Tag Archives: names

#LoveWritingChallenge – Naming Characters

I’m participating in the #LoveWritingChallenge by Katie Kling. For more information see the introduction post.

This weeks theme are Characters and today is all about How to find the names.
To make things easier for myself I will focus on the characters in three of my longer stories:

Though I might add more from other stories.
For stuff about our characters from Warlords feel free to check out our Facebook Page.

What’s in a name?

I’m horrible at naming people and cities and countries and have I mentioned characters?
I have either no idea what I should call someone or I keep ending up with the same names…
I already talked a bit about this when I mentioned my usage of Georg(e) and Richard, but that’s only part of the problem…
For most of my stories I go through real life names I have in my mind and then either use them as such (TUO/NBWolf) or change them to fit the story (TQW). I know I could use baby name pages and I sometimes do that, when I have a specific meaning in mind, but that’s rather rare.
Sometimes I try to use names that actually serve a purpose or have some kind of „hidden“ meaning, sometimes I just come across a name that fits the character and keep it that way – or change it if it doesn’t. Though I usually do the meaning part with surnames, at least, if I give people a surname. 😀
In TUO most of my surnames are references to movies and such: There is a family called „van Saken“ originating from „The Fosaken„, another is called „Carfax“ like the abbey where Dracula comes to live in London, another „Verlaine“, which was the name of Bela B.’s character in the German Zombie movie „Garden of Love“ and so on…
For TQW I not only added the rule „royals (or those working for the royal households or those wanting to be as grant as them) add H’s to names“ (e.g. that’s why she’s called Lihsa and not Lisa), but I also pretty much used my Mums family tree as inspiration for the names of a certain family, including her actual name. On the other hand did I make an unsubtle reference to Merlin and Athur by naming the main wizard character Emry and Aturo respectively (For those who don’t know this: Merlin was sometimes called Merlin Emrys and Arturo is the Spanish version of Arthur), not to mention that Sarah isn’t just a princess in name…
By the way: Rasha is an anagram of Sarah, because Nina is an anagram of Anni and I wanted to name those two after two girls by the same name, I know in real life. 😉
So, yeah, my names aren’t really original, but well, so far no one complained about them. 😀
See you tomorrow, when I talk about Quotes from my Characters.
PoiSonPaiNter