At long last, another update! This one I promised to Lhilertoro a while back; now I'm finally delivering. Without further time-wasting which no one will read, I present:

How to Name a Character

NOTE: This entry reflects how I name characters, and may or may not be easy or convenient for you.

The first thing I do when naming a character is to choose some kind of base for the rest of the name to come out of. If you’re fluent in a language other than English, perhaps try taking a word from that language as your base (not “gracias” from Spanish or “bonjour” from French, as those are well-known among native English speakers and make the name too obvious). You could also take English words that describe your character (my Internet ego, Auserv, is a bit of an obvious portmanteau of “automatic” and “servant”, being that Auserv was originally a Toa of Electricity, automatic brings to mind electrically-run appliances, and a Toa serves the Matoran).

Or of course, you can always bang on your keyboard to create a base name (though I don't want to see any characters named Qeithapewgtihaoi;dsht). Most of the names I use in my stories were created in this manner. Combining Bionicle words is fine too, though since we’re all Bionicle fans, this should be done more discreetly if you don't want the name to be too obvious.

For the purpose of this naming tutorial, we’ll assume that we’re naming a Matoran who has just seen his friend killed by Dark Hunters, and has been exposed to evil for the first time in his life. Well, let’s say we want the base words to be “taste” and “evil”...in Japanese. Well, if you don’t know Japanese, pull up an online translator–there are plenty and they’re easy to find. I’ll be using “ajiwau” for taste and “warui” for evil.

Now we mix these words together. Ajiwarui combines the words in an awkward pun, but it doesn’t roll off the tongue. Cut out both I’s and the W; they are mostly responsible for the word being hard to pronounce. Now you have “Ajaru”, which sounds pretty cool.

Now comes the optional part. If you want to make sure your name isn’t already the name of something else, just type it into Google. “Ajaru” gets almost 3,000 hits; apparently it is the name of a place in Brazil. So now we just change the vowels and transpose the consonants till we find something with virtually no hits.

After a bit of playing around with this, I found that “Ujauri” is relatively close to the pre-Google name, and gets only one hit with Google.

Now, we’ve gone from “taste evil” to “ajiwau warui” to “ajiwarui” to “ajaru” to “ujauri”, and in between each step, there is no real obvious transition. Still, the last step (the Google-proofing of the name) can take a very long time. It’s best to not be so strict if you want a name quick and either skip the Google part entirely or be satisfied with getting, say, under 500 hits.

So a quick recap:

Step 1: Pick (a) base name(s). This can literally be anything.

Step 2: Mask the base so you can no longer tell where the name comes from. This may involve translating the base into another language, combining two words into one, and adding/removing letters or scrambling a word. If the base is already gibberish, this step can be skipped.

Step 3: Run it through Google and change the word slightly so it gets no hits. If it gets no hits the first time you run it through, you’re good and you can skip step 3. If you don’t really care, skip step 3 anyway.

Step 4: Step back and look at the name. Make sure you’re happy with it. If not, start over with a different base. If so, congrats, you just created a decent-sounding name!

You can also be lazy if you want and just type a Bionicle-sounding word, like...Krazatu...make sure it doesn’t have any Google hits (it doesn’t), and be done with it. In fact, a lot of my characters were named this way. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s a lot easier to guarantee the word will not be found on Google if you go through the entire process.

And as a closing note, feel free to take the names Ujauri or Krazatu for your epics, since I won’t be using them. (Quick edit: I typed this article up in WordPerfect quite a while ago. Upon doing the Google searches again, Ujauri and Krazatu no longer have such low hit numbers, but they are still low enough to pass as good names. So don't worry about it.)