Character Names in Fiction Novels
I'll bet every fiction writer owns a book or two of baby names. It's either left over from when we were growing our own families or purchased especially for reference for writing. Maybe current writers Google names instead. It's not the same though. There's something about flipping through pages filled with strange name after strange name or even pages filled with oh so familiar names that is quite time sinking. Someone named their kid what back in the day?!
Who knows where those collected names came from? Did someone go through city records? Old magazines? Old books? Now I suspect baby name lists are compiled from computer generated SEOs and slapped together.
The world is changing so much. Everything is automated, online, searchable, expected to be free, riddled with bad grammar, and not necessarily valid. The bad grammar is often due to cut and paste, which means the author of the article or list doesn't even bother to read what they've compiled by hitting a few sites on the internet. At least I hope it's due to cut and paste. I don't expect everyone online to use proper grammar, spelling, and to catch and fix typos but I do expect the professional writers to make an effort. I see so much of it these days that it's starting to feel like readability takes second seat to timely publication online.
The world is changing and also moving faster. News has always been time sensitive but lately it feels like if information is more than a day old it gets dropped off the radar. Yet, there are other things that continue to recycle and come around and around and around and then around some more. Maybe it's always been that way and it just seems faster with our online world because we are being bombarded constantly.
So, we writers own a book or two of baby names but there are times when those books aren't close at hand and the thought is with us and we need a name now. We can get pretty creative in naming characters that live in other worlds where the common, normal names we all know and recognize must be altered to fit a mood of alien connotation or project a sense of another time. In Huron: Descendants, Coastin got her name because I was staring at a shoe box on the box shelf across the room while trying to conjure a unique name for a little girl on an alien planet descended from humans from Earth.
Coasters shoes became Coastin. The irony is that the name suits her perfectly yet it came from tweaking a brand of shoes. Yeah, I don't know where my baby name books have ended up landing over the years. I used to have a good one but it went away during a move across country. I bought a nice old one at a garage sale once. Ugh. That was a waste of a quarter. If you come across a good baby name book, hang onto it if you ever plan on writing.
Who knows where those collected names came from? Did someone go through city records? Old magazines? Old books? Now I suspect baby name lists are compiled from computer generated SEOs and slapped together.
The world is changing so much. Everything is automated, online, searchable, expected to be free, riddled with bad grammar, and not necessarily valid. The bad grammar is often due to cut and paste, which means the author of the article or list doesn't even bother to read what they've compiled by hitting a few sites on the internet. At least I hope it's due to cut and paste. I don't expect everyone online to use proper grammar, spelling, and to catch and fix typos but I do expect the professional writers to make an effort. I see so much of it these days that it's starting to feel like readability takes second seat to timely publication online.
The world is changing and also moving faster. News has always been time sensitive but lately it feels like if information is more than a day old it gets dropped off the radar. Yet, there are other things that continue to recycle and come around and around and around and then around some more. Maybe it's always been that way and it just seems faster with our online world because we are being bombarded constantly.
So, we writers own a book or two of baby names but there are times when those books aren't close at hand and the thought is with us and we need a name now. We can get pretty creative in naming characters that live in other worlds where the common, normal names we all know and recognize must be altered to fit a mood of alien connotation or project a sense of another time. In Huron: Descendants, Coastin got her name because I was staring at a shoe box on the box shelf across the room while trying to conjure a unique name for a little girl on an alien planet descended from humans from Earth.
Coasters shoes became Coastin. The irony is that the name suits her perfectly yet it came from tweaking a brand of shoes. Yeah, I don't know where my baby name books have ended up landing over the years. I used to have a good one but it went away during a move across country. I bought a nice old one at a garage sale once. Ugh. That was a waste of a quarter. If you come across a good baby name book, hang onto it if you ever plan on writing.
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