I’m finally ready to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) on a story idea I’ve had for about a decade now. The only problem I have is that in the past decade I haven’t been able to come up with a single character name. It’s easy enough to figure out the story when they’re just characters in my head, they don’t need names. But I don’t want to write everything down as “The Admiral,” “The Assassin,” and “Brother #2.”
So how do you come up with names? Especially looking at all the sci-fi writers out there. I’ve having a hard time coming up with names that are “alien-y” enough without being ridiculous.
I try to imagine someone calling out to my character, either in anger (KHAN!!!) or Lust (Flash Gordon…umm, yeah no…)
I don’t write sci fi; this world we live in gives me plenty of fodder than to have to create a mystically cool or endangered one…but now I’m intrigued…
One time and one time only, I started the first sentence of a first chapter without a main character’s name in mind, a name that I thought was perfect appeared on the screen, and that was it. I’m kind of doubtful that’s ever going to happen again. For the most part I just blindly grope around my own brain until I find one that sounds right for what I think the character is. I used to read baby name websites to try to find the right meaning, but I don’t do that very much anymore. A few weeks ago I had a long conversation with twickster about the name of a child is mentioned (but doesn’t even appear) in the story I’m working on- I was really stuck on that one. Once in a while I’ll use the name of someone I know, but only if the character isn’t anything like the real person.
Look around on phone books and pick out names that you like and use them. Change a couple of letters around, spell them phonetically, or smush parts of two names together to make them more “alien” to standard modern USA names.
“Smith” = “Miths”
“Lawrence” = “Larrance”
“Jane Evers” = “Evernes”
Harder answer:
Think about the people you’re writing - what does their culture use for names? It’s part of their culture, their backstory, so you should be able to answer that. If the answer is they’re human, then look to whatever human culture they are and extrapolate. If they’re alien, think about what’s important to them, or how they would identify themselves, and use that.
X is from an earth colony settled by a radical offshoot offspring of the hacker group Anonymous. All the colonists changed their names to signify their dedication to the cause. X’s name is Selena Infofree.
Y is an alien. Their language is difficult for humans to speak well or transcribe - it’s musical tones. Y’s name is Viola Major Chord.
Z is from New Scotland, in the Delta Quadrant. Her name is Kyleen McBride.
One trick is to come up with a couple of common repeating elements in names that are meant to share the same culture. For example, if an earth story is featuring a lot of -ski and -czyk names, you already know where it’s set. So your futuristic and alien cultures need something similar. The more time you spend on the linguistics, the better (think Tolkien, for example) but you can get decent results by coming up with a half-dozen sounds/syllables and them mixing those through names from that culture.
Names also tend to use words from that language. Just think of all the girl’s names that are virtues and the last names that were professions. So if you’re working on your linguistics, you can come up with an alien word for “strong” and then name your character that.
It can also help to select random letters (I used to have a 30-sided die with letters on it). I never tried to spell out a name literally. But I took three or four random letters and then connected them. Let’s say I’ve got a Polish guy and I roll S, L, T. Add a vowel to connect the random letters and slap on an ending and we’ve got, say, Soltski. Experts on Poland are undoubtedly wincing, but if we’re doing this with aliens, you’re the only expert and it becomes a traditional alien name as soon as you write it down.
Also important. Names are descriptors, at various levels of removal. Many of them have origins in a person’s occupation, or visible characteristics. Just as we have names like “Cartwright”, another culture may have a name for some occupation that we have never had, or which did not produce a common name in our culture. If the setting has magic, for example, you might have families bearing names like “Magus” or “Wizen”. In a setting with a lot of local water traffic–like an archipelago–“Pilot” (or a drifted version like “Pilt”) might be a common name. For non-human species, think what their voices, if any, would sound like and make heavy use of letters that fit that sound.
However, a more fundamental piece of advice: Pick a distinctive name and get on with it. Someone in one of the NaNo threads was struggling to come up with a name for a dog. I decreed the dog’s name to be Ebenezer, because it was find-and-replace-friendly. As long as the names you choose aren’t part of some other word, you can change every instance of the name in seconds whenever you think of a better one.
A friend of mine was in Prague. She was watching “Animaniacs” on tv, and, for giggles, sent me an audio tape of one episode. “Pinky and the Brain” in Czech. At one point, in the English version, Brain says “So much the better.” In Czech, it sounds (my naive transliteration) like “Darkhas Maulchin.”
What a damn great name for a fantasy villain!
I also heartily endorse Lasciel’s first technique, taking names out of the phone book and mucking them around to make them sound vaguely foreign/alien.
[ol]
[li]I have a little book of unusual names for the baby and pick ones out whose definition fits what I’m trying to do. [/li][li]I also go to baby name sites, decide on a first initial and then search for things that sound good.[/li][li]My most successful character, Quarnian Dow, took her first name from a minor character in a mystery novel (dramatized on Mystery! 25 years ago) and the last name from someone I knew in high school.[/li][li]Others just came out of nowhere: Sir Morin Tag, for instance. It sounded good.[/li][li]A few were the result of typos: I picked out “Febrin” from an example of creating a name from “February.” I typed it as “Fedrin” and kept it that way. His last name, Bedell was from a coworker; I choose it because I liked the way it scanned (Fedrin Bedell).[/li][li]A current character is named Ruby because in her language, human names come from concrete nouns.[/li][li]One character was named Eve because she ran around naked on a planet called the Garden.[/li][li]I named a robot lovedoll “Patti Pleezmi”[/li][/ol]
It is possible to create a funny name, but it’s difficult. I don’t usually try, but the best template is and out-of-fashion first name + middle initial + noun or compound of everyday objects: Rufus T. Firefly (my template). Wilhelmina R. Strudelbaker. Sylvester Q. Whitefish. Clayton A. Woodglue. Etta P. Green.
I’ve used names from my family tree several times.
Several years ago, on the Dope, there were a series of “Finish the…story” tales, written by multiple authors on the SDMB. There was a sea story, westerns, and sci-fi.
In the first western one character had been named Belle, and when I wanted to give her a surname(I hadn’t first written her) I gave her the surname Kasson, after my great-grandmother, Cora Belle Kasson. At other times I used other family names. But in the sea story, an American character I created had the name Caleb Wynton, which I simply picked out of the air.
Phil Dick was a master at this, as were the Python guys. Nothing is better than a character named, say Ernest Dishwasher or Gilligan Cementmixer or Mr. Smokestoomuch.
This is a great way to find strange old names. I know somebody who’s related to a Baltus Van Baren, and if I ever write some kind of gothic horror thing I’m likely to steal that.
If, like me, you are a poor typist, go ahead and type a paragraph or two hastily. Don’t worry about what you are trying to say. You are almost certain to make a bunch of typos. Don’t correct them! You will find great names that you could never have been able to come up with. Example: I just typed “typhos” when I meant typos. others in this paragraph are “whast” instead of “what”,and “Halstyly” instead of hastily. See? Easy!
A couple of books back in the '70s featured a character who had been born on a planet settled by Apaches and Scots highlanders. His name was Dawnboy MacCochise…
Seems to me Asimov once said he used the phone book, too.
I got Wednesady yesterday.
I’ve used Basque names, names from Spanish legends, word-by-word translations of the above or of Spanish names. For example, Amaya or Amaia means “end” - Amaya and Amaia sound terribly exotic to anybody who hasn’t heard it yelled in the street, End or Ending would be literal translations which may make sense in whichever culture is being described.
The phone book technique is made much easier nowadays by being able to check the yellow or white pages from other countries, or listings for international companies. You can get names from specific cultures and check what do they mean, whether there’s anybody famous associated with the name, etc.
I’m not a writer, but that method just seems hack-tastic. Like really bad, god-awful sub-Twilight grade fantasy and Sci-fi naming scheme methodology.
What I’ve done for role playing games is try and think up some backstory to the character, including their origins and if need be, the backstory to the backstory, and then tried to think up combinations of names that might fit that.
For example, if your character is an asteroid miner in 2158, you could say that asteroid miners came predominantly from the US and Brazil, and then go about naming your character “Joao Robertson” or “Stephen Moreira”.
I’m also not a fan of naming human characters weird spaced out names when they’re in the relatively near future. I mean, we’ve had recognizable first name / occupation surname combinations for upwards of 1000 years now, and some first names are over 2000 years old (Marcus / Marc / Mark for one example). Naming your guy “Quarnian” is just bad (not to pick on RealityChuck too much). It’s likely that in the 30th century, we’ll still see variants on William, Jennifer, etc… and probably other more modern first names like “Hunter” as well. Where the hell would “Quarnian” come from?
Surnames will be even more sticky, I suspect. At what point will someone’s descendants get a wholly new surname? You’d probably need to give a nod or account for some sort of societal change that would either give people occupational surnames again, or that would cause other ways to get a new surname- some sort of Roman agnomen type thing.
There’s that famous Straight Doper literal-mindedness. Not that I’ve never looked at a sci-fi name and rolled my eyes - come to think of it the act of looking at a sci-fi name and groaning at its stupidity could be named after George Lucas - but this could be explained in the story or it could be irrelevant, and on its own it’s not big a deal. And RealityChuck didn’t say the character is a human.
Nah, it’s something that annoys me when I pick up a book set 1000 years in the future, and everyone has space-agey first and last names that don’t derive from anything in the present day. It’s usually a good sign that the book will be schlocky.
I googled. Apparently Quarnian is an established woman’s name that may have shifted from a surname. Although there’s also a chance that it was taken from the name of a character in a novel. It’s not common, but it’s out there.
Cool idea. If anyone wants to use the woman’s name Jerusha, there were a spate of them in one generation in my family tree. It seems a shame to waste it.
Also Axtell as a surname. That one got memorialized as a middle name for awhile.
And if you have a twenty-sided die and a six-sided die, you can roll up names (consonants and vowels).
Not that I’ve never looked at a sci-fi name and rolled my eyes - come to think of it the act of looking at a sci-fi name and groaning at its stupidity could be named after George Lucas - but this could be explained in the story or it could be irrelevant, and on its own it’s not big a deal. And RealityChuck didn’t say the character is a human.