By Claire Booth
When I do a
book event, one of the most frequent questions I get is how I come up with
character names. It’s a good question and one I love to answer, because I love
collecting names.
One of the
best ways is to read the obituaries. Not only do they have a fantastic variety
of names, they often give you the background behind it. You can find out that
the person was a Croatian immigrant, or of Chinese ancestry, or hailed from a huge
family in Indiana. All of these bits of information can more fully develop a
character as you write.
Another
great way to collect names is to watch the credits of a movie or TV show.
Because—just, wow. The credits on something like an animated movie or CG-heavy
blockbuster go on for ten minutes and are absolutely diverse. Watch one at
home, where you can hit pause and write down whatever names strike your fancy.
If you need
more of a mainstream name or you want to peg your time period just right, there’s
no better source than the Social Security Baby Names website. You can find the
top baby names by year. So if you’re writing a historical piece, you can find
the top names from, say, 1890. (Number 10 was Bertha—see how awesome a tool
this is?) You can also sort by name popularity, seeing how one name fluctuates
over time. (Bertha, you will not be surprised to hear, declines steadily and
disappears from the top 1,000 names altogether in 1985.) Be warned—this website
is a rabbit hole of extreme dimensions. You could get sucked in for hours.
My last go-to
name source is actually meant to be a name source: baby name books. I have one
that sits right next to my thesaurus on my desk; it’s that important. I flip
through it all the time.
If you
write, where do you find names? And if you don’t write, do you read obituaries
or notice movie credits?
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