What's in a name?

Far too much, I'm afraid. That which we call a rose would indeed still smell as sweet if we could truly smell the word. On the page, however, names are essential.

I've always found naming to be the most difficult part of character creation, and that goes double for fantasy settings. There are really two interrelated problems here. The first is originality. Anyone who has played an MMO has seen worst offenders here. Servers get populated the utterly generic like Crushgore or the ever-popular slight misspelling of copyrighted heroes. That's fine for shallow online avatars, but entirely unacceptable if you expect your reader/player to have any sort of emotional investment. (Usually. Like any other rule of writing, this can be tossed out with the right reasons and execution.) However, this oftentimes runs afoul of my second goal: meaning. Take as an example my online persona, Astribulus. The name was created to sound mage-like (a vague qualification, I know) and to evoke the stars. The Astr prefix is taken directly from words like astral and astronomy. None of this needs to be explained outright to the reader or player, but I find such meaning helps the name fit.

The problem with defining the character directly in the name, aside from the shear unlikeliness of that actually happening, is that it can easily end up sounding unnamelike. Look up all the etymology you want, grab all the roots you need, and you still need to create something that sounds like a proper name. Sadly, this is a place where I revert to good old-fashioned trial and error until I find something I like. This can even mean just dumping everything for something that simply sounds right, but that's entirely impossible to define as far as I can tell.

Now this only applies to making up names from scratch. In a setting with more normal people, things can be somewhat easier. It still comes down to trying things until one fits, though. In dire straights, one can always hit the randomizer on a baby name website and play "Does he really seem like a David?"

In the end, I really don't have a good solution. Like I said, it's still the hardest part for me.