What Kind of Name Is That? How to Name Fictional Characters

I read Brandon Sanderson's "Stormlight Archive" and "Mistborn" series, and I couldn't stop thinking about how awkward the names sounded, from Kaladin to Kelsier. It repeatedly took me out of the scene.

Meanwhile, the team behind Morrowind seemed to have an uncanny ability to produce names that just felt completely right. Somebody responded to my random thoughts on the topic with this very sound summary:

> Morrowind's names are a pretty remarkable achievement. I don't know who was responsible for it but whoever it was did a really good job of ripping off name "templates" from disparate languages, tweaking them enough to retain their associations but not their meanings, and then sticking with those templates across the board. Modeling the Ashlander names on Assyrian was a stroke of world-building genius.

> Mistborn's names, in contrast, never seem to have much purpose behind them. The templates are inconsistent and arbitrary, and convey no information to the reader. You have fantastical gibberish like vin/reen/camon, standard anglo names like dockson/hammond, bizarre nicknamey nouns like breeze/clubs/spook, and cod-french like valette renoux. It's a mess and it makes it difficult to figure out what this world is when there doesn't seem to be any natural way those names could have emerged in one culture. It's fucking weird.

> That being said the only names I never liked in Morrowind were the Redguard names. I could never figure out what they were supposed to be doing.

There is a practical consideration worth keeping in mind with names: they distinguish characters from each other.

I found One Hundred Years of Solitude virtually incomprehensible because it features an enormous cast of characters whose names are all similar.

There is José Arcadio Buendía, José Arcadio, Arcadio, Aureliano José, 17 (!) other characters named Aureliano, José Arcadio Segundo and José Arcadio (II) (who is not Segundo).

Aureliano Buendía, Aureliano Segundo and Aureliano Babilonia (Aureliano II) (again, different dude from Segundo), and Aureliano (III).

Úrsula Iguarán, Amaranta Úrsula, and Amaranta.

Remedios Moscote, Remedios the Beauty, and Renata Remedios.

Some of my favourite are the ship names in Ian Banks' culture series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Cult...

They're all great, but here are some examples

  * Only Slightly Bent
  * God Told Me To Do It
  * Ethics Gradient
  * I Blame My Mother
  * I Blame Your Mother
  * Poke It With A Stick
  * Don't Try This At Home
  * Contents May Differ

As a writer, I live and die by this site : http://www.behindthename.com/random/

Pick an ethnicity and just hit random until something fits the character.

I usually don't use the exact name, but it puts me in the right neighborhood of what I want. After that I can tweak it.

'Absurdonym' is my favorite new word. It will come in handy when discussing startup names.

Thomas Pynchon is a great inventor of names. From "The Crying of Lot 49" alone, we have:

Oedipa Maas

Wendell "Mucho" Maas

John Nefastis

Stanley Koteks

Mike Fallopian

...and so forth. Granted, the humour in "Lot 49" is a little more juvenile than, say, "Against the Day".

I remember the introduction to Nightfall by Isaac Asimov, which explains (or perhaps defends) the familiar names of not just alien characters, but their measures and objects:

> Kalgash is an alien world and it is not our intention to have you think that it is identical to Earth, even though we depict its people as speaking a language that you can understand, and using terms that are familiar to you. Those words should be understood as mere equivalents of alien terms-that is, a conventional set of equivalents of the same sort that a writer of novels uses when he has foreign characters speaking with each other in their own language but nevertheless transcribes their words in the language of the reader. So when the people of Kalgash speak of "miles," or "hands," or "cars," or "computers," they mean their own units of distance, their own grasping-organs, their own ground-transportation devices, their own information-processing machines, etc. The computers used on Kalgash are not necessarily compatible with the ones used in New York or London or Stockholm, and the "mile" that we use in this book is not necessarily the American unit of 5,280 feet. But it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms in describing events on this wholly alien world than it would have been to invent a long series of wholly Kalgashian terms.

> In other words, we could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying, and that did not seem useful. The essence of this story doesn't lie in the quantity of bizarre terms we might have invented; it lies, rather, in the reaction of a group of people somewhat like ourselves, living on a world that is somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail, as they react to a challenging situation that is completely different from anything the people of Earth have ever had to deal with. Under the circumstances, it seemed to us better to tell you that someone put on his hiking boots before setting out on a seven-mile walk than to clutter the book with quonglishes, vorks, and gleebishes.

> If you prefer, you can imagine that the text reads "vorks" wherever it says "miles," "gliizbiiz" wherever it says "hours," and "sleshtraps" where it says "eyes." Or you can make up your own terms. Vorks or miles, it will make no difference when the Stars come out.

... Granted, this only works because they never meet other characters whose "miles" or "gliizbiiz" need to be disambiguated.

Despite its great reputation, I found "The Day of the Locust" unreadable because I couldn't move beyond a major character named Homer Simpson.

One of the things I like about Gene Wolfe's writing is that he doesn't make up words, and I believe that this extends to names as well. Severian, Vodalus, Palaemon, Thecla, Dorcas are all names used in Book of the New Sun that already exist in the historical record.

In Book of the Long Sun, at least in the city where the story takes place, the men are named for animals or animal products (Silk, Horn, Musk, Remora), the women for plants or plant products (Mint, Rose, Hyacinth, Mucor), and the androids for minerals or other non-living things (Marble, Hammerstone).

Is this the right comment thread to talk about how bad names are in Star Wars, at least ever since... Episode II came out? And the names in the new trilogy so far sound worse than even in the prequels.

It was good enough for Shakespeare. There's "Malvolio," the discontent from Twelfth Night. "Horatio," the even-tempered observer in Hamlet. "Elbow," the drunken constable in Measure for Measure, and "Dull," the slow-witted constable from Love's Labors Lost (which also features the empty-headed schoolmaster "Holofernes"). "Prospero," the artist-magician who makes all right in the end of The Tempest. "Hotspur," the (actual) nickname of the irascible warrior from Henry IV Part I who could think of nothing but riding his horse into battle. (Of course, that was a real historical name, but it's no wonder Shakespeare latched onto it.) And who can forget "Mercutio," another hothead, the short-lived hyperglot from Romeo and Juilet? Not to mention "Posthumus," who all but dies to set right his folly at the beginning of Cymbeline. And then of course, "Falstaff," also from Henry IV, that great monument to the art of deception.

Does anyone need to guess the profession of Mistress Overdone, Mistress Quickly, or Doll Tearsheet?

Lesser characters: Shallow and Slender.

Not as sure what to make of Touchstone, Caliban (an anagram for "cannibal"?), and Bottom.

Dickens was just imitating, and in many ways bettering, his master.

I read a lot of scifi and have generally been impressed by the naming. I dislike Cratylic names when they're trite but authors like Phillip K. Dick and Gene Wolfe manage to pull them off. Neal Stephenson uses them humorously in Snowcrash (the protagonist's name is 'Hiro Protagonist'). I can't say I'm a fan of Asimov's names in the Foundation series - not Cratylic, just a bit off sounding. "Bayta Darrell" doesn't give the same brain-feeling as "Severian" or "Paul Atreides".

I'm curious as to whether or not parents put as much thought into naming their own children as authors do with their characters. I suppose not, because parents start with somewhat of a blank slate. Authors have to find a name that encompasses a fully developed character, even if they are fictional and will end up being less complex than a real person. It might be an interesting exercise to name yourself and your friends now, and see if you can think of a better name to suit them.

If you're looking for realistic names, try the names of people you vaguely remember from highschool. Or ask your friends for the names they remember from their own highschool. Only works up to a poont, but something about each of these names is perfect. Often they're too silly to seem made up. Here's one: Chris DiJacklin. (If you're reading this, hi Chris!)

When writing fiction, way back when, I'd just flip open a phone book, point, and run with it.

I have a friend that's writing a book and has this very problem!

Completely off topic, but the phrase "always an amusing resource for complex issues" contains the wittiest act of hyperlinking I've seen in a while.