Subject: Hmmz, guess I should add thoughts.
Author:
Posted on: 2011-05-10 12:24:00 UTC

Five minutes on a name. Hmmz, sometimes.

There will be times when one WILL want to pick the 'meaningful name' route-- especially if their character is a symbol or some other literary thing. But it should never be obvious, if one wants to go that route. And other times, one will want a random name.


But sometimes, neither of those are good enough. It's just that far more than meaning goes into a name. One must consider the sound of the name, for one. Should a name sound hard or soft? What emotions should it invoke? What background should it give the character? Should it even sound different from what you'd expect of the character for purposes of contrast?

Consider these names?

A warrior named Dash.
A warrior named Brutus.
A warrior named Sir Helmson.
A warrior named Dagzut Gutsmasher.
A warrior named Patience.
A warrior named Arcandeth.
A warrior named Bob.

Yeah, they were all two second names, but how do they make you feel when you hear or read them? They all invoke drastically different sounds, influences, backgrounds, and feels.

None of these were concocted in particular for a character I had in mind to write in the future. But if I was going to use this method to make up a name for a character of mine, I'd spend far longer than two seconds on this two-second sound-test method. ;)

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