: Re: Choosing character names is a constant difficulty I find it hard to name my characters. Every normal name sounds funny if applied to a product of my fantasy. If I take a common name, I may

@Steve161

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What I’ve done for names:

Browsed a nice thick baby-name book, which is organized by ethnicity.
Looked in Wikipedia for a list of names of the appropriate ethnicity. For example, if a certain character is descended from Haitian immigrants, I might look up the membership of the Haitian national legislature to get a sense of what last names are common there.
Checked the US Social Security Administration’s most-common-first-names database, which is organized by gender, state, and birth year.

If you’re trying to come up with names for a fantasy world, I suggest coming up with some phonology for a language in your fantasy world, and then generating a bunch of words that match it. (You can add flavor by creating multiple languages with different phonological rules, or by imposing a rule that the pattern of sounds communicates something about a character’s gender or status. In Mindy Klasky’s “Glasswrights” series, for example, the higher a character’s caste, the more syllables were in his or her name.)

I agree with Martha above that you shouldn’t give different characters names that start with the same letter. (Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh has an Arthur and an Art, but I think Chabon was just showing off.)

And one other tip: full names sound better if the first and last names have a different number of syllables.

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