Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!

Today’s topic is: How do you choose your characters’ names?

And remember to visit my fellow writers to see what they have come up with. You can find their works here!

This one has a simple answer to it: it depends. For a lot of my short and flash fiction, it really doesn’t matter. Some a written in a first person perspective where names, and sometimes even genders are irrelevant. I like that, as it can make the story more relevant to more people. Some are third person but the name is equally not important.

Where the story is set in more modern or recent times, I just throw names together to make plausible sounding first and surnames. Obviously I give thought to the location, if referenced, that the book is set in.

But then there are my steampunk books. These take some real work. The beauty with steampunk is that it is entirely made up. It never happened, it’s more of a what if scenario. What if rather than electrification on a mass scale, human invention diverged on a new path where steam became the dominant force for all power? BUT, and this is a big but, it is somewhat loosely based on an historical period. Depending on where you are from, either Victorian era or the Wild West. Though my books are set in a completely fictional world, not Earth, as England is my home, my characters follow a more British route for the most part. Not all, but most. So with that in mind I sourced my names from research. Lots of research. I look up Victorian names to see what there were at the time. I mix and match to make things work. It’s how I’ve ended up with characters named Edison, Reuben, Thaddeus, Algernon, Atticus and Mordecai. On occasion I’ve gone out of my way to find unique names. Selah being one of them (pronounced, in this case, as SAY-la). She’s a bit of an enigma as characters go, not the open book some of the others are. And so the name fits, as it seems to date back to ancient Hebrew language, and yet there is a lot of debate as to its actual meaning. And for any others, there are a plethora of name generators on the internet for anything you can think of. I’ve used plenty of Victorian and steampunk ones to help me out along the way.