I’ve never been one of those writers who agonizes over characters’ names, nor do I look up obscure tribal meanings so my hero’s name means “eagle in flight” and my bad guy’s name means “he who stains his britches in fright.” Typically, I have fun just noodling around a bit until I think of a name that sounds right for that character’s personality and time period, and I use that moniker unless something else sounds better or the character evolves from, say, an Aloysius to an Ace.
Here are two resources I want to share — one idea I used for a work in progress, and one I discovered today.
Era-Appropriate Character Names
When creating one Southern town, I wanted to give a sense of community and history, and I also wanted to spice up one family’s history with a 1960s flavor. So I trusted to the wisdom of Google and searched for “Tennessee surnames” and “hippie baby names.” The surnames search led me on a winding path through many websites that helped me build up my fictional town’s major families. They all sound like sturdy Southern names, and I’ve got a complicated history of relatives, schoolmates, and neighbors for my story’s backdrop, as well as the last names of my major characters.
The hippie sites also yielded gold — some fabulously colorful names for one family’s children; they are now grown, and some are still mortified by their parents’ groovy name choices. It really struck my fancy that my heroine’s good-guy husband would be a straight-laced son of some very laidback and pro-hemp parents. I won’t mention any specific site names — just the advice that narrowing my searches like this led to some really useful sites.
Creativity-Inspiring Weird Names
The resource I found today is AllNewBabyNames.com — a site that documents the rising popularity of exotic baby names that range from made-up names and odd spellings to frontier favorites. This is NOT just another baby-name site. These quirky names are instant inspiration for naming everything from people to microbes in your fiction, such as names for:
- average citizens
- their pets
- the native species of plants/animals on another planet in your science fiction
- social classes
- cities in the future
- diseases of the past
- elves and orcs and other cast members of your fantasy novel
- strippers who need good stage names
Put aside the fact that there really are some poor kids out there lugging around appellations like Zilon or Invior, and revel in the fact that you’ve got a brand new treasure trove of names to spark your imagination. Don’t you just get a certain VIBE from some of these? I thought of several story ideas, histories, and settings just from skimming the site. Here’s how I would sort a few of the names that caught my eye:
- Old-fashioned: Adaly, Clarey, Dracey, Iselle, Ninabelle, Raelle, Trulyn, Quivionna, Vayla, Osman
- Ethnic, multi-cultural: Ciela, Hinda, Dreama, Elique, Jadakai, Miyari, Souljah
- Futuristic, cyberpunk, science fiction: Brevik, Bladen, Cymber, Diesel, Jave, Swade, Branum, Reiken, Raif, Theory, Vicia, Xen, Xoli, Zenden
- Hipster: Alista, Maxton, Tarrod
- Pole dancers: Eazy, Pleazure
- Fantasy novels: Avrana, Feyley, Glamoura, Jex, Kadriel, Litiana, Locklear, Melora, Tasani, Naiven, Nearia, Poema, Umea, Wyck, Yexalen
- ‘Children of the Corn’ backwoods woo-woo: Breezie Raine, Cellanie, Genariah, Swendy
- ‘Deliverance’-style Southern creepiness: Ezavion
- Gods and goddesses: Zeryus, Zatoria
Found this gem of a baby name site via one of my favorite potpourri news and trivia feeds, the J-Walk Blog.
Technorati Tags: fictional names, characters
(This post was transferred from my now-defunct “Unshelved Writing Goals” blog.)
So. Much. Fun.
THAT is what I had working on my book last night. After a long weekend of Girl Scout cookie sales and throwing together a troop meeting, I treated myself to a selfishly long session behind my computer. I sat down in my recliner at 5:30 p.m. with my laptop, and with the exception of a brief supper break, I didn’t look up again until my husband said, “Uh, honey, you’ve got to work tomorrow and it’s midnight. Coming to bed anytime soon?”
* blink, blink *
You’ve gotta be kidding. Six and a half hours? The house was dark and quiet.
Here’s what I got done:
- Named all my major and minor characters (including maiden names for the married ‘uns and nicknames for a few special people). I won’t use them all in this book, but it’s going to be a series and I like to know who I’m dealing with.
- Picked jobs for them
- Developed three completely unexpected subplots that arose just out of who the characters are screaming to become
- Figured out some of the town’s gathering places
- Created a set of in-laws for my heroine that her husband despairs of and that she adores
- Discovered that my heroine is pregnant
Here’s what I discovered along the way:
- Working on characters before you get too detailed on the plot will actually suggest plot elements. Just starting with a list of character roles I wanted to flesh out, I created current relationships, past marriages, a Vietnam vet, some quirky siblings, a streak of old hippiedom flourishing in my book’s small town, and variety in my townspeople’s ages, ethnicity, life stages, economic levels, jobs, sexual orientations, lifestyles, ordinary/eccentric skewing, and more.
- Have you ever read a mystery and wondered how it is that the main character is so very CONNECTED in her community that she conveniently has a string to pull or a favor to call in whenever the novel seems to call for it? There’s no one who is close personal friends with that many movers and shakers and isn’t a mover-and-shaker herself. So I’ve distributed my heroine’s friends and relatives and acquaintances through different stratas of the town’s society. I don’t like books that pull rabbits out of hats. I like to be surprised multiple times along the way in a book but able to re-read later and say, “Oh, THAT was a subtle hint for the story … how did I miss that?”
- Sometimes when the juices are flowing, it’s like there’s a whole rude crowd of people inside my head, and they’re all jostling to be at the front of the line to claim a winning lottery ticket. “ME! I’M NEXT! Oooh-oooh, it’s MY turn! Dammit, get out of my way! And quit pushing!” I’m a fast typist, but it’s hard to even keep up. I’m sure I look like a Tourette’s sufferer as I mutter and giggle and swear back at all the folks spilling out of my brainwaves.
- It helped to do research so I wasn’t pulling names out of my head when starting from scratch. My book is set in Tennessee, so I Googled “Tennessee surnames” and developed a list of common ones. Then I decided roughly how old each character was, and I Googled for the most popular baby names of that time period, such as “1970 boy names.” I didn’t rely solely on that, but it gave me a feel for each decade. And I almost got sidetracked by the pleasure of research, discovering cool sites that listed things like popular hippie names for boys and girls. (I’m still itching to name someone Patchouli, but no one is crying out for that one, darn it.)
Hope your writing experiences recently have been just as triumphant. I was so buzzed that it took me another hour to get to sleep after I lay down.
Technorati Tags: characterization, character sheet, writing, fiction writing, novel writing, DropsofBlood.com, Carolyn Bahm, character development
(This post was transferred from my now-defunct “Unshelved Writing Goals” blog.)
Towse.com includes links to several other blogs with useful character charts:
Technorati Tags: fiction writing, novel writing, DropsofBlood.com, Carolyn Bahm, character development, character sheet, character chart
