Top writing tip: One of the lesser-known reasons for the success of the Bible is that it stuck to memorable names like Moses, Methusala and God. Yes, it had a few boring names like "John" and "David", but these were generally in the New Testament when the writers had run out of ideas. We have access to tools that biblical writers could never have dreamed of that mean we never need to run out of good names.
A girl has no name
New characters used to terrify me. I knew what they looked like. I knew what they were going to do. But I had no idea what to call them. Here's what my sentences used to look like when I was drafting.
[Main character] got out of the car. [Supporting character] aimed the sniper rifle and fired. There was silence. [Other supporting character] heard the shot, froze for a second and then began to run.
I wrote like this because names were a blocker for me. Without a placeholder, I'd be stuck staring at the screen for long minutes when I could have been writing. And it wasn't just time that I lost - my inspiration and ideas were leaking out of my brain while I sat there thinking "What should I call my character?"
Name early, name often
But, really, naming characters early is a must. In fiction, the sound and feel of a name is part of the description - it's how the reader starts visualising the character and it shapes how you write the character.
If your names are placeholders, your characters risk being placeholders. If your white male character gets called something like "John Smith" then that lack of imagination risks being imprinted on your writing. If all of your characters are called names like John Smith, Jack Jones and Dave Watson, then they risk blurring into one, for you and for the reader.
Principles for naming
So what makes a good name? I'd say there are two principles to stick to:
- The name has to fit with the setting and tone of the story. If the setting is Viking Norway, you don't want to call your character Constance Wallflower. And if your tone is serious, you don't want to give your character a self-consciously wacky name. This kind of incongruous naming is self-sabotage and puts the reader right off.
- The name has to fit the character. This second principle is more difficult and is the cause of most of the wailing and gnashing of teeth around naming. It's easy to say that a name should 'just work', but much harder to pull off. Mostly it's a case of trying out lots of names and relying on onomatopoeia, similar-ish sounding words and allusion.
In my story The Horse Van (Part 1 Part 2 Part 3), which is set in the 1930s, I had two characters whose names I wanted to get just right. One was an oafish rich man and the other was a hardened criminal out to rob him. I named the rich oaf Fulton Gully (after seeing the name, it looked to me a bit like gluttony) and the hardened criminal Randall Wragge (which just sounded plain mean).
Tools for the modern namer
To get a lot of options for your character names, you can now use technology and augment this with your writer brain. Here are three great options.
Fantasy Name Generators
Fantasy Name Generators is an example of a bad name because the site allows you to generate random names for any theme/culture you can think of. It's a really useful resource that I used to generate the Mayan names for my scifi story The Long March.
The Onomastikon
Compiled by Kate Monk, this dictionary of names has sections on various historical time periods and cultures that can be browsed for inspiration. If you doubt its veracity, it also comes with a source list. Thanks to @anarcho-andrei for the heads up on this.
Random Census Names
Here's one for the nerds. I use the programming language R on a regular basis and discovered a great package called randomNames that generates, er, random names based on the US. It's fantastic for modern stories because you can specify gender and ethnicity and have it spit out any number of names, repeatedly, until you hit on one that you like the look of.
This is how you use it:
install.packages('randomNames')
library(randomNames)
set.seed(10)
randomNames(5, 'male', 'African American',
which.names = 'both',
name.order = "first.last")
And you get the output:
[1] "Caleb Georgantas" "Jacub Hildreth"
[3] "Dominic Miller" "Treyvon Williamsnash"
[5] "Isaiah Franklin"
And if you don't like those names, just run the function again.
Last name
You now have no excuse to not give your characters great names - or do you? Let me know in the comments how you get over your naming difficulties.
If you enjoyed this, please follow me for updates and sign up for my low-volume writing newsletter.
You might also enjoy The Horse Van, an ongoing Steemit Original crime series (Part 1 Part 2 Part 3) and The Long March a scifi series.