Here’s an oldie from TKZ emerita Jordan Dane:
JSB’s favorite short story collection
Answer any one or all:
1.) What’s your favorite way to select a character’s name? (Do you have any favorite GO TO resource links?)
2.) Do you care about name origins or meanings?
3.) How do you select names for a character with different ethnic backgrounds?
I find choosing character names to be one of the least fun things about the writing process. Now sometimes I just instinctively know what a character’s name will be. Other times I spend digging for information about different names, and sometimes I just randomly assign names. Then of course you have to go through and make sure you don’t have too many similar sounding names that might trip up the readers with the menagerie of characters that would populate any novel length work. And of course you have to be cognizant of what names might not have been likely used in a particular time period.
On the good side, it can be interesting research to look up name meanings but it can also be another way to fall down a rabbit hole because you get distracted by the interesting information you find.
I would also ask an additional question: for characters with small roles, how do you decide who gets a name or remains unnamed? What is the dividing line?
There’s no one answer to this. I judge it like life. If I have a conversation with a stranger, would I ask his name? Sometimes I skip the name, but emphasize a physical feature or mode of dress. If that character shows up again, that’s how I’d make the ID.
Thank you!
I like the process of choosing a name for a character. Sometimes I pick a name that fits the image of the person I have in mind. More than a few times, though, I have named characters after people who were good to me when I was growing up. I think it’s a way of honoring them so their decency and kindness will continue even though they’ve passed on.
If you read the complete Elaine Viets you will find; me, me and my wife, a character based on me named for my great grandfather, a friend who was at the time serving in Iraq, and a character based on my oldest child. I did forget to tell my mother that my wife and I were murder suspects in one book. Oops.
Oh, in Dead of Night it is possible that a real campus rapist comes to a gruesome end. It is what happens when you ask a college student who they would like to kill.
I like the process of choosing a name for a character. I usually think up a few, then research their meanings, then choose.
In my novel, No Tomorrows, the main character’s name is Annie. The meaning of her name is “grace”. I thought it fit perfectly with a woman who believes today is her last day on earth.
Happy Friday, all!
I needed an Irish ‘rising actor of his generation’ – Andrew O’Connell seemed to fit the bill.
I needed a writer with a relatively easy pseudonym, and a last name which had usable variations – Dr. Karenna Elizabeth Ashe, AKA author K. Beth Winter (variations on ‘white’) filled the bill.
And an actress with a part-Mexican background – Bianca. Last name ‘Doyle’ because actors need to pick a unique name to be known by so the search engines can handle their credits – I believe the Actor’s Guild requires that. If you read credits as I do, you’ll see notes such as “Steve Lemon (as Stephen J. Lemon)” in the list of credits, where an actor failed to pick and stick with a single name; it gets confusing.
The rest – the usual: if they appear several times, a name is a good idea, and a diverse background allows me to have a world like the real one, with a huge variety of names, ethnicities, genders, lifestyles – to give me a chance to learn about and write.
It’s not that I go looking for a missing type of person, but more like not wanting to have all white women, etc., when doing a character list. Boring.