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Joined: 9/4/2012
Posts: 10
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I find a lot of romance novels have characters name which are fake sounding. as if the writer is trying too hard for an archetype male and female. Not that this is a genre I read, but where does one find believable names? In real life (friends)?... out of the phonebook?
what names in classic books feel real or phony?
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Joined: 6/14/2012
Posts: 194
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What is "believable" depends on what a given reader finds believable in a given genre. If you're writing contemporary fiction set in our world, then yes, the phone book isn't a bad place to start, though there are online lists of names from different countries (in case you want to have a Finnish spy or a Turkish businessman.) And you can use names you've heard, though names of people you know are iffy. (If they don't like the character and think you're intentionally making them look bad, for instance.)
It's worth mentioning that real-life names exist that you might well find unbelievable and fake sounding, as parents go through spasms of creativity in naming their children, and a lot of cultural mixing goes on as well. Parents name kids after movie & TV & book characters they like, decide to use last names as first names, decide to make up totally new names, or spellings for names.
In science fiction and fantasy, where the story is not set in this place/time, many names are completely made up and yet more believable to readers than "John Smith" or "Jane Brown" would be. Names change with culture, with language, with time, and need to fit the setting they're in. So in historical romances, or historical fiction of any kind, you need to research the names of that period and that location.
Most readers want to be able to pronounce the names (even if unfamiliar names) directly from reading them. So readers will accept a name that's not familiar if it's easy to sight-read over a name that's not.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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I love making up character names.
In Shortfall, a story set in a future of hominid slavery, there are three orangutan clans who found a free village: the Yunsbitches, the Yardboys, and the Chattles. Those are all names intended to accord with the long history of enslavement of the apes.
And naming conventions tickle me too. I've got tangs named Louth outa Yunsbitch, Chattles' Chuz, and Barbary Yardboy.
I like to take existing names and try to imagine plausible future variants: Natch Marbro, Severence Brimming, Narcos Osbjorn, Holio Escrobar, etc.
Big fun!
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Joined: 9/4/2012
Posts: 10
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Those are great names. Wildly different and above and beyond the tedius space names that really stop me reading further. A reader should expect somthing better than the obvious, that rings true to their environment. Your story sounds a cut above. I will give it a read. And thank you for responding to my post.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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silent k,
Thanks for the kind words! I'm eager to hear what you think of Shortfall, and you don't have to review it to tell me, either. There's a discussion called You don't have to review my work to talk about it, and you can use that if you like.
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I answered this in a similar thread further down the way. I also kinda wrote about it in a blog thread I wrote a while back. You can read the blog entry here:
http://blog.apexbookcompany.com/2012/05/23/it-builds-character/
I hope it helps!
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Joined: 11/29/2012
Posts: 11
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I faced the same problem with my book, as well. All of the characters ended up with names of my friends (if the characters were 'good guys') or names of enemies, especially ex-girlfriends (if they were 'bad guys'). I worried how people in my circle would react if they saw the connection to my characters.
So I ended up writing a list of characters (not names) on a sheet of paper and googling 'random name generator.' Several sites were available. The one I chose would generate 5 names (first name and last) each time I pressed the search icon. I decided to choose the third name in the list generated for each character. Some of these names ended up sounding hokey, so I went to the fourth name. In just a couple of minutes I had my cast of characters named.
One drawback of this, though, was my inability to remember the character's names consistently thoughout the first three chapters or so. My MC seemed to want to change his name from Earl to Steve. I didn't let him. I mean, who's writing this book? Right?
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Joined: 10/14/2012
Posts: 229
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I've a mixture. Some are names that just sound right..... short and snappy, posh, or exotic, dependant on their characteristics or origins. I couldn't resist having a bit of fun with them though; where the character's influence is akin to a parody of a biblical or historic event, I'll give them the name of their original, but with a couple of letters moved. Some others will be anagrams of people or sentiments.
Ultimately pointless, but it gave me something to settle on!
G'luck
Michael
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Joined: 6/13/2012
Posts: 13
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I have had scatty access to the internet over the course of my writing, so I usually use baby name books to name my characters. I have three in my library now; a really old one with a lot of classic names in it, a new-age one, and a specialized one for which I can't remember the title of the top of my head. I also search the internet on baby name sites. For surnames, I have gathered several lists from online sources, such as the top 100 surnames in America and so on. I peruse through each source with the character's personality in mind and chose a name that I like. I like to look at what the name means as well, but the meaning is usually for me only and doesn't feature in the story anywhere. Often naming my characters gives me a better insight to them and helps build them into believable people.
For second-generation characters I try to get into the parent's heads and name them as the parent would.
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Joined: 8/13/2011
Posts: 272
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Me personally, I generally tend to go through several names for my characters until I find one that 'fits'. Generally this'll be while I'm fleshing them out in doodles or the like, but often it's simply before that. Finding the right name can often invoke the character for me, pointing me in the direction of who they are. For example, Lea from Scales uses a shortened version of her full name Aleah, which immediately says something about her.
For more fantastical names, I like to follow the simple rule I've noticed a lot of writers use: chop up a normal name. Maria becomes Mara or Maia, Peter becomes Pieter or Petr, etc. It's nice, simple and none to complicated.
One rule I do try and follow is to keep every name quite dissimilar. I've read books before where I've found it hard to separate two characters as they've both had very similar names, so when I'm casting, I try to keep the names to different lengths and starting syllables to make them easier to tell apart.
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Joined: 6/14/2012
Posts: 194
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Most readers find it easiest to slide into a character if they can immediately "hear" the name--they can remember a name they can say better than a name they can't. And having names distinct--starting with a different letter, having different vowel sounds--is also a good idea. Some readers, however, can't remember character names well at all, no matter what cues you give.
You can easily run into difficulty trying to find distinct, different in both look and sound, names for characters when you write long books (or series) with lots of characters. The names file for one of my groups of books is now 17 single-spaced pages and always incomplete. When I started writing in this universe (30 years ago now) I deliberately set up "root word" names with different suffixes and consistent vowel changes from region to region (as happened in Europe for some standard base names) but that turned out to be a copy editor's nightmare. But once you've got a bunch of books in the canon, you can't go back and change all the names. I did with one (who became a more important character later--he chose to change his name) but that still left too many similar names (starting with same letter and maybe even same first two letters) and too many overlaps.
Characters with the same name can be given nicknames (just as here, but appropriate to the culture in the book), so you can have Red Jim and Little Jim, or Red and Shorty instead of Jim and Jim.
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i have a jimmy and a james. at one point i had two characters named george but never realized until i sent it out to readers. oops.
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Joined: 4/24/2013
Posts: 18
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I browse geneology websites and census records to find first names that were popular in the period and surnames which were prevalent but may have since died out.
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