R.S.Sharkey

Creating Aneri – Part 1

Hello everyone! I’d like to introduce you to Aneri; one of my most recent characters.  Aneri is the first of his race and thus has the honor of being my “Guiney pig” while I figure his people out. I’m going to attempt to write a few posts as I develop his character and his race: the Scàduin. To start, I’m going to talk about how I named Aneri.

The word I chose for his name came from a list of names I’ve been making for a while. I always consider a list of names better than making up names as you go. Though there’s no problem with making up names as you go (I do it) it’s a lot easier to simply pick one that fits your character then to try and make a new name. Besides, names can be easy to create when you’re not trying to craft them towards a specific person. I make up names on the fly all the time. Aneri’s name came from a list I made up while chatting online with some people over on HolyWorlds:

Ninya

Aneri

Ayna

Yarei

Ennin

Asei

Eilya

Isserk

Ineve

Eyien

Lasina

Aniretek

I came up with these names by mixing, mirroring, rotating and swapping the letters in names the five or six people who were on chat. See? Easy. The first factor in pick Aneri’s name was deciding if he was male or female. As you can tell, I went with male. This narrowed the list to masculine sounding names. After a quick bit of deliberating I settled on Aneri.

So, at that point I had his first name, but Aneri needed more than just a first name. He needed a last name. Now, personally, I like creating unique ways to name my characters; usually a way that has something to do with their culture. Since I only have a few tid-bits on his culture, I had lots of room in creating my style.

First of all, I thought of what little I knew of his culture. The main thing I knew was that his people gave both honorable and dishonorable titles; though more honorable ones than dishonorable ones. Because of this, I realized that one person could have tens of titles; both honorable and dishonorable. I decided, instead of making people remember all of a person’s titles, titles would be shortened into last names. So, I tested this style on Aneri (my awesome little Guine pig!).

The second thing I did was chose a bunch of adjectives to be Aneri’s titles. These titles describe Aneri’s character and accomplishments.

True

Fearless

Lost

Angry

Hope

Respect

Love

Guide

Free

Open

Forgive

Wound

Strong

Willful

Brave

Then I had to come up with a reasonable way to make this list into a name. My first attempt at giving Aneri a last name started with creating an acronym of his list of titles:

Aneri TFLAHRLGFOFWSWB

This is obviously unpronounceable. So I tried adding some vowels here and there to make it pronounceable:

Aneri Teflahralig Fofewisawib |

Pronounced: ah-NEAR-ee | teh-FLA-h-RAL-igg | PHOPH-ew-IS-aw-eeb

This is still quite the tongue twister.

Here’s where my good HWchat friend KathrineROID (Katage) comes into the picture. She was strong enough to withstand my attempts at naming Aneri and assisted in creating the pattern for last names. After struggling to pronounce my tongue twister she offered her version:

Aneri Trufe-Lahrel Guifof-Wisiwib |

Pronounced: Truth with “f” | Laurel pronounced LAW-rel | JOY-phoph | wi-SEE-wib

Now. That’s something pronounceable! I’d like to thank Katage for her assistance and also explain how this name works:

Trufe – takes the first three (3) letters of True and adds the first two (2) letters of Fearless.

Lahrel – takes the first letter of Lost, Angry and Hope and adds the first two (2) letters of Respect and the first letter of Love.

Guifof – takes the first three (3) letters of Guide and adds the first letters of Free, Open and Forgive.

Wisiwib – takes the letters: WSWB from the last four (4) words and adds “i”s between them.

This isn’t at all a set pattern, but it is a pattern. I can use the ideas from Aneri’s name to come up with the names for everyone else belonging to the race of Scàduins. You may have noticed that if I want to add more titles to Aneri’s name I’ll have to change it. But! That’s the beauty of this style. People’s last names are constantly changing which causes them to play close attention to someone’s name. It is another level of culture. It is unique and that’s what I like about it.

~ by R.S.Sharkey on February 6, 2011.

Posted in Story Development
Tags: Aneri, character development, naming, styles, systems