How important are the names you pick for your Characters

The names can be important because most of my stories are set in New York and New Jersey (often in the late 20th Century), so the these can give information - or at least clues - about ethnic identity. Usually it was a topic of conversation among people who knew each other fairly well. A significant number of people had mixed identities from their father's and mother's sides of the family.

Fairly important, actually. If you wrote 10 stories and the characters were all named John and Mary, what fun would that be? THere are a lot of name generator sites online. You can even pick a person's nationality and birth decade to find names that would match. A great idea I read once is to put some humor in the name with what they do. For instance, if a woman is a blowjob fanatic, call her "Miss Hoover." If a guy is one of the nicest you'll ever meet, call him "Nick Savage." You get the idea!

i name all my characters after one of our cats, past and present.

For regular stories set in my own culture, I just pick names that seem to fit the characters. Usually one just comes to me either before I write or as I write.

If there are people from non-English cultures involved, then I might do some research, esp. if it is one I am not familiar with (e.g. my recent ancient Egyptian story).

For fantasy, which is mostly what I write, I usually come up with some kind of convention for names in the world I am building. I am neither as educated nor ambitious as J.R.R. Tolkien so you'll never get me creating whole languages, but I will make notes as I name things to try for consistency. No good examples here, but in my Chronicles of Tana on StoriesSpace, I have established, for instance, that "Tan" means "Palace" or "Castle" so any palaces in that world are going to be Tan (something), e.g. in the Tana stories, "Tan Kolar" means "Night Palace" or "Palace of Darkness".

Quote by Seeker4

For regular stories set in my own culture, I just pick names that seem to fit the characters. Usually one just comes to me either before I write or as I write.

If there are people from non-English cultures involved, then I might do some research, esp. if it is one I am not familiar with (e.g. my recent ancient Egyptian story).

For fantasy, which is mostly what I write, I usually come up with some kind of convention for names in the world I am building. I am neither as educated nor ambitious as J.R.R. Tolkien so you'll never get me creating whole languages, but I will make notes as I name things to try for consistency. No good examples here, but in my Chronicles of Tana on StoriesSpace, I have established, for instance, that "Tan" means "Palace" or "Castle" so any palaces in that world are going to be Tan (something), e.g. in the Tana stories, "Tan Kolar" means "Night Palace" or "Palace of Darkness".

Sounds like a lot of work. I tend to write b-movie pulp fictionly fantasy/sci fi, so names tend to be a bit on the silly side. Mr. Pinkwell/Pinky was a minotaur in one story. I had a character named Valentine Day in that one, too.

For me the name must fit the character, but more important is to protect anonymity. Many of my characters are based on real people (male and female) whom I've known in my life, and with whom I've either had sex or wish I had. They're my fantasies, after all.

But I go to great lengths to make sure even the subjects wouldn't recognize themselves in my stories. I change BOTH the physical descriptions of the characters AND any circumstances in the setup from what really happened. And I change the names a minimum of TWO degrees from the original: if the person I have in mind is named "Beth" in real life, even "Deb" is out of the question as a substitute. So I might change the name from "Beth" to "Deb" and then to "Donna" before publishing - at an absolute minimum. The goal is to keep it so only I know who the real people are, and so that in the off chance they came here read the story, they wouldn't likely even know it was about them.

Quote by sprite

i name all my characters after one of our cats, past and present.

I love it.

Very important. Names and character descriptions are very carefully chosen for the endless deeply personal inspiration that makes me want to write.

I think they are very important too. Especially, if writing a period piece. Then, I'll Google popular names from that era. If you write really imaginative stuff, have fun with names. See Sprite's stories for examples!

My stories are supposed to be about ordinary people doing extraordinary things, so I keep my names quite common and relatable. Except Meenakshi, because she's goddess by name, goddess by nature. 😊

I'm pretty bad at it, but I agree they are important. I tend to use a placeholder name, the first one that occurs to me, and then try to think of a better one the entire time I'm writing (and find-and-replace it in the doc). Sadly, my laziness often means I end up using the placeholder name simply because I couldn't think of a better one.

I use the list from social security in the U S for names. If it's a special time period, there are names from specific years. Sometimes I can see I'm looking for ethnic names and there are specific lists for them.

My personal reaction about names is that Olivia #1 is about as likely to be a hotwife as Amanda #475. i guess that since I'm almost eighty my read on names would be different than someone twenty. thats why i depend on

Spread sexual pleasure as widely as we can, as long as we can!

Jim AKA Keylime Pi

It is very important.

I always give a lot of thought to my character's names. In my film-noir contest entry, I strongly identify with the male character since I'm an Olympic weightlifter myself, so I gave him a name and surname that have the same initials as my real-life name. Daniel is easy to pronounce for English speakers, and Lévesque is a very common surname in Quebec.

If you have several characters, it is best to avoid names that sound alike.

Zabel is the Armenian-family girl in that story. If the French teen girl had been named "Isabelle", that would have been confusing, so I picked "Marie" (again, very easy to pronounce for the English speaker). And for the Ukrainian/Soviet beauty, I used "Nadia". On another note, I learned that "yes" isn't "da" in Ukrainian, it's "tak" and I've had Nadia using this word in the final sex scene, but foreign language researching is another topic.

If your character is from somewhere specific, it's important to do a little research on names from that place. There are a lot of resources to do this. I've looked up Armenian names for that lovely girl and that's when I learned there was once a queen named Zabel in Armenia.

I've written stories where I've spent far more time agonizing and researching names than actually writing. I've also written stories that are 10-15 pages where I haven't named any of the characters and didn't feel they needed them. Also have written some that I am just fine with the first thing that popped into my head.

So no hard and fast rules for how I write. I find the names important but only feel like I need to be clever with it on certain projects.

Generally, the names I choose are not significant...but my current series is an exception to this rule! All the men's names have been chosen as foreshadowing of where the story is headed.

I can see every point of view presented here. Important in some instances and not in others. Relatable or suggestive of character is tough because as seen above 'Edna' is not an old prude for everyone.

A personal peeve of mine is when someone uses several names that all begin with the same letter, or even sounding the same, making it difficult to keep the characters straight in the story.

Quote by 2bespanked

I can see every point of view presented here. Important in some instances and not in others. Relatable or suggestive of character is tough because as seen above 'Edna' is not an old prude for everyone.

A personal peeve of mine is when someone uses several names that all begin with the same letter, or even sounding the same, making it difficult to keep the characters straight in the story.

Great point! The names to me are very important. The names become more exotic when the setting is different. The names are more ‘common’ when it’s an everyday sort of situation. For a book I wrote, their names are Clayton and Chelsea since they become romantically entangled (not TOO similar, I don’t think).

Quote by Gordon_Brail
For a book I wrote, their names are Clayton and Chelsea since they become romantically entangled (not TOO similar, I don’t think).

It's not a problem with male/female names as the action often makes it clearer.

They are important to me; they need to sound sensual, and this part is quite easy. Also, they have to be vastly different to separate each other, and no alliteration. I think I am a little unusual, perhaps. I do not like this. Also, they must be convincing; now, I am unusual. Convincing that it fits the locale, the time and place it is set, and perhaps by the end of the story, the reader thinks, "Yes, they are definitely a... " I know... just crazy, but still, this is what I do.

Depends on the characters role and the story, I guess.

I believe that names are inherently important, in that most people having a child will spend a great deal of time and thought on naming. This is true to the extent that anyone saying ‘oh, just use any old name’ when registering a birth would be regarded as eccentric at best, and possibly dangerous. So, names are rarely given casually or thoughtlessly in real life. Somehow, I feel that throwing any old name at a character is a path to weakening the credibility of a story.

Then there’s the reality that some people are rarely called by their birth name as it doesn’t fit. This tells me the idea of names fitting characters matters to many people. I guess that’s one reason we have nicknames. One of my uncles was never referred to by his legal name outside legal contexts (house purchases etc.) Apparently, on first introduction, his grandmother declared his given name to be ill-fitting and called him something different. From that day on, the name his grandmother chose stuck. And it suited him.

As others have said, geography also matters. In many countries (certainly in the UK) there remain clear regional patterns to naming, so a name can hint at someone’s origins. I was always intrigued by a UK TV soap whose writers, it’s said, used to visit local graveyards to source regionally appropriate names. In some legal systems, of course, there are strict rules on what you can and cannot call a child.

Beyond all of that, a name can bring an exotic edge to a character without the need to be sidelined into detailed explanations of their background. The character of Dimitrios, for example, in Eric Ambler’s ‘The Mask of Dimitrios’, has a Greek-Russian name that tells you much of his origins in a single word.

Personally, though, I try not to fret too much about names, preferring to land on them mostly by instinct. So I’ll regularly change a character’s name when developing a story – not great, in that it leads to some painful editing. I often feel like a ghost when I’m writing: floating silently into a scene and trying to work out what’s going on. Part of that is working out what someone’s called. I’m not sure I always get it right. But that’s how it feels.