Have you ever noticed or found out something about your character's name after you made it?

@Iain Aschendale Works for the Battle Ballerina on the field.

 

You guys are a riot.

Please do get back on topic, though.

 

I generally name my characters after a facet of their personality and then the other characters give them a nickname on their own perceived notion of the character in question.

 

A friend of mine wrote a series of blog posts about a female coder. He called her Jezebel, because he liked the sound of it, and didn't find out what it meant until he was halfway through the planned sequence.

 

I write my characters names at random sometimes, though with my current task, I chose names that sounded Roman. I just finished Ryse: Son of Rome which is a video game set in Roman times and I was feeling the particular name sake to be quite pleasant.

 

I love the process of choosing names. I tend to be quite picky; character names must be appropriate to place/era/social context, they must suit the character (I don't quite know what makes some names suit and others not, but it's a thing!) and, generally, the name should have a meaning which alludes to or references some element of importance for either that character's personality or role within the story.

I wrote the following as a short exercise for myself during my planning process when I was growing acquainted with the main characters in my WIP:

There was once a small town. In this town lived a family with a mother, a father, and two daughters. These two daughters were as different as they were beautiful. The elder daughter bore the name Eleanor, for her mother had great hopes that their firstborn would carry herself with regal pride and bring honour to the family name.

When the second child was born, the father said to his wife, “We must pray she remains blind to the horrors of this world, to ensure she remains innocent and beautiful always.” And so a pledge for her blindness was made, and she was named Cecilia.
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Amusingly, a name which I had never previously considered just dropped into my mind one day and introduced itself to me as being the name of one of the characters in my story. I did some research, and turns out that name was in the top 50 most popular in the year and within the social demographic of that character's birth! Talk about coincidence?!

 

I think I shared this once before, but in all of my novels I managed to have a female character whose name starts with the letter L. Not sure why, maybe a subconscious preference. Who knows? But in my most recent novel project, I don't. Instead, my main character's name is Noelle. And that was completely by accident.

 

These are great! I love it when a character's name surprises me--and it's even better when it's my character's name!

 

I remember Opus Penguin (of the old Bloom County comic strip) wondering if "feminine protection" meant a pink Uzi.

Not exactly a character backfire, but one of my VW buses was named the "Blunder Bus" and had a section of that name devoted to in in my book On The Bus. I found out later that "Blunderbuss" is a euphemism for masturbation in some parts of England. It was too late to change, and would have involved too much editing.

 

I had a crazy old drake named Shakhira until I found out about the female singer Shakira and changed it. His name is no longer Shakhira and I'm considering using another character to fill his role. But that's not till book 2 so I don't have to think about it right now,

 

I know a kid named Brenna. And yes, she's a girl.

 

Haha! I'd change his name, too!