Finding the perfect name can be tedious and frustrating, and when you don't know how to get started, a baby naming website seems like the logical place to start.
But... if you spend a lot of time on those sites, you might start to get some weird looks.
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| "Are you having a baby...?" | |
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Luckily, the people at babynames.com know authors use websites like theirs for discovering names and have posted some tips just for us. I've picked some of my favourites to share with you.
One tip they give us is to
choose a name by its meaning. They explain by saying "many writers give their characters names that have significance in the story". It is also suggested that a name could reflect the character's role in the story. The first character I thought of when I read this was Flynn Ryder from the movi
e Tangled.
"Ryder" is an English name that means Knight. Even if you haven't seen the movie, you can probably guess which role Flynn has.
Another great tip is to
stay away from overused names. This is pretty straightforward. You stay away from certain names because
everyone uses them. Baby Names use the name Jack as an example. "For some reason, every writer likes naming their hero JACK. I know it's a tough-sounding, honest-working name, but naming your hero Jack is like naming your son AIDAN. It's overdone".
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| That means you, Captain Jack! Run! |
The bottom line is to be more creative with your names.
Keeping with the theme of being more creative, the final tip I'm going to leave you with is this:
have fun with names! The original post suggests you start with your character's childhood nickname. This tip made me think of my favourite teen novel
The Catastrophic History of You and Me by Jess Rothenburg. Her main character is named Brie (yes, like the cheese). This eventually leads to Brie's mentor, Patrick, calling her various nicknames such as Cheeto, Cream Cheese, and Cheesepuff. By using these fun nicknames, Rothenburg creates a dynamic between the two characters that makes their relationship more believable.
I hope this abridged version of the tips from Baby Names give you a great place to start!
There are tons more on the list. Here's the link:
http://www.babynames.com/character-names.php
If you're a sci-fi writer, be sure to check out #4!
This is a really cool blog post! I love names and often have a hard time picking ones that I feel match the personality of my character. It's nice to know I'm not alone!
ReplyDeleteI hate naming things...people and titles...arg. Another thing you can mess around with is using a translation. I recently wrote a script that had a psychopathic stalker and their prey. Surnames are the worst. What I did was look up the words psycho and hunted in Italian...voila...surnames haha
ReplyDeleteI find that last point about the nicknames is interesting since it reminds me of how Gale calls Katniss Katnip in the Hunger Games. I've often found last names though to be rather difficult though even using a baby name website.
ReplyDeleteGreat suggestions!
ReplyDeleteI often find what I do is think of a word that describes my character, and then try translating it into different languages and see if anything sticks. Or I go to a map of a country or region somewhere in the world, close my eyes, then put my finger down. That can make for some interesting names!
I like using the translation method too. Never thought of doing the map thing though! That's really cool!
ReplyDeleteI used to use websites with Baby names, then switched to using Japanese names for some of my characters since often times the meanings can be quite interesting. Sometimes I still pick names the same way as I did before, just choosing what sounds cool and then making the character based on the name I picked, but sometimes I decided to completely make up the name of the character. I guess what name you pick would depend on what genre your book happens to be, so the way some people choose thier characters' names can be quite different than others' decisions.
ReplyDelete