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Joined: 1/10/2012
Posts: 192
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Great discussion and topic! For me, I do the name search like many others if I want to assign a name that means something. For instance, the "bad guy" in my short fantasy story, Wyatt, means strength and bravery, which he ultimately lives up to. In the same story, my other characters (the "good guys," sort of) all take their names from Greek gods, goddesses and spirits. I've just always loved the mythology and the sound of the names. In this story, each character's personality is a reflection of their name in some way. I'm working on world-building with that one, but for names, I wanted to borrow instead of coming up with my own. Call me unoriginal in that regard, but I think the Greeks did it so well, why re-invent the wheel? (No offense to you uber-creative folks here who have done complete world-building, with places, societies and names. My hat is permanently off to you guys.) 
Researching names is fun. But for my police drama work, I just thought about my MC until a name came to me. Ann is an ordinary woman, for all intents and purposes, so her name reflects that. But she's still a woman, and I think the name is short but feminine enough to convey that idea. As for last names, I usually think about what sounds right with the first name. Though with the kind of work I do, I meet lots of people, so I'm sure that has an impact on my choices.
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Joined: 1/31/2012
Posts: 2
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Hello, everyone. I'm a newbie but this thread interested me, so why not take the plunge?
I have a couple WIP - both very different from each other - but fantasy nonetheless. When creating the characters for my contemporary fantasy, I meticulously chose names that were common enough in Scotland and would fit the characters best. The surname I use for the primary clan is MacGregor and while doing research, I pulled a list of all of the names associated with that clan whether under aliases during the Proscriptions or out of trade to the central MacGregors and built connections and characters from there. For my other project, a more medieval piece and centrally located in what is now Croatia, I have chosen a mixture of names mingling Slavic and Turkish names as the cultures are mingled within the area due to empirical expansion of the period.
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Joined: 5/8/2013
Posts: 25
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I use www.20000-names.com and www.behindthename.com and surname.behindthename.com ... I like to keep my names culturally appropriate even though I write dark fantasy.
I tend to base my fantasy races and cultures on real world places, so I stick with the equivalent names. I have Norse, Scots Gaelic, Roman/Greek hybrids and Anglo-Saxon at the moment.
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Joined: 5/11/2013
Posts: 4
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I mostly use behindthename.com, too. However, I try to not pick "meaningful names", unless this is really justified by the story. For instance, if my character's a beautiful woman, I won't pick a name that means "beautiful"—that'd be just too cliché. I also dislike "kre8ativ" names/spellings, especially for stories set in our own world, on the basis that no parents in their sane minds would inflict such horrors upon their kids. (Seriously, why call my heroine "Mhelahny", when "Melanie" is perfectly acceptable?)
As for fantasy works, I roughly decide how a given country's language may sound like, and then hand out names according to similar cultures. For a country whose language would sould like Italian, I'd go with Italian-like names (Elena, etc.). I do my best to avoid anything too long/exotic/full of apostrophes and weird sounds nobody would be able to pronounce
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I tried picking my character names, but they never felt right. Now, I let the names just 'drop' into my mind and they always fit perfectly.
Next, because of my over-bearing curiosity to know the 'meaning' in everything, I look the names up. In every MC case, the name has a significant meaning for that character in that story -and most of them, I'm surprised to find, have been biblical names. (An exception: In 'The Unicorn Hero', I did consciously decide to use my Bengal-cat's names for the Bully Twins. I also used a specific research name, from a character in another book, 'The Unicorn Majesty', which I ended up discarding from that project and, instead, it fit just right in this current piece: Arthur Short and Arturo *Corto -they're not really 'twins'; they just have the same name in another language. *Corto means 'short' as in 'incomplete'.)
(Never throw any ideas away! Yes?)
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Joined: 4/3/2013
Posts: 20
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My number one rule for naming a character is that I'm not able to picture anyone I know when I say it or think it. I don't know why, but if this happens I can't write. I am unable to let my imagination build scenarios for that character. Don't get me started on sex scenes. <shudder> LOL I keep a list of names that just keeps growing. If I use a name I highlight it on the list with a reference. One last thing I do it to make sure I don't use matchy, matchy names for hero and heroines. Like Michella and Mitchell or Gabrielle and Gage. You would be surprised at how often this happens.
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Joined: 6/5/2013
Posts: 7
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I usually start with names i like, i've often perused lists of names for fun and i have quite a mental list of names i like. with first names i usually stick with names on my mental favorites list. i also try to use a variety of names. for my book the main character's name is Eric, this is one of my favorite male names, his Aunt's name is Eileen and the other characters have names like Marie, Darren, Alice, Lucy and Daniel. when it comes to last names i tend to either make them up from scratch or do a little research, i like the last names have meaning. an example of this would be the character Darren, he is the brainy, professorial, mentor figure in the story so i made up the last name Elderwise, its kinda obvious but i like it. middle names i usually pick at random
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Anagrams, if I can stand to play with them long enough to come up with something that sounds good.
I once wrote down a bunch of names of towns where my story took place, put it in an excel spreadsheet, split the beginning and ends up into two columns. Then I researched baby names of that country and did the same thing. And, then did a mish mash pow wow combining parts until I liked what I had created. It gives me names that are unique, but also still sound like the origins of the country my setting takes place.
Big sci-fi/fantasy nerd here, so I might go through my Discover, Science Illustrated magazines and pull inspiration from there. For example, a character named Nova for a futurist or space setting. Or I even mash up science terms. For example I have a story that takes place underground after all the supervolcanoes of the world exploded, and her name is Vala (from Lava)...well, that isn't too inventive, but whatever, that's what I did.
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Joined: 7/3/2013
Posts: 19
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I'm really weird in that the name is super important to me - I have this weird attraction to names. For example, I play a lot of RPGs and my fiance gets so frustrated whenever I create a new character - because while I can choose how they look, etc - their name takes the longest for me to pick out. I literally take around 2 hours to find a name I am comfortable with using. .
This has led to me creating an ever growing list of names I like that I can just pull from as needed. I store this as a document in Google Drive so I can access it regardless of whether Im on my PC, Laptop or Tablet - and if I'm on my phone, I add a quick note in Evernote.
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Some of the names I hear somewhere and like, some I just think up, some I have developed based on cities around me during my long commute. For example San Francisco can lead to "Risco". So I just keep these all jotted down, and then when I need a name, I will go through my list and find a name that seems to fit with that character.
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Joined: 6/7/2013
Posts: 1356
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Ugh. I have an embarrassing story about this. I was working--still am working on, in fact--a novel, and I decided to take the plunge and share a chapter with my writing workshop. I needed to print and make copies of the chapter, so I emailed it to myself to print out at the library. Of course, when I reopened the document at the library I decided to make a million last minute changes to it, including give my main character a last name. I chose the first that popped into my head, did a bunch of other revisions, and printed, copied and distributed the chapter to my classmates. When we workshopped the story, I discovered that I'd given the character the same last name as a woman in my workshop, one whom I didn't know well at all. She was definitely weirded out, and her name is not at all common. Her name must have popped into my head because it had appeared in my email when I was downloading and printing the story . . . every time I think about it, I cringe. Needless to say, now I am MUCH more careful when I choose names now.
I love the resources that Marcie posted, especially the one that explains the ethnic etymology of surnames. Great find and thank you for sharing!
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Joined: 5/11/2013
Posts: 4
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@May: I have exactly the same problem with RPG characters. Names are what comes to me last, and of course, I can't just settle on any old name chosen at random from the phone book. On the other hand, once I've found one that fits, my, I'm really happy and at ease.
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Joined: 8/6/2011
Posts: 1
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I personally like to try to flesh out more of my character's attributes before I name them. Then, once I know as much as I can about them before I start writing, I assign a generic name such as John or Jane while I write. As soon as they have become more of a personality I choose three words that define them and begin to look up names that have those meanings. I like to give every character a middle name even if I never even mention it in the story. Just makes them feel more real to me.
Of course, depending how much I've written before I finally figure out my character name, I may have to go back through everything many times to make sure that I remove all reference to someone named John when my characters is named Harold or something like that.
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Joined: 10/7/2013
Posts: 65
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I tend to pick names from a baby name book; I look at the meaning of the name and consider the year the character was born.
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Joined: 8/20/2015
Posts: 19
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Sometimes names just come to me. Others I think about and choose carefully. I have a few nasty characters and always name them after someone negative in my past. Of course I would never name them after friends or family.
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