Name Hunting

FINALS ARE OVER. YAY. I did really well (see what I did there?) on all of my finals, just so you know. I’m still finishing the semester with a B in Chemistry, but the rest of the grades are As. And the B is a 89.4. My teacher doesn’t round up until 89.5. A tenth of a percent. It’s really annoying, but oh well.

For today’s post, I’m going to be making a throwback to one of the earlier post, True Names- Naming Your Characters. This was actually originally going to be a part of that post, but it ended up being really long and it wasn’t really needed to get the point across.

If you remember or want to go back and reread that post, we essentially set a handful of guidelines/suggestions for finding names for you characters.

• ·         The name should have some sort of relevance to the character. Whether that’s the literal meaning of the name, or just giving him a really ordinary name because you’re trying to give the impression that he’s a normal kid that got stuck in a crazy situation.
•         The name’s “weirdness level” should be more or less level with everyone else, unless there’s a particular reason why it’s weird. You typically should avoid a world full of Johns and Michaels with a main character named Mortsfy.
• ·         Likewise, you should not have a main character with a Japanese name living in 20 century Germany unless his/her parents are Japanese.
• ·         You should like the name. Not necessarily about to name your child that, but you should like it.
• ·         Balance the length and normality of the first and last names. If you give him/her a long first name, give them a shorter last name. Same with normality.
• ·         Please don’t use more than one middle name unless your character comes from a culture where you typically have more than one.
• ·         Even if your character does come from a culture where multiple middle names are common, don’t ever use words for a middle name.

Now with these guidelines in mind, let’s name a character together!

The character we are going to be naming is going to be a character I am literally coming up with on the spot right now for the purpose of this post. If you're looking for help or wondering if your character is good, you might want to try looking at a post that Margaret wrote (yes, she does actually write stuff) How to Make a Non-Cliche Protagonist

Our character is male. He is 14 years old, has brown slightly shaggy hair and brown eyes. He has freckles and, like most 14 year old boys, is gangly and awkward. He is dealing with an acne problem.

For simplicity's sake, he lives in our world during the 21st century. He attends a public high school, and has two or three really close friends. He'll probably never approach you, but if you approach him, he will try his best to be friendly and have a conversation. He has fairly good grades and he's in honors English and History. He is aspiring to become an author (*wink* bet he reads this blog too).

And... he's about to find out that he has the power to make things come true by writing about them. Why not?

So he writes a short fiction piece about finding dinosaurs on the moon and all of a sudden astronomers are going crazy because they swear they found a dino bone in a moon rock.

Time to name him.

Normally you are going to know your character's name better than I know this kid, considering he's only existed (in my head at least) for the past 3 to 5 minutes, which will make it a bit easier than this might be. Or it might make it a heck of a lot harder because you care more about him/her and want them to have the best name possible.

Margaret and I worked on naming him together, and surprise, surprise, she ended up doing most of the naming. I really hate naming characters. I really do.

Usually we/I start with a first name, but in this case Downes came up first for a last name.

Downes means "poet or storyteller". So that fits. It's also not ridiculously long or short, it's simple enough that most people could pronounce it, though if you're going to try to get away with a unpronounceable name, go with the last name rather than the first.

As for his first name, she said that she really wanted an A name. I was personally thinking of giving him a more feminine name, so when she suggested the name Adrian, I thought it was perfect.

Adrian Downes

We have meaning in his last name, he fits the parameters that we both wanted his name to fit into ("A" name and a slightly feminine one). It is something that you could expect to hear at a 21st century high school, but it's not so ordinary there will be two other boys in each of his classes with the same name. Both his last name and his first name are slightly out of the ordinary, but not so drastically that it’s too weird. And he doesn’t really have a middle name, so we don’t have a problem with too many of them.

I wanted to give you an example of the type of conversation we usually have when we’re naming characters together/helping each other name, but it was actually really easy to name him, so there’s not much to show.

I hope this was helpful for some of you as an example of the process!