One of my favorite things about creating characters is picking out the names.
I firmly believe that a name isn't just something you slap on a character before calling it a day. Naming a character is a very important process (which I'll be detailing in a future Tip Tuesday), and sometimes I can spend weeks trying to think of names. At times, if I can't think of the right name, I simply abandon it-I have stories sitting in my Google Drive that have two pages of them written, and wherever the protagonist is mentioned, there are dashes in place of the name.
Some authors tend to lean towards plain names, and you seem to know five or six people that share each character's name. Meanwhile, others seem to try to find the most exotic names they can find, and occasionally make their characters' names a part of some pun or joke (which I find a bit irritating, to be honest). Neither method is wrong (unless you name your characters Jack and Jill just for grins, which I feel completely misses the point of naming your characters). But I like to avoid being boxed into one category by using just one type of name. I've named my characters everything from Haley to Nova; from Kim to Saoirse. The other day I named one of my male characters Caius (pronounce Ky-Us)-when was the last time you met a Caius? I know I never have, but the name was too awesome to not use.
(So I just read on Nameberry that Caius was a character in Twilight. I've read 3.5 out of the 4 books in the series, and this is news to me. Will someone please cite this for me? Comment below!)
Plus, as someone who has an unusual name (I'm not sharing the whole thing on here), I know both sides. There's something beautiful about the simplicity of common names like Isabella and Elizabeth, but some unique names are just as beautiful. (For example, I couldn't get over the name Saoirse (pronounced Sare-Sha) when I first saw it, and knew that I had to write it in somewhere. Saoirse is currently the protagonist of my main work, and I feel like the name fits her perfectly.) So boxing myself in doesn't get me anywhere, because I'd be missing out on wonderful names on both sides.
What kind of names do you use? What's your favorite character name that you've chosen? Comment below!
T
I firmly believe that a name isn't just something you slap on a character before calling it a day. Naming a character is a very important process (which I'll be detailing in a future Tip Tuesday), and sometimes I can spend weeks trying to think of names. At times, if I can't think of the right name, I simply abandon it-I have stories sitting in my Google Drive that have two pages of them written, and wherever the protagonist is mentioned, there are dashes in place of the name.
Some authors tend to lean towards plain names, and you seem to know five or six people that share each character's name. Meanwhile, others seem to try to find the most exotic names they can find, and occasionally make their characters' names a part of some pun or joke (which I find a bit irritating, to be honest). Neither method is wrong (unless you name your characters Jack and Jill just for grins, which I feel completely misses the point of naming your characters). But I like to avoid being boxed into one category by using just one type of name. I've named my characters everything from Haley to Nova; from Kim to Saoirse. The other day I named one of my male characters Caius (pronounce Ky-Us)-when was the last time you met a Caius? I know I never have, but the name was too awesome to not use.
(So I just read on Nameberry that Caius was a character in Twilight. I've read 3.5 out of the 4 books in the series, and this is news to me. Will someone please cite this for me? Comment below!)
Plus, as someone who has an unusual name (I'm not sharing the whole thing on here), I know both sides. There's something beautiful about the simplicity of common names like Isabella and Elizabeth, but some unique names are just as beautiful. (For example, I couldn't get over the name Saoirse (pronounced Sare-Sha) when I first saw it, and knew that I had to write it in somewhere. Saoirse is currently the protagonist of my main work, and I feel like the name fits her perfectly.) So boxing myself in doesn't get me anywhere, because I'd be missing out on wonderful names on both sides.
What kind of names do you use? What's your favorite character name that you've chosen? Comment below!
T