What's In A Name?

It's funny, but sometimes a name just doesn't suit the character you're writing.

I'm neck deep in a story at the moment where the main character's name was Ben. It was bugging me. For some reason, it just didn't suit him. As soon as I did a search and replace (with Mike), everything seemed to flow a lot better.

I'm also starting to notice that I have a tendency towards certain letters. I suddenly realised that a whole bunch of my writings have characters with names starting with the letter 'J'.

I wonder what that's all about.

But one thing I recently found that was useful was a random name generator. Enter the country, culture, gender and so on, and it creates names and addresses that are reasonably authentic without being real. It even includes Hobbit and Ninja names.

And who knows? Somewhere, in some universe, you may actually be creating these people.