How do you name your characters? How do you decide if Peter is really a Richard? And do you know your characters' names when you start a story or is this something that comes after you've written part or all of the story?
Writing short stories all the time, we are always creating new characters, and they all need names. I realized that I have too many Daves in my stories. I have to stop using that name. And sometimes I start off with one name and realize it is the wrong name once I write more about them.
I know names might not be that important, but this is something I struggle with sometimes. How important are character names? How do the names you choose usually suit the characters?
Choosing character names is one of my favourite parts of writing! I often get one come to me out of nowhere and a new character is born, along with their background and future, within a few minutes. But also other times I'll think of a character and then change their name a dozen or more times (actually, a lot more than that) before I settle. I'm quite used to thinking up names as I've had a lot of pets over the years, and have many now lol.
My favourite name I've come up with is Rufus Tydd-Fox - he's a middle-aged jewellery merchant on a steampunk type of world. I went to a few steampunk name generator websites, and got some great ideas.
I thought of the time he was living in, his job and status in the community, and obviously the fact it's all steampunk-ish on his home world. He had to have a name that suited him.
You can go through your family tree - an ancestor's name can be handy. I have a character for something new I'm writing, she's called Evelyn-Rose Dowse. Dowse is a family name of ours. Evelyn-Rose is a very dainty little girl, living in a well-off family, set around the 1910's/1920's, so I wanted the name, again, to suit her, to suit the time, the fact she's in a middle-class family, etc.
A trick I used to do in my teens for fantasy names of planets, cities and people, was turn off predictive text on my phone, jab away at the keys, and try to make an interesting name out of what I'd end up with, and obviously making sure it could be pronounced because fantasy names are often ridiculous. I came up with the name 'Elsamyth' and absolutely fell in love with it. I planned for it to be shorten to 'Elsa' as she got older - this was years before Frozen came out, by the way lol.
What I've done a lot in recent years is use baby name websites, also a site called 20,000 Names. I've got amazing names from the latter as it uses all kinds of culture names, animal names, object names, weather names, season names, every kind of name you can think of! It's a fantastic site, and even gives meanings to the names. I found a couple on there I loved - Seren and Afon.
Um... I can't think of anything else, other than looking into song titles with names in, author's you're a fan of, celebs you're a fan of. All kinds of places you can get a name from, and mould a character around it, or vice versa.
I've actually never written about a Dave. I've had a David though, in a story I wrote when I was 14, and he had a brother called Peter - I was going through a Monkees phase. I don't like using the same names twice, but that's a personal thing.
