This week's question is How do you decide on names? Would you ever name a character after a friend/family member/ex?
There are a few ways that character names come to me.
1. They are just magically there when I think up a character, and the fits absolutely perfectly and I love it and can't imagine any other name.
2. I can't think up a character name right away, so I think up a placeholder name. Eventually, I can't think of the character by anything but the placeholder name, so the placeholder name is then no longer a placeholder, but the character's actual name.
3. I can't for the life of me think of a good name, and I spend hours and hours on end scouring babynames.com and other useless baby names sites where all of the names are really weird or unpronouncable. After that, I spend days asking family and friends for names that they like and they answer oh so helpfully with names of other family members. Or my name. At that point I usually go back to #2. (So, no, I wouldn't name a character after someone I knew. Mostly because I'm sure they would forever think oh, so that's what she thinks of me? Is that supposed to be what I'm like? etc).
So! That's my very inefficient way of thinking up character names. How do you think up character names? Maybe you could give me some tips...
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