On naming things.

My head's filled with names today. Not the normal sort, either: Sweet Moment of the Waking Dream. Precious Falling Star. Eve of the Blood-craven Dawn.

Weird little things like that.

I like naming things. It's my favorite part, I think, of having new stories and new characters and new places. It's also, to me, one of the most essential parts: I can't develop things, really, until I've named them. A character without a name is just a placeholder; personality traits, backstory, appearance, none of it STICKS until they have a name. Once they have a name, they're people.

(This is also how I judge whether a story will be eating my brain, in its early stages--do the characters have names? and are they GOOD names?)

I also find that I geek out about names in stories--I love it when characters have more than one name, or nicknames; I love it when you can tell the closeness of two characters by what they call each other. I love figuring out what characters refer to themselves as, or when the name the character uses gives away something about how old they are, what they're feeling at that moment, their self-identity.

If I could write a story completely, entirely about names? I probably would. I think my love of Japanese is based partially in the neat things it can do with names: you can write the same name dozens of different ways, and it is still the same name, but the meaning's totally different; what two people call each other tells you how close they are, their relative social rank, and something about their personality; and your name carries with it all of your family history. In Japan, names have always been one of the most important things. I relate to that.

I've got no system for coming up with names. I know a couple, but my favorite names tend to come on impulse. When the right name hits, I KNOW it's right--and from there on, I can build.

Contrarily, I have a close friend who, when she writes, insists on naming her characters last. Her reasoning is, she can't know what sort of name will fit until she knows the character. I don't want to say she places less importance on names, because she doesn't; she just names things last. It's a finishing touch, for her, rather than a foundation.

What about ya'll? Are names an integral part of character creation? What systems do you use to name things? Do your characters' names ever change as they develop; do you sometimes use the same name for more than one character? Tell me about it~