: Re: Inventing names for Sci-Fi characters How can I invent names for fictional characters in a future-setting Sci-Fi story so they won't be connected to any existing culture? I considered the following

Wherever your characters are from they will have their own culture and their own language. It's pretty easy to come up with some random names for characters but if you have more than one character then the naming construction for each should be similar, with similar syllable count and length. If they have a culture that respects class hierarchy then they may have other standards that append to their names to denote house or clan affiliation or just family name. For example it's common among Dutch people to have a name that is [someone] van [somewhere] like Vincent van Gogh - the 'van part just means 'from' so it means Vincent 'from' Gogh (bear in mind I'm not Dutch but you get the idea!) and it can also be spelt van de, van der or van den and it pretty much means the same thing.

Your character names have to have a common construction and it should be based on some sort of culture and language construction, even if the reader never actually gets to know about it. Also, once you have decided on a language construction it becomes much easier to write dialogue for those characters because it will be based on the language they know - even if it's not their language they are speaking - in the same way that I can often spot a non-native English speaker by sentence construction, even if the words and context make perfect sense.

For more on language construction try this guy: www.zompist.com/kitlong.html
Hope that helps.

Load Full (0)

: Converting Word pages to book pages, for novels? The title says it all. How can I gauge how long my novel would be, if for example I've written 400 single-spaced pages of size 12 Times New

@Ogunnowo420

Load Full 7 Comments

: How do authors incorporate languages they don't speak? In many, many English-language novels I've come across characters who speak other languages, most often French for whatever reason. In many

@Ogunnowo420

Load Full 3 Comments

: How many different words are in the average novel? I realize there's going to be a bit of variation here from one author to the next and depending on length of the novel, but the range shouldn't

@Ogunnowo420

Load Full 5 Comments

: Find Information For Describing A Nuclear Power Plant I want to start my story connecting the government flaws to the main characters life before he was even born. I thought since the settings

: Re: Inventing names for Sci-Fi characters How can I invent names for fictional characters in a future-setting Sci-Fi story so they won't be connected to any existing culture? I considered the following

More posts by @Ogunnowo420

: Converting Word pages to book pages, for novels? The title says it all. How can I gauge how long my novel would be, if for example I've written 400 single-spaced pages of size 12 Times New

: How do authors incorporate languages they don't speak? In many, many English-language novels I've come across characters who speak other languages, most often French for whatever reason. In many

: How many different words are in the average novel? I realize there's going to be a bit of variation here from one author to the next and depending on length of the novel, but the range shouldn't

: Find Information For Describing A Nuclear Power Plant I want to start my story connecting the government flaws to the main characters life before he was even born. I thought since the settings

Login to post a comment!

0 Comments

Back to top