Names in stories are a paradox. They are simultaneously quite important and nearly irrelevant.
While the right names are important, spending too much time at the onset of writing on them isn’t useful. Let’s look at ways to quickly get a name sorted and let you concentrate on writing.
Hopefully, over the course of writing your story, you’ll get to know your characters inside and out. They’ll become real people to you, firming up their personalities, traits, quirks and flaws. So it’s natural that you’ll want their names to be ‘perfect’. Names are evocative and powerful, and having your characters appropriately named is important.
The quest for the ‘right’ name can be detrimental to your writing efforts when you spend too long searching for it. Getting distracted from actually writing is easy enough without additionally burdening yourself. Another trap that beginning writers fall into is thinking that the right name will provide enough of a basis for the character that they ignore the other elements of character-building.
With that in mind, here are five quick and easy methods to come up with a name for your character. You should be able to zip through each of these suggestions in a minute or two and churn out a dozen possible names. Pick one you like and get writing. Remember, it’s better to have a story with a character’s name to revise than a brilliantly named character with no story to live in.
1. Random creation
Randomly naming your character is ugly, fast, and brutally efficient. Think if you want a long or short name, then find a way to randomly generate one. Pull some tiles out of a Scrabble bag. Close your eyes, rotate your keyboard 90 or 180 degrees and mash some letters. Ask someone to call out letters until you tell them to stop.
You’ll probably have things like pogf, wov and akoghma to work with. Ugly, right? But useful enough. The first two sound like sneezes, so we’ll extend them with a vowel or two. Akoghma sounds like a boulder falling into a mud-pit, but it’s livable as well. With a few seconds; work, we can form something that looks a little more pronounceable: Pageef, Wover and Akomagh could all be names for something.
2. Anagrams
Anagrams are fun and simple. Take a word you like the look of, one that describes your character, or open a dictionary to a random page. Take your word and rearrange it as necessary. You can stick to the strict lettering if you want, which will delight your clue-ier readers. Or if you get stuck, you can add in extra letters. These techniques are quick and dirty, remember!
If I open my dictionary, I get…
Collect: Cel Colt
Hemp: Phem
Modern: Dernom
Pumpernickel: Nick Mupprell.
Awkward? Maybe. Fast? Definitely!
3. Real words
Yes, you can use real words as character names. Actually, they can be quite evocative. Aim for proper nouns, adjectives, and colorful verbs. Combine with titles for added cool factor. Works especially well for characters with superpowers or who want to hide their true identity.Reservoir Dogs and American Gods both made good use of this.
Try giving characters just the one name:
Mr Orange
Madam Wednesday
Lord Bungee-jumping
You can also just take random words and combine them until you find a sound that’s pleasing. This happens occasionally when people move from one country to another and want to adopt a more local name.
You can also add suffixes onto real words to make them into a descriptive title: ‘master’, ‘smith’, ‘mancer’ and ‘lord’ are some. This works best with nouns and verbs, otherwise your characters might end up seeming a bit pretentious. Hammersmith is probably fine. Burgerlord might need some revising.
4. Placeholders
If you’re in the throes of writing and can’t name a character quickly, use an identifiable tag, like [square brackets], and a placeholder name. That way you can involve [OldMan] quickly and easily in your story, and edit the name later. A “Find and Replace” function will quickly remove the awkward phrasing and get your character name in place once you’ve thought of it at your leisure.
5. Nameless characters
This might seem like a bit of a cheat, but do bear in mind that you aren’t obliged to name characters. The shorter your story is, the easier to get away with nameless characters. If someone’s only going to be in your story peripherally, then simply describing them as “the barman” or “the guard” is fine. Even if they appear on more than one occasion, simply referring to them as “the barman George had spoken to earlier” or “the same guard” will do fine.
Now that we’ve looked at some quick and easy ways to name your characters…
Go write!
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