Programs, phone books, obituaries: where I find names for my characters

I look for names everywhere. Partner is so aware of this search for names that he regularly tells me about interesting names he hears at work.

Anyone can look in a baby name book, but those names feel so sterile. They’re connected to definitions, but they lack life, they feel too contrived sometimes. The telephone book is a great source of names, of course, but they tend to feel like lifeless words on a page too. I like the phone book best for the name of a minor character. I use it like a random name generator. Flip it open to any page and point without looking. Do it twice, once for first name, once for a last name. Bam. Bam. Colleen Figueroa. That can be the name of my character’s workplace friend. A minor character involved in one important conversation.

If I want to find names that feel more rich, that feel like they have history and messiness, my favorite place to look is the obituaries of my daily newspaper. Go ahead and think it’s weird. You may think it’s morbid. But those obituaries are printed there for a reason. They are remembrance and celebration of lives that have ended. Friends and family want the obituaries read or they wouldn’t put them in the paper. They want their loved ones to be remembered. I live in a small town, so I’ve never used a whole name from the obituary section; I tend to look for just first or last names. The style of names sometimes sound more old-fashioned, but characters come in a whole range of ages. These names, attached to real people, feel alive to me.

The stories in the obituary section can also offer other kinds of inspiration. Need ideas for how to build an extended family for a character? Want to have a range of causes of death for your mysteries? Want to consider the range of euphemisms for dying to help build honest-sounding dialogue? Sometimes the obituaries include very detailed biographies of different life experiences and activities, clubs and accomplishments. You never know what might inspire you in there.

I intend absolutely no disrespect by reading the obituaries for inspiration. It’s a way of celebrating and reviving bits of a life lived.

If I’m looking for names for very young characters, my favorite source is school lists. Each spring, the newspaper prints a list of high school graduates, but with a high school administrator in the family, we also tend to accumulate programs from different events. I skim through them for interesting first and last names and rearrange them until I find things that work for my characters.

How do you come up with the names for your characters? What is your favorite character from a story you’ve written or read?