I had an idea.
It’s probably a bad idea. It might turn out to be a good idea. Either way, it’s got me staring at spreadsheets at 2am, questioning my life decisions. 🫠
I’ll be the first to admit it: in-depth advance planning is not one of my writing strengths.
I usually outline key events in the story, and revise & expand the outline over time, but not much more. As much as I love reading/watching fantasy with super detailed worldbuilding and admire authors who create a whole world before focusing on the story, I know I don’t have the patience that requires. Most of my worldbuilding happens while I’m developing the stories and characters within the world. My ideas start as the big-picture story concept, and the details of the characters and the world appear as I flesh out the rough story scaffolding into a nuanced plot.
In general I’m happy with the approach that works for me, but it has pros and cons. It lets me jump right into the story-crafting that I enjoy most, but there are some world details that can’t be added later without changing the characters and/or story too. One notable and personally annoying instance of this is names, and how they fit into the larger world/culture in the story.
Names have always been both one of my favorite and least favorite parts of writing.
I sometimes struggle to create original names that I like, but I care deeply about finding one that just feels right for that character. Or, in fewer words, I name my characters based on vibes. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I do love fantasy worlds where the names have significant meanings. I remember spending hours playing with name generator sheets like this one to craft names for my D&D and story characters alike, even those who never actually got played or used. I always liked the idea of having something like that for one of my own fantasy worlds, but never wanted it quite enough to put in the work.
My current main WIP is no exception. I’ve had to use placeholder names for some characters before I settled on a true name, but I always continued searching for the names that felt right to me. But that project had another problem: the story & world had grown to the point where I had lots of background characters I wanted names for, but my brain was still in a dry spell in terms of original-name-generating ability, and I didn’t want to resort to my ‘online name generator best hits’ list.
I decided the best move was trying to make a custom name generator for myself. If it worked, I’d get results I liked more quickly, and they’d still be original in some sense. I went through all my existing names and broke them down into 1-2 syllable pieces, put those in a spreadsheet, added some similar but new pieces for variety, and started playing with random combinations. The outcome was far from perfect, but it regularly produced fairly good results, and made background character naming much easier. I was pretty pleased with myself for having figured that out.
And then I had an idea.
Having already gone to the trouble of breaking the names down into component parts, what if I could retroactively assign meanings to them after all?
The list is right there. Should be easy, right?
…Right?
Long story short, it proved far more complicated than it seemed at first glance. Most of the generator’s pieces range from 2-5 letters in length, and some longer pieces are made up of several shorter ones. If I broke all the larger pieces into their smallest components, it would severely limit the number of pieces I had to work with. But the alternative means that any given name can be broken down multiple ways. That flexibility is a double edged sword; whichever option I choose impacts which pieces match across which other names, and I can’t easily tell which versions are better. And since there’s zero consistency in how I named my characters, there’s no chance of finding a pattern to automatically determine which to use.
It’s like an insane-level logic puzzle, with dozens and dozens of variables to track, very few hints or clues, and no guarantee that a consistent answer even exists. I have no idea how long it would take or how hard it would be to make it work, or if the result would be worth the effort. For all I know, I could spend hours and hours on this only to hit a contradiction that can only be resolved by changing a main character’s name that I’m adamantly opposed to changing.
But it’s also not out of the question that it could succeed. My main characters’ names have fairly little overlap, and I’m less attached to most of the minor characters’ names. This is already the closest I’ve ever come to having a proper naming system. I can’t possibly throw away an opportunity like this! I’m giving it my best shot, and crossing my fingers it works out.
Besides, I’d been meaning to revisit my old names to try to fix pronunciation inconsistencies (another side effect of my vibe-naming). If I’ll have to alter some names’ spellings regardless, I might as well use the opportunity to consider connections between them…
Anyway, I gotta get back to those spreadsheets.
Stay awesome, stay nerdy, and stay uniquely you.
— Riverly 💫
