I do the baby name thing too! I may even have an account on babynames.com with a whole bunch of names saved on a favorites list LOL. I also love behindthename. com because it gives more background info on where a name came from and its popularity over the years. Actually, one of my favorite sites to go to when I can't think of a name, usually for minor characters, is the Social Security site. They have great lists of popular names from each decade, each individual year, even each year by state. Great for historical fiction! http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/index.html
I tend to only use the baby name sites if I'm stuck and need ideas for names, or if I have it narrowed down to a few choices and can't decide - then I'll look up the meaning and see if there's one that fits better than others. (And yes, I will fully admit to being one of those people who spends way too much time coming up with character names!) I do like the favorites list on babynames.com because it's just a big list of names that I like, which is usually how I name my main characters. I think pretty much any name I've ever considered naming a future child has gone to a character at one point or another. One of my newer favorite girl's names is Analiese, which was Anne Frank's full name (spelled Annaliese). It's a German name, so it worked well for the Amish girl in Guilty Roads.
I prefer classic names, nothing too weird or too trendy (although classic names are the trend nowadays!), although I try not to use names that are overused either in real life or fanfic. I'll probably never name a character Alyssa, Ashley, Stephanie, or anything like that - no offense to people with those names. I try to choose names that fit the character. For example, with Cary in Curtain Call, I knew she was going to have this whole 40s/50s vintage vibe to her, so I definitely wanted her to have a classic name. Her name is Carolyn, which was a popular name in those decades, and she's also named after her mother (Carol), who was an important part of her back story. I like nicknames, and I like them to be derived from the full name and spelled as closely as possible, so I went with Cary instead of Carrie or Cari because Carolyn only has one R and a Y instead of an I or E. Also, it made me think of Cary Grant, which, even though he was a guy, worked with the whole retro thing.
Sometimes I pick names that I don't personally like, but that fit the character. Claire in Broken was one of those. I didn't like the name Claire at the time (it's grown on me since, after writing it so many times over the years!), but that was why it worked for her - I wanted her to have a name that was plain and simple and not overly "pretty"-sounding, like Isabella or Madelyn or something, because that's the type of girl I wanted her to be.
I've used myself as a character in a fanfic once before, back in my teenybopper early days, and since then I've modeled characters after myself (usually in collabs, it seems), but I'm not into blatant self-inserts. I think creating an original character is way more fun than writing a barely-disguised version of myself with a slightly different name. I wouldn't make a very good female lead anyway!
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Topic: Question of the day thread number 2! (Read 64103 times)