Choice of character names

[Lucius]

Choosing character names is far from easy, and some authors approach it with great care. Historical porn certainly requires onomastic attention -- you want your names to work for the time period!

How do you come up with names for your victims, villains and supporting characters? @Vela Nanashi, I'm especially interested in your approach! As for me, I just love going through books and web pages on onomastics.

And now for something concrete -- is it confusing to have characters with names starting with same letter? It's an often-cited 'don't' of writing advice, but would you really mistake an Alexander for an Ahmed? Moreover, history sometimes keeps adding more and more Alexanders and Ahmeds to a historical fiction work...

[Claire]

I can't say I look that deeply into it. I mostly go with names that I like the sound of and then check what they mean on some website for parents looking up names for a baby. Now that I think about, I wouldn't be surprised if Google thought I was pregnant.

If I ever were to write a story set in a historical setting, I would put more effort into choosing period appropriate names. I would probably ask you to double check them for me, @Lucius!

And now for something concrete -- is it confusing to have characters with names starting with same letter?

At first glance that sounds like an overly technical piece of advice to me. Is that also supposed to apply for character of different genders? I never thought about that Eleanor and Eugene from Late Satisfaction both have names starting with an e.

My intuition is that it likely doesn't matter if you manage to establish your characters as distinct people in the reader's mind. But if you write a 4,000 words short gang rape story about let's say three college girls getting abducted, then it likely can't hurt to give them very distinct names so that the reader can easily tell them apart. If they just register as college girl 1, 2 and 3 in your reader's brain I could see similar names adding to the confusion. But in that case I would suggest trying to make the characters more different or to question whether you need three victims in the first place. It seems odd to me to try to solve the issue by changing their names.

[Shocker]

I go most of the time with fairly common names that do not require the story to play in a specific area of the world. Except of course when I’m having some fun with names, and I don’t get called out about that very often.

Of course it’s Alice who has to have a glory hole experience with a looking glass.

My intrepid witch hunters aren’t called Peter, Paolo and Marie without reason, for starters they are nice catholic names, but anglicized they have some musical pizzazz to them.

Literature, Music and movies are full of characters, that can be dragged into more sordid adventures.

Other names often contain a little nod to the people who inspired the story. Quite a few of my stories have characters with the Initials CW, all of those stories had been sparked from conversations I had with a member of former boards going by the moniker CosmicWitch.

So in a nutshell, I don’t overthink names and go with what feels fitting with the story I’m telling.

[LtBroccoli]

It depends on the story. I try to not repeat names in the larger stories unless I have some other nickname or identifier. Mostly it's to keep it straight for the reader, but having 3 Emma's gets confusing for me, too.

Unless I have a name I want to use, I'll usually go to a name generator though I've recently started using GPT to come up with small details I don't want to spend too much time on. For example, in my most recent story I needed two names that sounded similar and didn't want to spend 20 minutes coming up with that detail when the rest of the story took about a half hour to write.

I also like to use ironic names when possible, or ones tied to movies or literature. For example, in the Harbor City Universe, Bubbles's real name is Kim, and she's Korean. I don't know a lot of Koreans personally, but almost all of them are named Kim in one way or another. One of the first things she talks about is how she uses that to her advantage to hide in crowds.

Think I want to name a woman rapist Chasity in the future.

[Vela Nanashi]

I often pick names based on meaning, and then sometimes I use a elven name generator that I like where each part of a name can have a meaning but it only matters and is only used by me if the name also sounds and looks like I want it to, and sometimes I just pick a name based on its sound or meaning from the real world, sometimes from a culture I want to bring to mind in a story, I also sometimes have been inspired a bit by other characters who wore a name. For instance long ago I watched a tv series called Farscape, one character there Natira made an impression on me, and I made a dnd character where I caught some trait sparks and used her name for that character, the dnd game did not last long but the character survived in my mind and evolved with my own multiverse and surfaced again, now as a star elf in one of my stories she was not a star elf in farscape, nor in the dnd game, but now the spark and essence has been put in that form she does not have a lot to do with the Natira in farscape, and for this story the meaning of Natira's name also felt right

Also Vela and Nanashi have meanings I like. Vela has multiple meanings, it is the name of a shape changer character of mine, Nanashi sounds cool and was a name I gave to another character of mine, it means without a house, or maybe in modern settings it can mean anonymous

[SoftGameHunter]

It depends on the type of story. A lot of times I'll use generic basic names. The name in those cases is not that important. Or sometimes it is important but I want the character to have an anyone vibe. Alternatively, if it's sci-fi or fantasy, I'll just make something up that sounds nice to say. I can't really claim to have a process here. A rare specific name would be in my holiday contest entry, which it looks like I've won, where I needed to call my girl Holly to make the title Holly's Jolly Christmas Carol. It wouldn't work with Eliza.

So with that prefect about how unimportant the process it, is sound strange that I find each character is getting their real name. Written in the stars. Once assigned, I'm hesitant to ever change it because it's their true name and knowing it grants me power over them. I had a story I once tried to write for publication (it failed) and found I had two secondary characters with the same first name. Neither was generally referred to by their first name and they had no scenes in common, but I followed the advice and changed one. It never felt right to me. So, yeah. That's my approach.

[RapeU]

Sometimes I do it for meaning. Frances Alexandria Turner, the main character in The CUNT Rapist, has the initials FAT. It was done intentionally to further point out that the character is a large woman.

Within that same story I created a supporting character Danielle and then created a victim Daniel. It didn't cause much of an issue until towards the end when I was trying to wrap things up. I've now told myself I'm not going to do that again.

Also, if you name a character Brian it's easy to type Brain and think you typed Brian. And when you re read the story your brain automatically says Brian when the word is Brain and you don't catch it because it's capitalized and you think Brain is Brian when it's not.

Also, Hannah Olive Thompson's initials are HOT. Wendy Elizabeth Turner's initials are WET. Both are also intentional

[AdmiralPiet]

I rarely go for meaning in a character name.
I think main concern is if it fits the setting.

For contemporary settings I sometimes try too much to get a name that has a good "ring" to it, but in reality people have common names, and boring names.
Like John Smith, or Miller, or Gardner...

In a fantasy or sci-fi setting there is more room for something more epic, but it needs to fit the surroundings.
Stuff like "Sector Governor, Lord Tiberian, Jeff Jefferson" is meh...

For my Warhammer 40k fanfiction a lot works, since the Imperium of Man consist of a million worlds with even more cultures.

Freya and Caelyn come from a time when I roleplayed with these characters years ago.
I just liked the Name Freya and Caelyn is a derivation of Katelynn.

The two slaves in the "Story Freyas new slaves" are Muriel and Selia. Since they are from the same planet I wanted them to sound as they belong to the same cultural background.
Not like Muriel and Bertha

Another character I had named simply Ivy. Perhaps a bit too simple for a chaos sorceress, so if I reuse her the full name will be Iris Ivanera.

Sometimes I use name generators for ideas and change them around a bit. I think one character started out as Barack Obama.

[KittyUmbrass]

Scrivener has a namge generator built in, if I need a name from a particular culture or blend of cultures I often open it and tell it to give me 50 names with (e.g.) Common US First Names and Hindu Family names. Then pick the one I like that has the right kind of sound, for my Indian-American character.

For science-fiction or fantasy I often shift a few vowels and/or consonants from a normal name, or just bung some stuff together. Or, I open up Fantasy Name Generators and get a list of 10 suggestions, which I then rework. Or, I decide on some linguistic customs for the race, species, culture etc where the story is set and then use those to produce a few possible names.

And there's always "the character tells me their name as I'm writing them". Which is to say, sometimes a name just seems to fit the character perfectly so I use that.

[Lucius]

I guess I'm the Luddite here -- I'm not sure one can rely on the generators to account for social and regional factors in naming. It's books and articles on onomastics for me, sometimes extremely involved, as well as websites listing names popular in this or that year.