic leader, the other a villainous loner – and one of the superficial similarities was that the more important character went by the alias of Captain Jack Harkness while his ex-husband went by the alias of Captain John Hart.

When I first came up with my fanfiction, I wanted one of my own characters to fit the same theme as the two canon characters, so I scoured the internet for "girl names J" and "last names H" before deciding that my character would go by the alias of Captain June Harper.
 
Ruby

Ruby

Dark Lord
I usually don't have a problem choosing names for my characters, but I did accidentally invent one name as the result of an autocorrect that went wrong.

When I wanted a name for a Magic Academy I just closed my eyes and typed until something useful appeared; then I Googled it to make sure it didn't exist in the real world/hadn't been used before in fiction.
 
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