Young Writers Society

does anyone else have a hard time choosing names or lastnames?
if you dont, where do you get your naems bc i cant keep on using my friends names

Phone books! No, seriously - phone books are really helpful for last names. Also, babynames.com is a great site if you want to find some names with specific meanings behind them.

Lol, if i'm too lazy to get up and turn the tv off i sometimes sit and watch the credits of a movie/tv show to see if any interesting names jump out at me.

I'm not too keen on the baby name books that so many other people use for some reason.

I'm not sure what writing you're into, but fantasy fiction is easy because you can just pick names out of anywhere. A few months ago I actually held a competition on YWS to see who could rename my characters, and that worked well for me.

For more...realistic names I would go for a phone book or baby name book. Failing that, just ask people in the street what their names ar.

Rubric

The phone books and baby books are always good ideas. I like Kadie's tip on looking at the credits of TV shows or movies.

One thing you may want to look at when naming a character is symbolism. If the character fulfills a specific role or fits into a certain niche, you may want to name them accordingly. Example: in Stephen King's The Green Mile, he names his innocent man who is wrongly accused John Coffey. If you look at the initials, JC, they correspond with another famous wrongly accused man. I know, really basic, but you get the general idea. Things like that help make your story strong.

Another thing: if it's fantasy or science fiction, don't be afraid to use the "misspelling of nouns" trick.
That's my two cents.

What I did is I went out and bought a baby name book for only six dollars. It contains hundreds and hundreds of boys and girls names, and it is so unbelievably helpful when I'm looking for a name. It gives meaning and background as well. And there's a lot of baby name books out there, too.

Or, go to a baby naming website. Even for fantasy novels, they have some pretty far out names people came up with.

I use Behind the Name (there's also a section on surnames) when I'm naming my characters. I'll start with a general idea - I want an English name, or a name that starts with "B" or means "king" or is a saint name* or whatever and search like that. If I don't have aaaaaany idea, I'll just browse through randomly.


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*there is a name that fills all of these search criteria, by the way.

Well, one of my characters shares her name with a chemical found in bath products (Theobroma).

My problem is last name, and, lol, lyrical_sunshine! I thought I was the only one who used phonebooks for that reason! That's sweet to know there are more brilliant minds out there other than mine. Lol.

Sade

I like to think about my friends and a lot of times I name my characters after them if the personality corresponds and such. And I also like to name characters after my favorite characters in books [but not stuff like Edward or Bella or the really famous ones]. I really like the names Alice, Ryne, Paul, the kinds of names Ann Brashares likes to use.

I always use www.20000-names.com it's really helpful if you want names with specific meanings or from specific cultures!

graveyards, baby name books are fantastic. I write down all the names I like so I have a page of them whenever i need one for a character.

Mostly if I have a decent idea for a character they choose the name themselves. Like I temporarily named a guy Hath until I could find something better, but it stuck, and i knew i could never think of him as the same guy if I changed the name so I was stuck with it. Hath. Eugh.


Actually I have a good example of a name choosing process: http://use-the-force.deviantart.com/journal/?offset=5 The Naming of a Vampire. It took me AGES. I made lists and lists and got my friends to help me and it still took ages. But ultimately I was happy with the result. ^_^

Tbh the last character i named was called comfort and thats because i was think about whiskey/borbon at the time and southern comfort came in to my head lol

Click on the link below for help ^_^