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   Roomey (roomey@mastodon.ie)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jul-2023 15:38:52 JST Roomey

   Would love to get feedback around naming characters. Do you like making their names 'sound' like the main character traits? In Sci-fi do names have to be strange to fit the genre?

   I kinda like incongruity so having very 'normal' names appeal to me, but so few books follow this, it must be for a reason. I guess an unusual name stays in your memory a bit more?

   #writingcommunity #amwriting #writingwonders

   • Embed this notice
     Albert ARIBAUD ✎ (aaribaud@mastodon.art)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jul-2023 15:38:51 JST Albert ARIBAUD ✎

     in reply to

     @roomey

     For sci-fi, I'd offer two things for consideration:

     - alien names should follow the same rules (phonological, structural, semantic) within a species;

     - avoid alien words unless they're needed (the "call a rabbit a smeerp" issue).

     Apart from that, I tend to avoid too obviously meaningful names, but I like a name to be evocative -- the problem being, one's never sure a name evokes the same thing to the reader than to the author.

     #writingcommunity #amwriting #writingwonders

   • Embed this notice
     Stephen Cox Author (stephenwhq@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jul-2023 18:34:19 JST Stephen Cox Author

     in reply to

     • Albert ARIBAUD ✎

     @aaribaud @roomey

     "alien names should follow the same rules (phonological, structural, semantic) within a species;"
     mate, this isn't even true for European languages (and Europe is in linguistic terms, much more uniform than say, Papua New Guinea.)

   • Embed this notice
     Albert ARIBAUD ✎ (aaribaud@mastodon.art)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jul-2023 18:34:19 JST Albert ARIBAUD ✎

     in reply to

     • Stephen Cox Author

     @stephenwhq

     True, in actual settings.

     However here we are dealing with imaginary, even narrative, settings, where things are simplified for the sake of storytelling. And example of such a simplification is "if my aliens don't produce vowel sounds then none of their names should have vowels" -- irrealistic, yet self-consistent).

     Sorry if I made it sound like it was a real-life rule -- and if I made it sound like hard rules. I mean neither.

     @roomey