omginternetlord

Yeah all my characters have meanings in one way or another. Could be a reference to someone from other stories or something which hints at their personality.

Noirllyn

I don't think I've ever NOT based a character off of someone I know. I always have, at least subconsciously. I used to joke with my mother that I'd never have to write "memoirs" because my entire life and self would all ready have been documented in my other writings.


Naming is a big ordeal to me. I started studying name etymology when I was ten or so. I always take some sort of care when naming people and things. One of my business teachers would laugh at me for picking such "obscure" names for my fake employees, until I explained that they all meant what the person needed to be for their job (Sales associates had names meaning "nice", the guys who unpacked the truck and stocked the shelves had "strong" names, so on.). Fake business plans and real stories are a bit different, though. I'll often give a character a temporary name until we have a good chance to get to know one another, then they'll be baptized into their true name. I don't sit around trying to get names that match the main personality trait of my character--that'd just be ridiculous, typically. If it's a minor character I'll try to give them either an ironic or a "well duh" name. For protagonists and antagonists I try to stick to the "sound echoing the sense" thing. People should know the name to be the character and the character to be the name (Ever sit around with friends and say, "You don't look like a Brittany."?).

I also put heavy emphasis on the origin of surnames when I'm laying out character palettes, to add depth. One of my stories takes place in a Northern Maine community, the protagonist is from an English family who, for the most part, had been in Anglo-America since its birth, while the majority of the antagonists and most other characters have Québécois background. This is never introduced as a point in the story, it's never explained. The protagonist's struggle revolves mainly around poor communication. It's not as though people are speaking an entirely different language, but the small difference in the name origin (which most people will pick up on) will reinforce the boundary between the protagonist and the rest of these people.

seigfried007

I haven't intentionally based a charcter off anyone I knew since my first novella at the tender stupid age of seventeen (was a very bad story). Everyone since then has been an amagalmation of different people people I know, and I think it's interesting to find out what they got from who as they develop and I get to know them.

More recently, I think every man I've ever known has been reincarnated into an army of 523 dog-men with names like Reno, Tonka, Spazoid the Small and Annoying, Jungle Bunny, Chef, Gunther, Seigfried the Dragonslayer, Alf, and Qwerty the Gnome. I would have never thought to name people these things on my own--they just pop into my head like that and give me this look like, "Yeah, my name's Spic. What you going to do about it?" Turns up they like calling themselves racial slurs as a sociopolitical statement, random human names because they either like them or because they wanted to be accepted by humanity, or something random that would get them recognized as eccentric.

Other people aren't so easy to name and a lot of the time I have to start with one name until the person tells me "Hey, by the way, I HATE that name and This is my real name."

The craziest things sometime happen with naming too. In that same group of dog-men, I had a guy named Ira who usually took point and was often used as a scout (as well as all-purpose badass). Turns up the name means "Watchful, vigilant".

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jon_snow

I pick names the sound right for the characters. I frequently get names from movies or video games, but I also look at naming websites and books also.

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