Anyone else struggles with names?

[Fuzed]

I feel like naming things is the bane of all writers...

Also, if I ever happen to see a side-character named Mars in your story I know he's about to be important. Interesting

[NickRowler]

I tend to to put a theming around a group of characters names. Like one group would be Crow, Raven, and Rook. And another group would be Tabu, Shadow, and Mistique. People who do plant magic are named after plants. Etc.

The weirdest one was trying to name the older sibling of someone named Nono. I was almost going to go with Sisi, as a bad Spanish joke, but it sounded too close to sissy. But ended up calling him Ottavo, because Nono means 9th in Italian and Ottavo means 8th.

I am not very good with coming up with titles tho, and I usually end up with something that just sounds off.

[Fuzed]

I like the naming shenanigans you've got going there. Makes it all a lot more interesting than just naming your characters 'Bob' and 'Joe'.

Keep it up!

[kmlangleyauthor]

@rumpenstiltzkin that’s about how I feel about it, too. I love finding names for my characters (well, 98% of them) but names for cities or moves? I’ll stare at my screen for weeks or just “gloss over it” without a name to give myself a heart attack whenever I go back to edit
* future me sobs *

There’s always the outliers. I have a whole story that I struggled with names, so I need to rename one of the main characters, a main secondary character, and a background character. All because I thought they needed interesting names. Except I hate their names

Names are fun. But names are hard

[otaku_rose]

The greatest struggle for every writer. You want a name that is unique and stands out but also recognizable. You dont want to end up with landing on a name everyone uses too... cough Lucas...cough cough. But I try to use name generators or use latin bases. Hopefully that helps!

[Rhonder]

Names are hardddddd. They're usually the very last thing I do when making a character and... sometimes not even then. The antagonist for the one-shot I have on Tapas, for example, doesn't have a name technically xD I just call her "The Thief" because when I was writing the script there was never a time where her name needed to get said aloud so... I just didn't come up with one

The new story I'm working on will be hard because there's quite a few characters and all need to be named out of necessity. I'll have my work cut out!

[Fuzed]

Lucas just gave me TBATE flashbacks... if you know, you know.

[otaku_rose]

lol its the worst! but people are getting creative out here Lukas... the originality is just beautiful. lol

[Fuzed]

I am sure that nobody who read TBATE would call a protagonist Lucas/Lukas or any variation of that name.

[otaku_rose]

it was just an off comment. really just suggesting the commonality of the name

[Fuzed]

Yeah, I mean my MC is called Nathan. Also a pretty common name. But then I've got names such as Daeril, Dayla, Blithe, Rafael...

I think I chose the most generic name for my MC.

[otaku_rose]

lol im guilty as well. Nathan is also one of my characters names but I have other names like Remy, Theo, Kash. So there is some variety there too.

[Fuzed]

What's your novel name? I might give it a read. I just finished a book so need to fill the void.

[DiscountedArtist]

I don't officially name my characters, but if I did I would make the names ironic. That makes everything simpler for me. For example, I'll name my blue character either blue, discount, gradient, water boi, anything that can somehow relate to the character.
https://tapas.io/series/Discounted-Comics

[Fuzed]

If there was a MC called Water Boi, that shit would be next level!

[Fuzed]

I liked your comics. Some of the jokes were pretty old but some of them were new to me. Good job!

[otaku_rose]

If your into werewolf and BL, then you should definitely check it out! Its called The Two Alphas of Rosewood Creek. Let me know what you think!

[Jen-Jen]

Hello again!
I have some trouble naming, too. If I'm lucky, a name will just come to me. Otherwise, I scour this name generator:

Name Generator

or baby names websites, like this one:

Baby Names at BabyNames.com - The #1 Site for Names & Meanings

You can also make your own realistic ones by googling name prefixes and suffixes and mixing and matching. That's a little harder, though.

[M.ComicFan]

Whenever I write something, I have the plot figured out in no time. But naming stuff. That's a real hassle.

Same. I often have trouble coming up with names for characters.

[Hazumirein]

With characters I tend to just go with the first name that comes to mind, even if it's stupid...and occasionally wind up repeating myself (i.e. I have two different OCs named Sam; one is Samuel and the other is Samael). Also one time I had to change the name of a minor side-character because in the time since I'd started writing the story, someone with the exact same name had been in the news a lot for being a murderer and I didn't want people to think the character was named after them I guess that's what I get for picking super generic names for side characters.

My city/country/world names are questionable at best and are usually like...words spelled backwards with a few more or less letters, or a word in another language.

And I have NO idea how to come up with good story names; if anyone knows the secret to that I'd love to hear it.

(I do think I'm pretty good at coming up with fake band names though. Got a bunch of those.)