How to Choose Names for Your Characters in 10 Easy Steps

So you’ve decided to write a novel! Or a play! Or a screenplay! Or a short story! Or a fanfic with OCs! Congratulations!

But unless you are like artsy, and I mean, super-duper artsy, your characters will need names. What to do?

Every writer knows that names are important. They’re the first impression your character makes on the reader. They can hint at your character’s family dynamics, their personality, and, of course, their gender, familial, cultural, religious and/or racial background. They can even be the source of the main conflict of the story. Plus, they need to be cool but still unique enough that everyone remembers them.

No one would want to watch “Humperdinck. Zebediah Humperdinck.” ask for his martinis shaken, not stirred. (Or, at least, they wouldn’t believe that he scores with all the hot people after introducing himself.)

So what’s a writer to do?

Luckily for you, I’m here to help you out. Just follow my easy 10-step program, and you’ll be naming your characters with the greatest of ease!

1. Be super-duper artsy.

Names aren’t, like, the point of this story. I’m calling my protagonist “Boy” because he’s, you know, every boy. I’m going to write a story where the reader is really the protagonist. Along with “Boy,” I’ll feature “Girl,” “Man,” uh, “Other Girl,” “Other Other Girl”…

This… might be a challenge.

2. Be even more super-duper artsy.

Stroke of genius: what if I just tell the whole thing in second-person and never mention another character?

3. Realize that this is a unique opportunity.

Unless I have children, I’ll never get to name a human being. And even if I do, I don’t get to choose their last name, and I may have to compromise with someone else who has a vested interest in them.

But I have the only say over original characters. Mwa ha ha ha!

4. Call the main character the name you always loved as a child.

What better name to occupy my mind and page for the foreseeable future? My own parent(s) were too shortsighted to call me “Jack Female Bear“, but I can rectify that in fiction.

5. Maybe… not.

*sigh* Jack Female Bear Maybe not.

6. Compile a list of names that are almost right.*

Thank the Powers That Be for Behind the Name.com.

Let’s see: Hunter, Harper, Zandra, Zahra, Lee/Leigh, Lux, London, Garnet(t), Shelby, Devon, Charlotte, Shakespeare characters?

I guess those give me the right impression? Based on my completely arbitrary first vague mental impression no doubt influenced by book characters and long-ago summer camp-mates whom I’ve since forgotten?

Oh, what about a few clever ones that play on the literal meaning of the name? Like naming my character who’s secretly Richard Lionheart’s immortal vampire child “Dixon.” Get it? Dixon = Dick’s Son = RICHARD (WHICH IS THE FORMAL FORM OF DICK)’S SON I AM A GENIUS THE READERS WILL THINK I’M SO SMART.

None of them feels exactly right, but maybe I could get used to that one. (Or maybe that one?) All I have to do is say it aloud at least twenty times to stop making it feel like a real word. Dixon. Dixon. Dixon.

7. Eliminate the entire list.

Even after saying it aloud three hundred and forty-four times, it still isn’t right. Now, that one is perfect, but it’s the same as that guy from my tenth-grade English class, and I don’t want him to think the story’s about him, even though I haven’t seen him, not even in Facebook mentions, for well over a decade, and, besides, now when I think of that character, I kind of also think about the guy, and he’s not at all who I want that character to be.

This is the worst. Can’t we just go back to #1?

8. What about fantasy names?

Gratuitous apostrophes for everyone!

9. Just pick something that sounds decent because you’re running out of time.

There’s always Search and Replace if this doesn’t work out, right?

10. Meet five people with the same name as your main character when it’s too late to change it.

Damn it.

* Bonus step if you are white like me: don’t be racist.

Naming characters from cultures other than my own is easy! Just pick a few names that the Internet says are from that culture and smash them together in a way that sounds good to me, who has no background in or knowledge of these naming traditions. But surely they must all sound equivalent to people from this tradition whose beliefs and knowledge would obviously be no more profound than those of an inexperienced outsider!

I can’t wait to write about my French hero, García Sanchez.

Yeah.

No.

Bonus bonus step if you are white like me: still don’t be racist.

But, wait, wait, you guys, get this: what if I name a white character a name from outside white, Western culture? Eh? EH? It’s like diversity with none of the hard work or inclusion and all of the superficial appearance!

It’s probably totally okay to take advantage of my privilege and contribute to the erasure of actual people of colour by stealing willy-nilly from them with complete disregard of the significance of what I’m bastardizing to gratify my own ego. Right?

Beuler?