Trying to come up with a good name for my main character suuuuucks (hexbear.net)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Anything I write with a placeholder name feels bad and then I get stuck trying to think of a better name. I've already designated too much of the start of the alphabet to side characters, it needs to be something easy to read if its coming up over and over again in the book.

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

The kind of name you're going for will obviously depend on your genre, but I used the method described here [https://rpubs.com/tarakc02/name-project-1] to build a fake name generator. It occasionally comes up with something really out there, and occasionally comes up with a name that actually exists in real life, but for the most part it gives a lot of good fake names that sound reasonable enough for it to be easy on the reader. I also like behindthename's random name generator [behindthename.com/random/] because you can get interesting, unique names that are still plausible for real people. When neither of these is satisfactory, I look up lists of small towns and borrow one of their names.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Behind the name is great. I've been using it for a sci-fi scenario where the names are always an unusual mix of nationalities, so there are characters called things like: Remi Proudfoot, Hans Abimbola, Wladek Quirke. It involves a lot of re-rolling, and often the names need tweaking to get them to scan, but it's a lot of fun, and so much better than my old technique of googling baby names, place, year

this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025

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