How to Write Memorable Names: Writing Tips From a Professional Writer

names are important names go into everything that we interact with when it comes to a story that we're telling we name our characters places and even the things within the story but names can sometimes be tricky they can break immersion or make us think of a story entirely different from our own and they can also be the most memorable part but they aren't easy to come up with every writer has struggled at one point or another with coming up with a name and that's why I've come up with a list of four ways to craft better names craft more memorable names and how to avoid some of the mistakes that come with bad names let's get into it whatever you do don't stop writing whether it's a place or a character don't stop writing we all get analysis paralysis or decision fatigue but push past that we can use things like placeholders to save the spot for a name that will come back and include later I've used placeholders many other writers have used placeholders we don't have to have a name for a character or for a place the minute that we want it to appear in the page I've known and I've worked with writers that have not had a name for a character until the second or third draft of an entire manuscript that's fine we use placeholders all the time for all other aspects of a story or in our writing process we use placeholders for whole sections of a story we will write in come back and write later or come back to the scene fix this scene we don't need a name for every place and every character but sometimes placeholders end up being pretty good nice looking at the real world there are plenty of places that have actually received a placeholder type name that ended up getting adopted into becoming the actual name of the actual place it literally at some time might have meant City by the river or big hill or whatever it is placeholders are all around us and sometimes they end up doing more than just holding a place sometimes they become the place the second thing we can do we can sometimes Look Backwards for inspiration where we're at right now now I'm going to State a couple of things that might be a little bit obvious but I think there's some nuances that can come up with some pretty creative names whether it's a place or a person we can look at the culture of where a person or where a place is situated what are some of the cultural elements that might influence that character's name if we're speaking about a character do people of a specific region have naming conventions and does the language have any linguistic patterns this is really where we can get creative with how we want to name our characters we can look at the areas that they're from and if we are struggling to come up with a name either we can look at names that might be common to the region or common to the area and specifically for that considering the naming conventions we can further ask are these specific to just one area or do they vary we can ask what does son or daughter mean in their home language as this is a very common thing that plays a role in many names within our world today we can also think of how this might play a role and if we are inventing a language that is not real we can create a suffix or a prefix that might mean son of or daughter of and we can also then ask how are people named in general here versus there sometimes the variation in the blending of names and naming conventions creates a entirely new naming convention this of course will depend on the genre that you might be writing in and will probably be more common in fantasy speculative fiction and science fiction however if we are writing in modern times or using our modern modern world as an example we can very easily go and see where this person is from looking at their backstory their Heritage and then coming up with the name that way however if we're writing specifically for Fantasy or science fiction we really want to look at the World building that we might have done we want to look at the place that they're from and try to understand how these people are named and what some of the naming conventions there are something else that we can ask as as well is are there linguistic rules to your world or to this time period we can go a step further and ask a couple more questions as well can you find inspiration from other cultures and naming conventions this again is very specific to Science Fiction and Fantasy we can sometimes look at our present world as inspiration for some of our fictional worlds are people named after places or objects ideas principles or sayings this again can help create a bit of lore when it comes to your character's Back stories and even help enhance a character's name giving more flavor and more context to them as a character Beyond just the name that they have and something else that we can consider that goes up Beyond just the World building or some of the physical world elements is looking at the spelling conventions but more specifically looking at characters sounding like the character that they are this can come in the form of syllables names that are very strong or even Sinister might invoke feelings that this character is an antagonist names like Darth Vader Lex Luther Bane Hannibal and even Sauron all have a way in which the words and the names are said that invoke a Sinister or benevolent sort of feeling to them the same can be done for Heroic names or names that are supposed to be a symbol or feel in your mouth or when you read it a certain way names like Luke Skywalker Han Solo Sherlock Holmes link and Robin Hood all invoke a feeling of heroism if we are writing something that spans or includes multiple generations of family members we can also look at naming conventions for a family a great series that does this very well is just about every family in The Game of Thrones we can look at the Lannisters or the Starks for instance but for this part we really should try to say the names aloud say my name and consider how the name sounds to you and how the name might also sound in the native language or the region that this character is from again saying it aloud might invoke certain feelings whether it be good or bad or might sound like a emotion itself does the name sound menacing or does it sound honorable and even Gallant does it sound like this fits the context of the character within the framework of the story that you're writing if you're getting value out of this video please consider liking and subscribing it's a good way for me to know how I'm doing if these topics are helpful and helps me determine what videos I should make in the future future just recently we passed 1,000 subscribers so thank you if you're already subscribed but let me know what you think so far before we go any further we should talk about some of the things that we should avoid or the things that we should watch out for when it comes to coming up with character names the goal should always be to make a character's name memorable and not distracting one thing that we can try to avoid that used to be a point of almost like a law or principle that writers and editors sort of abided by was to not have two characters with the same starting letter in their name having someone named Andrew and Aaron was a big no no not those names particularly but having two characters that start with the letter A or B or C or so on this kind of has fallen by the wayside or I don't see this necessarily get brought up as much much but we should avoid names that are sounding too similar something like Catherine and Katie both of these names they may be spelled differently and they may be spelled similarly with similar starting letters but on the page and when you're saying them can possibly become confusing sometimes with bigger casts we can get away with having characters had having names that are spelled or sound similarly as long as we don't have them all in the same room at the same time we can usually get away with this sort of soft rule however if we have a smaller cast it becomes more important to have name diversity just because in a smaller cast we're focusing we we want there to be more focus on each individual party rather than having them get blurred together another sort of Pitfall is knowing if a character's name fits sort of the context of your story this mostly will apply to if you're writing in a specific time period or if you are writing in fantasy or science fiction or speculative fiction we don't want to have in a strong fantasy world where the protagonist is either a dragon rider or or if they work on a space station we don't want to give them a name that feels out of place we probably should try to give them a name that fits the context of the story that they're in famously in the book iron the name that was used first before Aragon was used was Keith which a dragon rider named Keith doesn't necessarily hit the same as a dragon rider named Aragon and then the other thing that is similar to this that we might want to avoid is the name's uniqueness now I'll break this into two parts one being the name being too unique and I think that this is a problem we see with Fantasy names where we have no idea how to pronounce them or there isn't really a good method or it isn't really easy to pronounce from a reader perspective this is sometimes a thing that readers can get past but as writers we shouldn't try to make the names a burden for the readers on the other end of this is that we should avoid using names that might have already an established presence in the same genre that we're writing in if we are writing a story about a wizard that goes to a school we probably shouldn't use the name Harry in most stories where there's a wizard we probably shouldn't ever name them Harry cuz everybody will think of Harry Potter and not think of your own story this is something that might change with time you may have a great name and then all of a sudden it pops up in popular culture and you're not really sure if you should keep the name or not mostly this is a issue or a problem for names in stories that have found International success another thing that we can do though to come up with interesting and unique names for our characters is to decide if the character's name will have any specific meaning or reflect any character traits that they might have once we sort of narrowed down the culture the background and even some of the beliefs that they might have and possibly even come up with a unique or strong linguistic rule we might consider giving them a name that has a different root meaning whether that be in a fictional language that you've created or in a another cultures language in our actual world we see this happen a lot with names being given Latin roots or even other cultural or linguistic Roots as well something else that we can do is if we want to pay homage to a another character's name or another character in general from a similar type of story George R Martin might have done this when he named Sam Tully after Sam wise gamji as he was a big tolken fan another thing too that we can consider is if we want the name to foreshadow anything whether that be about their character or some events that might have happened to them or will happen in the future we can add red herrings and even symbolic meanings behind them as well some of the most famous ones being Katniss everine in The Hunger Games where Katniss is a plant with the rough Latin translation being Archer which fits her character as she commonly uses a bow as a weapon another one is brand Stark in the Game of Thrones where in Irish bran means Raven and many others in fiction history something else that we can do when it comes to coming up with character names and adding little hints and meanings is creating things like anagrams that if we reassemble the words we might come up with a whole new meaning but there's a lot of really creative ways you can hide things in plain sight about your story and about a who a character is in general try playing around with it and see what you come up with and then finally I have a couple of resources that I use all the time when I am coming up with with character names place names all sorts of stuff so the one that I probably use the absolute most is behind the name which this is a random name generator but I like this one specifically because if I'm dealing or I want a place to sort of have a cultural feel to it it gives you a lot of customization for real world cultures and names within those cultures there's also interesting features where you can pull names from both religious backgrounds or mythological backgrounds as well something else that's really interesting when it comes to behind the name is when you click on any of the names it'll give you a definition or it will tell you what the name means in whatever that culture's language is it also gives you sort of the different variations that that name might have across other cultures I like using it a lot I don't necessarily use it to come up with every character's name but usually I'll use it to get a feel for if I'm creating a fictional name or if I'm trying to base a place or a name off of a culture or part of the world another one that is really good is Don John not to be confused with the movie but this is a massive database with tons of random generators that you can check out I use this one a lot as well and then on this list I don't think you can ever not mention if you're talking about random generators fantasy name generator this is by far the biggest one that I can think of and the biggest database that I've ever used it also has tons of useful other generators that you can use to not necessarily take and copy and paste into your story but use for inspiration writing prompts or even just to sort of fill in some of the missing gaps that you might might have with your story of course you can always go and pull out baby books and that kind of stuff as well but what I found is that these random generators and sometimes the different AI tools out there is that they synthesize this information and are a nice tool to have but that covers a lot of what I do to sort of come up with names for fictional characters this was a question that was actually posed on the first live stream I did a few weeks ago where one of you actually asked how I come up with names or what a good way to come up with names is I try to get back to every comment or reply to every response and take a lot of input that you guys give for future videos and even podcasts that's all to say let me know what you're wrestling with do you struggle with coming up with names or do you have your favorite random name generator let me know in the comments down below as always thanks for watching and I'll see you next [Music] time

Channel: Wrestling With Words

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Keywords: Writing Character Names: Tips and Techniques from a Professional Writer, Cameron Thomson, Wrestling With Words, Authortube, Writing Character Names, Character Names, Naming Characters, writing, writing tips, writing advice, authortube, creative writing, how to write, writing characters, characters, Professional Writer, Editor, writing tip, writing craft, how to name characters, how to write character names, How to Write Memorable Names: Writing Tips From a Professional Writer

Id: luGxXtf8l4g

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2024