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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Character Names

Many people have been asking on how I get the names that I do for my characters. I have posted many responses and have decided to dedicate a post to the topic. To quote what I have said before:

"The characters are first imaged in my mind, and then I have to figure out whether or not their name needs to sound "soft", "hard", "sly", "sharp", "quiet", or "loud (or a mix of all of the above. For example, Forde needed to have a hard name, but it needed to sharply grab the reader's attention. The "f", "r", and "d" in "Forde" are hard letters, and come off as a blockish sound. His last name, however, has a more sharp sound to it. The "ick" in "Barrick" is cut off abruptly and leaves a nice ring to his name. Often times the names just jump into my head. Wreaknatter, Wapper, Flare, Alsenoth, Kala, Chi-Chi, and Kara all came without any difficulty. Mordin, Sketh, Greilner, and Regalon were all extremely difficult (Sketh especially). Often times I have such a perfect image of who these characters are in my mind that their names never seem adequate enough. It's just really random, but it is ALWAYS fun to make up them names. Also many of the names end up having a deeper meaning (see my Roots post). Alsenoth's name is especially deliberate in its meaning. So, I guess there are just a number of ways on how I get my names."

Obviously there are other ways that I actually form and mold my characters into shape (often I will have a name before an actual fleshed-out character). Just ask me about specific character's names, and I will gladly describe to you the origin of their name!

4 comments:

Kirthi said...

i think no other author has ever thought of that!

Adam Gonzales said...

Thanks. It IS eight...wait...nine years in the making (WOW! It's already nine?). This is SO important to me; the second most important thing in my life. I LOVE it to death, so everything has to work out in the end. If it didn't mean that much to me, I doubt that I'd even care about the names of the characters as long as I completed the story.

Kirthi said...

oh, my gosh. ARE YOU SERIOUS?! 9 years! Thats crazy! How many books are you going to write?

Adam Gonzales said...

Eight books are in the main series.