I am often asked about the names of my fictional characters and how I come up with them. I understand this is a problem for writers who employ a large cast. One initial hint I would suggest is to use the really good names on bit characters and give the main characters more ordinary names. The main characters will have a lot of appearances during which you can flesh them out. With a bit character you might choose a name that is a bit more descriptive. If you think about it, coworkers who you barely know, who have a workplace nickname, tend to be easier to remember.

My interest in naming characters goes back to the late 1980s when I was writing role playing sourcebooks. At that time I identified 7 traditional naming traditions [see my gaming bibliography]. These did not include the modern naming tradition of picking one out of a book based on how it sounds, or the postmodern urban tradition of making one up on an equally meaningless basis. These 7 methods, however, only apply to primitive societies, and many of my time-travelers and settings for my major fiction works are contemporary or futuristic. I put the most thought and creativity into my futuristic character’s names.

One method I use is to search the credits that run at the end of a movie. If I want a rancher’s name I look for the animal wrangler. If I need a hit man for a gang with a short lifespan I search the stunt listings. There are at least a hundred names at the end of every film. Don’t forget the phone book either.

My contemporary characters are named according to the system of aliases I developed in the late 1990s for protecting the identities of the subjects of my violence study. I will sketch that process here, noting that many of my contemporary fictional characters are composites of the subjects of my study, many of whom were just used as part of the database and did not make it into the anecdotal portion that required an alias. The alias methods are:

1. Overhearing conversations. I will use the first name or the nickname of a person that is being talked about by two other people.

2. Name reversals, corrupted and not. I will take Mark Smith and name him Smitty Marcel for instance. Other examples include changing David Lumsden to Daniel London.

3. Street names are used by criminals partially to protect themselves. So my borrowing one for my work further protects them by muddying the waters so to speak.

4. Middle names, when you can get people to divulge them, are usually unpleasant monikers good for villains or sidekicks.

5. Corrupting unique names. Often, unique sounding American names such as Hollenback, are corrupted versions of Germanic or Italian names to begin with. By changing Hollenback to Hoenbach or Hillenback you still get the texture of the two soft syllables followed by the final harsh single syllable.

A favorite method of mine, since I write so many African American characters, is calling up supermarket bookkeepers who I used to work with and getting the latest made-up ghetto names off of WIC vouchers. This is the source for such masterpieces as Di’Avian, Lailah and Journee.

Another method is for me to make up a nickname based on visual traits to help the reader visualize the character. A non-fiction example is Bubba Crank. This criminal, who was a contract murderer, looked exactly like former NFL great Bubba Smith, so I named him Bubba, in place of his very pedestrian Christian name. He also used a drug called crank hence his second moniker. The best fictional example I have of this is T.T. Redbone, who makes his debut in Thunderboy.

My favorite method is to borrow third-party names related to me by friends and people I interviewed. For instance, there was a cashier I interviewed nine years ago about the violent altercation that I used as the framework for a chapter in Of The Sunset World. I took the name of a coworker who she could not forget, because she had such a unique name, and I saved it. The lady’s name was Newnetthelove [no hyphens]. Five novels later in the Sunset Saga I used the poor woman’s name as the stage name for a transvestite cellmate of Jay Bracken in Behind the Sunset Veil, only I hyphenated it into New-Net-The-Love. What better name for a transvestite could a novelist ask for?

Now, for the story of the generation of my all-time favorite fictional names…

…I was seated next to two young ladies having dinner, when they began discussing a coworker. The coworker was a likeable young lady for whom they showed much pity. The entire conversation was about naming children, and how they were both endlessly grateful to their mothers for not getting drunk on a Wednesday on Two Dollar Tequila Night, having unprotected sex with an anonymous man, and hence naming them Tequila Wednesday!

Of course, Tequila—I’m sorry, wherever you are baby—is too good a name not to be used for the hang-around girl of a drug gang in my upcoming novel Seven Moons Deep. Now, I am a compassionate author—sometimes. I felt so guilty about naming one of the female characters in my time-travel series Tequila Wednesday that I decided to let her rename herself after her improbable survival and good fortune resulting from an excessively violent episode.

Back to the conversation between the two anonymous young ladies: the one young lady said to the other, “I’d rather have my mother name me Queen Vajayjay!”

There you have it. When Tequila Wednesday decides to take her destiny in her own manicured hands and rename herself, Queen Vajayjay, some will think me a semantically sadistic genius. But the fact is I could not have made that up.

Listening and reading with an ear and an eye for a unique name is the key to the memorable naming of your fictional characters. Just go out to an eatery attended by the socioeconomic slice of society you are writing about and pickup a few names, perhaps even the name of the waiter or waitress next to the smiley face on your bill, or the receipt log-in name of the cashier at the fast-food counter. The more fun it is, the more effective it will be when you name the denizens of your own universe or rename the real people in your non-fiction for their own protection.