Writer and Book View Cafe member Brenda Clough shares insights on how she comes up with names for characters, places, and more!
You write fantasy or science fiction novels. And, unless you write very philosophical Olaf-Stapledon
type fiction about colliding universes and enormous spans of time, you have created science-fictional or fantasy characters — elves, Klingons, Martians, Wookkies. They need names — and this time you cannot resort to Robert, Mildred and Susie!
This is particularly hard for those of us who need to have the names in hand before starting to write. Because names imply enormous things. We do not notice this so much, because modern Western culture pervades all we see and do so thoroughly. But step out for a moment. You don’t need a rocket ship and FTL to travel to another world. All you need do is learn another language and culture. And suddenly names mean something different. Paul Atreides changes his name to Paul Muad’Dib in Dune. The change of name shows the spiritual change. Or open your newspaper. Some Midwestern kid moved to Syria yesterday and joined ISIS. What did he do, just before that? He changed his name from Jason to Ali.
So, somehow, before you’ve invented the world, figured out the plot, or anything, you need a character. And to handle him you need a handle — a name. In fact in inventing this name all the rest will follow: because the world is encapsulated in the name, and the name embodies character which will inevitably lead you to plot. Pantsers have it hard! But even if you are not a pantser — names are so important that you might well start here as well. J.R.R. Tolkien had Middle Earth and its languages mapped out in fanatical detail long before he sat down to write The Hobbit. But to start that work he needed Bilbo Baggins, who is not (as Gandalf notes) in any of the material about the Eldar at all. All those appendices at the back of LOTR, they were not the story. Bilbo was the story.
So let’s brood like Jehovah over the primordial chaos, and pluck a name out of nothing. It would be helpful at this early stage if you have some idea of what kind of book it is you’re going to write. Even the most general parameter will help you here. A romance novel, a space opera, a hard-boiled detective novel — this directly affects the characters’ names. If you don’t have the kind of book in mind, hopefully you have a grasp of the tone. People named Paul Atreides or Elrond HalfElven are not going to be slipping on banana peels, but a Bilbo Baggins might well be impaled upon the social embarrassment of twelve unexpected dwarves to tea.
Keeping all this in mind, start shopping for words — words that have the quality you are looking for. Atreides for example, is not original with Frank Herbert. It is the ancient name for the Greek royal house of Mycenae:Atreus, Agamemnon, Orestes and the gang. Herbert recycled a name with the perfect resonances for what he needed. You can too. Cut-throat Bronze Age dynasties don’t do it? How about NASA engineers? South Asian deities? Zelazny did great with those in Lord of Light.
C.S. Lewis, a notable name-smith, did it by ear. ‘Maleldil’ was chosen because of the liquid flow of the L sounds over the vowels. Notice how many of the names in his Narnia books — Trumpkin, Puddleglum, Dufflepud — are modifications or chop-and-splice from English. His buddy Tolkien was of course the greatest namer of them all, and dipped from the pure fountain of language. All the Elven names in LOTR mean something in the various Elven dialects.
I instinctively work by eye and manipulation, as many crafty and handy people do. The name has to look right, and I have to forge it by moving stuff around. And I have a cheap and blatantly mundane trick, especially for names in volume — Scrabble tiles. Get yourself a Scrabble set, and use the little wooden rack for the tiles. Lay all the tiles out in the box lid, and start sorting. What letters of the alphabet look right for the names? You could sort them by groups — families, gender, status, titles. Certain syllables or combinations of letters look better — move these over to another wooden rack. How long should each name be? Long ones can be strung together out of nice-looking syllables. Perhaps all high-class people have names beginning with Vor, like Lois McMaster Bujold’s heroes. Keep track of all your favorites in a Word file or something, and you can fish one out every time a flunky needs a name.
And! Don’t forget to shove all of your creations through Google. If that fine alien-sounding name is NSFW slang in France for an skin-crawlingly gruesome type of genital piercing, you want to discover this -before- you write that entire novel.
Brenda W. Clough spent much of her childhood overseas, courtesy of the U.S. government. Her first fantasy novel, The Crystal Crown, was published by DAW in 1984. She has also written The Dragon of Mishbil (1985), The Realm Beneath (1986), and The Name of the Sun (1988). Her children’s novel, An Impossumble Summer (1992), is set in her own house in Virginia, where she lives in a cottage at the edge of a forest.
You write fantasy or science fiction novels. And, unless you write very philosophical Olaf-Stapledon
type fiction about colliding universes and enormous spans of time, you have created science-fictional or fantasy characters — elves, Klingons, Martians, Wookkies. They need names — and this time you cannot resort to Robert, Mildred and Susie!
This is particularly hard for those of us who need to have the names in hand before starting to write. Because names imply enormous things. We do not notice this so much, because modern Western culture pervades all we see and do so thoroughly. But step out for a moment. You don’t need a rocket ship and FTL to travel to another world. All you need do is learn another language and culture. And suddenly names mean something different. Paul Atreides changes his name to Paul Muad’Dib in Dune. The change of name shows the spiritual change. Or open your newspaper. Some Midwestern kid moved to Syria yesterday and joined ISIS. What did he do, just before that? He changed his name from Jason to Ali.
So, somehow, before you’ve invented the world, figured out the plot, or anything, you need a character. And to handle him you need a handle — a name. In fact in inventing this name all the rest will follow: because the world is encapsulated in the name, and the name embodies character which will inevitably lead you to plot. Pantsers have it hard! But even if you are not a pantser — names are so important that you might well start here as well. J.R.R. Tolkien had Middle Earth and its languages mapped out in fanatical detail long before he sat down to write The Hobbit. But to start that work he needed Bilbo Baggins, who is not (as Gandalf notes) in any of the material about the Eldar at all. All those appendices at the back of LOTR, they were not the story. Bilbo was the story.
So let’s brood like Jehovah over the primordial chaos, and pluck a name out of nothing. It would be helpful at this early stage if you have some idea of what kind of book it is you’re going to write. Even the most general parameter will help you here. A romance novel, a space opera, a hard-boiled detective novel — this directly affects the characters’ names. If you don’t have the kind of book in mind, hopefully you have a grasp of the tone. People named Paul Atreides or Elrond HalfElven are not going to be slipping on banana peels, but a Bilbo Baggins might well be impaled upon the social embarrassment of twelve unexpected dwarves to tea.
Keeping all this in mind, start shopping for words — words that have the quality you are looking for. Atreides for example, is not original with Frank Herbert. It is the ancient name for the Greek royal house of Mycenae:Atreus, Agamemnon, Orestes and the gang. Herbert recycled a name with the perfect resonances for what he needed. You can too. Cut-throat Bronze Age dynasties don’t do it? How about NASA engineers? South Asian deities? Zelazny did great with those in Lord of Light.
C.S. Lewis, a notable name-smith, did it by ear. ‘Maleldil’ was chosen because of the liquid flow of the L sounds over the vowels. Notice how many of the names in his Narnia books — Trumpkin, Puddleglum, Dufflepud — are modifications or chop-and-splice from English. His buddy Tolkien was of course the greatest namer of them all, and dipped from the pure fountain of language. All the Elven names in LOTR mean something in the various Elven dialects.
I instinctively work by eye and manipulation, as many crafty and handy people do. The name has to look right, and I have to forge it by moving stuff around. And I have a cheap and blatantly mundane trick, especially for names in volume — Scrabble tiles. Get yourself a Scrabble set, and use the little wooden rack for the tiles. Lay all the tiles out in the box lid, and start sorting. What letters of the alphabet look right for the names? You could sort them by groups — families, gender, status, titles. Certain syllables or combinations of letters look better — move these over to another wooden rack. How long should each name be? Long ones can be strung together out of nice-looking syllables. Perhaps all high-class people have names beginning with Vor, like Lois McMaster Bujold’s heroes. Keep track of all your favorites in a Word file or something, and you can fish one out every time a flunky needs a name.
And! Don’t forget to shove all of your creations through Google. If that fine alien-sounding name is NSFW slang in France for an skin-crawlingly gruesome type of genital piercing, you want to discover this -before- you write that entire novel.
Brenda W. Clough spent much of her childhood overseas, courtesy of the U.S. government. Her first fantasy novel, The Crystal Crown, was published by DAW in 1984. She has also written The Dragon of Mishbil (1985), The Realm Beneath (1986), and The Name of the Sun (1988). Her children’s novel, An Impossumble Summer (1992), is set in her own house in Virginia, where she lives in a cottage at the edge of a forest.
Her novel How Like a God, forthcoming from Book View Cafe, was published by Tor Books in 1997, and a sequel, Doors of Death and Life, was published in May 2000. Her latest novels from Book View Cafe include Revise the World (2009) and Speak to Our Desires.
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