Your favorite name for a character

[gunhilltrain]

My picks for the stupidest names in fiction are Katniss Everdeen, Draco Malfoy, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth characters in The Scarlet Letter, Humbert Humbert, Lord Lancaster Stiltstalking, and Guybrush Threepwood.

Oh, wait, our favorite name to use is (drumroll) none of the above.

Hawthorne isn't too subtle there. Dimmesdate does seem a bit dim, and Chillingworth rather chilling. Hester Prynne sounds like "prim."

He seemed to enjoy recreating 17th Century Boston as a setting, which was a small town versus the one Hawthorne knew. Hester leaves it via what later became Washington Street and builds her forest hut in what later is the South End or Roxbury. The reason isn't doesn't look like this any more is because landfill expanded it in all directions.

https://bpldcassets.blob.core.windo...s/commonwealth:9s1619481/image_access_800.jpg

 

[ElectricBlue]

I tend to go for lyrical names that roll off the tongue for my female characters: Gabriela, Arabella, Isabella, Amelia, Rebecca, Amanda.

Or short, efficient names like Ruby, Bec, Jenny, Clio, Grace, Jude.

My MC names are nearly always Adam, Alex or David, because I'm lazy. I've got a Dan In my Mickey Spillane tribute. I've got an Antony and a Sebastian.

And an alien angel named Ixtil. With the female astronaut who goes by her last name, Fleming.

 

[KeithD]

He/him

 

[TheRedChamber]

I don't tend to go in for punny or clever naming. The only instance is when I called my former-prostitute come hucow, Molly Meadows.

From mainstream media...

"Hello my dear, charmed to meet you. Edward Hitler at your service"
"That's an unusual name. Any relation?"
"Well, I've got a father."
"No, I meant to Adolf Hitler."
"Yes, that's him."

 

[StillStunned]

"Hello my dear, charmed to meet you. Edward Hitler at your service"
"That's an unusual name. Any relation?"
"Well, I've got a father."
"No, I meant to Adolf Hitler."
"Yes, that's him."

Eddie and Richie were the best.

 

[AchtungNight]

Silvan Farrow is another inspired original character name of mine. You can read my story The Wise Being for more information.

 

[nice90sguy]

I tend to use names starting with "V" for bad girls.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I once used my real name in a story...
Don't ask me why, but the thought that it was there excited me...

Let the data mining commence.

 

[AllenWoody]

I picked it on a whim, but Alain Sparr, my protagonist in Lost Colony remains a favorite for several reasons. Both first and last names of one syllable make for tighter prose, especially since I mostly referred to him by his last name. Also, so far as I can tell, there is no real person with that name, which makes searching for people plagiarizing my story quite easy. And finally, Sparr is just slightly suggestive.

I did find myself in difficulty once or twice when he needed to spar against others though. Had to work around that one carefully.

 

[nice90sguy]

I once used my real name in a story...
Don't ask me why, but the thought that it was there excited me...

You're not that woman across the street who's always leaving her bedroom drapes open, by any chance?

 

[Cagivagurl]

Let the data mining commence.

You only got, by my calculations.... 2750 names to extract, and about a billion words to read...
Good luck....
Let me know the answer...LOL...

 

[Cagivagurl]

You're not that woman across the street who's always leaving her bedroom drapes open, by any chance?

Possibly...

 

[Duleigh]

I do not know why, but when I create characters, the men get three and four letter names - John, Paul, Gus, Don etc. If his name is longer he'll be known by his nickname. Women get longer names and I usually create a 2 letter shortcut to "auto correct" her full name - vv = Veronica, pp = Pandora, aa = Adrianna

One of the hard things for me was naming characters, especially foreign characters, and the discworld series was a nightmare. Then I found this web site. If I don't get a name, I'll get an inspiration, and it's never failed me

https://www.behindthename.com/random/

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I've got fairly mainstream character names for their age and place (two Americans in different stories get to be Chad and Brad...). I've even written stories where I've gone alphabetically - Ali and Becca were A and B until a near-final draft, and the large cast of Third Time Getting Lucky has housemates Alec, Ben, Charlie and Delia, a friend Ed, colleagues Finn, Gareth and Helen, then fellow students based elsewhere, from the second half of the alphabet. I then changed a bunch who didn't appear except as a name, to stop it being too obvious!

But over time a fair few characters require surnames, which can be interesting. Brad got to be Bradley Owens which is apparently the 20th most common surname in Iowa. About 1/3 of English surnames are derived from place names that roll off the tongue, so I spent ages scouring maps of Yorkshire until Laura became Laura Silsden.

I also check that there's not anyone with the same two names who might think I'm writing about them. Had to change a couple names for that reason.

 

[RejectReality]

I'll try to condense this. It's not from writing, but it was a great coup in my PnP DM days. I had a player with a super-powerful humanoid demon character who was a terror to keep reined in. He managed to get time-traveled a hundred or so years in the past. Maintaining a human shape to lay low and find a way back required intense control. So, he had to utterly defy his nature when some random shopkeep started treating him like common scum. He kept it together — barely — but took the time from the critical mission of returning to his own time to start researching this random, unimportant NPC. I'm like, "why?"

"Because I'm going to hunt down and slaughter every descendent of this little prick when I get back."

He should have waited to tell me that before he tracked down the guy's name.

I let him get the information, and in a session or two, he found his way back. He was good to his word, and started hunting for the guy's descendants immediately. Like I said, this character was a terror to keep under control as a DM, so having him running all over the world looking for this guy's progeny for several sessions kept him from disrupting far more important things for a couple of weeks. The name was written prominently on the pocket of his character folder in bold, black Marks-A-Lot marker, and was his near complete obsession.

The name?

Wadsworth Nothing.

Wad's worth nothing. Sterile. No descendants. The look on his face when it finally dawned on him was fucking priceless. The rest of the table had figured it out before he even left the past, but somehow managed not to give it away. I've rarely laughed harder than that to this day.

 

[RejectReality]

Oh! Just remembered that I dragged that folder out of a box ages ago for research purposes, because that character is a villain in Danica/SOTM. Just scanned it!

 

[MillieDynamite]

I'm thinking of featuring John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt in a few stories. After all, his name is my name, too, right?

 

[Britva415]

I have April Mae Juneau, the prankster born on April 1st, from Boner Check. It is my worst rated story, so there is that

that's almost as bad as the real-life names of a couple girls I went to school with.

April Wednesday [lastname] - guess when she was born (not looking for a particular calendar date here).

Merry [lastname] - guess her birthday (calendar date).

 

[Duleigh]

I'm thinking of featuring John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt in a few stories. After all, his name is my name, too, right?

Stay at home please, I'm tired of the people always shouting

 

[lovecraft68]

My porn star turned porn producer, who specializes in taboo material, Malcolm Stone.

He's appeared in two stories where he had a significant role, then his own "origin' story, which is kind of a train wreck, and mentioned (as well as his site, Stone Cold Productions) in several others.