30 days: Day 3
Sep. 3rd, 2010 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousfic3. How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you're writing about fictional places)?
I generally shoot for a kind of onomatopoeia and subtext. Just hearing a name should remind you who a character is and maybe even give a little insight into how they work. Plus, a name with a double meaning gives me something to be inordinately smug about.
"It has an obscure meaning in Latin. You've probably never heard about it."
Just for instance, there's a character named Call. Right off, it's kind of a friendly, naif sort of name. And there's a bit of metafiction to it: she's a damsel in distress, so she's literally a call to adventure. More over, her name is short for Callisti. The golden apple that started the Trojan War was called kallisti. Since the conflict centers around everyone fighting over her, it's pretty apropos.
And the same thing with fictional places. Something that sounds right and hopefully has a larger meaning.
I generally shoot for a kind of onomatopoeia and subtext. Just hearing a name should remind you who a character is and maybe even give a little insight into how they work. Plus, a name with a double meaning gives me something to be inordinately smug about.
"It has an obscure meaning in Latin. You've probably never heard about it."
Just for instance, there's a character named Call. Right off, it's kind of a friendly, naif sort of name. And there's a bit of metafiction to it: she's a damsel in distress, so she's literally a call to adventure. More over, her name is short for Callisti. The golden apple that started the Trojan War was called kallisti. Since the conflict centers around everyone fighting over her, it's pretty apropos.
And the same thing with fictional places. Something that sounds right and hopefully has a larger meaning.
