Good morning everyone. Naming characters and your fictional locations can sometimes be a hard thing to do. For me, sometimes the character’s name and the world they are going to live in just pop into my head. When that happens it’s easy to start writing the story. Other times, I find myself starting at the page in the notebook I use or the page open on the computer screen and nothing will come to me. Those are the times I’ll go to things like random name generators, random town generators, and so on. Those type of things have helped me even if I already have a character name and don’t have a world name. For example, the characters from the vampire series I used the name generator on scrivener to come up those and the ones for the shapeshifter series. The new epic fantasy series I used a random fantasy name generator to come up with that main character’s name after getting a list of unique her name was on the top of the list.
Look forward to your comments about the methods you use to name your characters and the worlds they live in. 🙂
Diane Riggins 
I just try to listen and observe. Some strike my fancy. And I try to make notes of them on my Evernote.
I try to do that as well. It can be fun sometimes to just sit back and take in what’s going on where ever you may be whether it’s a movie theater, a cafe, or a mall even. 🙂
Some characters come with names, others don’t. For my menopausal superheroes, I used the census lists of what names were the most popular in the birth years of each character. I’ve had to change a name a few times because I realized I had chosen two in the same story that sounded too similar.
@mirymom1 from
Balancing Act
That’s true. I’ve used lists like that before myself to create characters. 🙂
Most all the names in my trilogy are family names. I also looked up tribal names and I use the obits where I always find interesting surnames.
That’s cool. I’ve not done that. I may have to think about the names in my family one or two might inspire me to name characters after them. 🙂