Writing Advice: Name That Dude
From @darkend@redwombat.social: “how do you go about choosing names for characters, especially if those characters come from parts of the world you aren't as familiar with?”
I did write a bit on this in my writing advice book (free from BadDogBooks!), but that entry is a little scant, so I can write more to this specifically pointed question.
Names are a funny thing and depend in large part on the world. To give a few examples I’ve had to deal with recently, names will be different if I’m picking them for my contemporary furry world, reasonably historically accurate (but still furry) Middle Ages England, or my contemporary urban fantasy world. Not that much different—you could have Tom in any of them, for example—but there will be differences. In a furry world, I tend to use contemporary names but I can toss in a unique one: Wiley and Devlin are not common names in our world but they sound like they could be. This is a nod to furry fandom, in which we all create character names that are sometimes real names and sometimes are made-up names and sometimes are names that sound like real names but are spelled pretentiously (ahem). I like that my Forester Universe has a little bit of a feel of a furry convention sometimes. In Middle Ages England, there’s a catalog of common names and I stick close to that even though it’s furry, because the historical feel is more important than the furry feel. And for a contemporary urban fantasy, I tend to stick to existing contemporary names, because I want to create the feel of a familiar world for the reader and then say “but there’s werewolves in it”; that tension is something I’m striving for.
So what do I do when using characters from parts of the world I’m not as familiar with? I start by doing the thing I do anytime I’m not familiar and want to be: I do research.
As I wrote in Do You Need Help?, baby name lists are a great place to go for name ideas. If it’s a part of the world you’re not familiar with, chances are there’s a baby name list for it, or for somewhere culturally similar to it. The advantage of baby name lists is they will often tell you the origin or meaning of the name so you can pick something that would be meaningful to the character if you like. You can often stop there depending on how in depth you want to get to the character’s origin.
But it’s also worth doing more digging to the history of that part of the world, especially around the time of the character’s birth. What major events were going on then, historical or cultural? Babies get named for famous people, or names that people hear often (as Phil Collins jokingly suggests to David Letterman here). As a bonus, if you find out why a character is named the way they are, you’ve built a bit of their backstory already. Their parents had some kind of expectation for them that was encoded into this name; how did they deal with that? Did they embrace it or struggle against it?
If you can find any other documents about naming from that region, that’ll help too. Is it traditional to name any of the children after their parents or other ancestors or relatives? What about gods or servants of gods (for the Middle Ages, I often go back to Biblical names and saints)? Family Tree did a roundup of naming customs from many Western countries; see if you can find something like this for the region you’re interested in. In First Nations cultures, names can be changed as the person changes; they aren’t fixed in the way that Western cultures think of them.
Note, also, that if you’re making up names for a fantasy world, having naming conventions like this can give your society more depth and verisimilitude. Naming children after ancestors, saints, or nature shows what’s important to your society. Fixed names speak to a society that believes at least a little in class structure and people staying in the roles they’re born in, while changing names allows for the changing of someone’s roles in a society.
Whatever you do, keep in mind that a name is not just a symbol to refer to that character in your manuscript; it’s the signifier of a character’s identity and their tie to their family and their culture. If you respect that in your choice of names, you won’t go wrong.