Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/17586
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

What I do:

I start with either a last name or a first name. Which one I start from depends on which one the narrator uses to identify the character, because that is what the reader will read most often. Katniss Everdeen is Katniss first; Dr. Henry Jekyll is Dr. Jekyll first.

With this starting point, and the knowledge of the character's cultural background, I go through a list of first or last names from that culture. There are books and websites that list these. I have collected extensive lists from the web using a self-coded crawler.

I also educated myself on how sound of names are perceived. The meaning of names, that some writers go by, is usually meaningless to a reader. Unless the meaning is obvious, as in Brewer or Shoemaker, the meaning is unknown to the reader and does not influence their perception of the character. What does, are the sounds of the name, and there is a small volume of literature on that, some by linguists, some by marketers specializing in brand name creation.

So, with this knowledge of my character, of the "meaning" of the sounds of names and with whaterver gut feel for language I have, I go through my list of names and weed out all the names that don't fit. I do this in a good text editor that allows grep search and replace. Usually there are certain first letters and name endings that I can exclude right from the start. Often there are also letters or letter combinations that I don't want in the name, so I delete all those names from my file.

The rest of the names I go over one by one until I have either one clear winner left or a handful of contestants. This process takes a couple of days, because after some time I lose all feeling for names and have to do other things before I can come back to my list.

Once I have a (few) first (or last) name(s), I do the same for the last (or first) name. The only difference is that I use search and replace to add the first name I found to every last name in my list and then go over and weed out the combinations.

I find the name of my protagonist first, then the love interest, then the antagonist and then the other characters in descending order of importance. I make sure that every character's name begins with a different letter from the alphabet and that the names sound and look clearly different. Somtimes one or more names are known to me for some reason, then I start with these.

My fantasy names are usually real world names or real words from a foreign language or variations thereof, so I use the same process only with a different corpus. For place names I use lists of placenames from all over the world. Sometimes I translate these. I chose place names by meaning. My favourite place name is "Lost Boy River" (in the US).

Original score: 8