7 WAYS TO CHOOSE CHARACTER NAMES

Naming characters can be nerve wracking. The following are different ways to choose a distinctive name for the character you’ve spent so long creating. One which makes them stand out from all the other characters in your story as well as characters in other books.

1. Baby naming sites – Names on these sites are searchable by first initial, boy, girl, or unisex. The origin and meanings behind the names are often given. Finding a name which means strong leader or noble or winsome can add another layer when developing your characters. Is your hero a good man? How about naming him Maddock which is of Welsh origin and means good? Is your heroine a shy wall flower whose light doesn’t shine as bright as it could. Name her Callie which is of Greek origin and means beautiful. Her name comes to represent what she is on the inside. Try babynames.com or nameberry.com for ideas.
2. Name Generators – Another way to create a character name is to use a name generator such as name-generator.org.uk or behindthename.com. What these sites do is pretty self-explanatory and both have a variety of criteria you can use to narrow down the types of names generated.
3. Give your character the same name as someone famous (and deceased) from history. Napoleon (emperor of France) was used in Animal Farm for a main character also described as the Father of All Animals and Terror of Mankind. The same name was used in the movie Napoleon Dynamite.. How about Leonidas Jones for the leader of a group of soldiers doomed to ultimately fail?
4. Another way to name characters is to take common names and misspell (or respell) them to make new names that still sound familiar. G.R.R. Martin does this often in his SOIAF. Take Eddard (Edward) Stark, or Walder (Walter) Frey, or Jaime (Jamie) Lannister. The name is easy to pronounce in your head as you read because you already pretty much know how it’s said. And let’s face it, when we read we hear the words in our head.
5. Another common technique authors use while naming characters is to avoid using names with the same first letter. One example would be the hero is named Don, his archenemy is named Daniel, and their common love interest is Dora. My advice is to jump around the alphabet to find names.
6. Another thing to avoid when naming characters is having names that sound similar when pronounced. I don’t know about you but in the LoTR I had a terrible time keeping the characters Sauron and Saruman straight while reading. Both were bad guys. Both were often only talked about and weren’t present in the scene itself. Let’s face it Sauron shares 5 of its 6 letters with Saruman’s 7. Avoid making Jane Dane’s love interest. Or Kelly and Callie friends.
7. Last of all, try to make your character names user friendly. Not everyone is familiar with Gaelic or Welsh or Olde English pronounciations or letter usage. I’d avoid names like Proinsias (pron + she + iss) and Cynddelw (kin + da + loo). Come up with something easy to pronounce. I once named a character Catte by taking the word matte and changing the first letter to C to sound like cat. I thought it would be easy for people to pronounce. Wrong. No one could figure out how to say it. Was it Kate? Or Katie? Or Catty? Try out saying your character names before they spend their lives eternally confusing the reader.