Re: Happy Days in Random Chatter 10
Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2012 12:05 am
I like to keep fiction names and real-life names separate as much as possible. None of my characters are named after people who are currently in my social circle. I have occasionally used a name that belonged to someone I knew who I no longer hung out with, and I have used names that people I met later have had (once a character has a name I usually break my rule rather than change the name), and I have also used names that are nicknames or based off of names of my siblings (but I usually do that when I'm doing some kind of character exercise using personalities that my siblings have). Also, any name used in a novel that has even the slight possibility of being published will never be used for any of my eventual children.
As for actually choosing names, I do own a decently-sized baby name book that I will flip through on occasion. However, actually assigning a name to a character is much more difficult than opening to a page and pointing, or even opening to a page and finding a name I like. I'm one of those writers who sees her characters pretty much as real people, so the process is more like trying to guess the name that someone has already been given. I often find names that I like but can't use because they don't fit the characters I'm trying to name. I have also occasionally come up with characters by choosing a name and then writing about who I think that person would be.
Since there is a wide world of names out there, I often come up with some sort of ramifications to narrow down my search. My most obvious use of this was in one of my past NaNo novels where there were two races; one race were all named classical, often almost old-fashioned names, and the other almost exclusively used nouns for names.
My most recent character that has been difficult to name is my RPG character. I wanted it to be slightly odd, as it is a fantasy RPG, but also not too odd, and it had to fit my character, and of the couple of names I did come up with Marduk vetoed one and the other was too close to my sister's character's name. I finally spent about half an hour flipping through my baby name book, wrote down several names, and ended up with a name that I didn't hate but didn't necessarily love either. Oh well.
As for actually choosing names, I do own a decently-sized baby name book that I will flip through on occasion. However, actually assigning a name to a character is much more difficult than opening to a page and pointing, or even opening to a page and finding a name I like. I'm one of those writers who sees her characters pretty much as real people, so the process is more like trying to guess the name that someone has already been given. I often find names that I like but can't use because they don't fit the characters I'm trying to name. I have also occasionally come up with characters by choosing a name and then writing about who I think that person would be.
Since there is a wide world of names out there, I often come up with some sort of ramifications to narrow down my search. My most obvious use of this was in one of my past NaNo novels where there were two races; one race were all named classical, often almost old-fashioned names, and the other almost exclusively used nouns for names.
My most recent character that has been difficult to name is my RPG character. I wanted it to be slightly odd, as it is a fantasy RPG, but also not too odd, and it had to fit my character, and of the couple of names I did come up with Marduk vetoed one and the other was too close to my sister's character's name. I finally spent about half an hour flipping through my baby name book, wrote down several names, and ended up with a name that I didn't hate but didn't necessarily love either. Oh well.
