When I first gave up work I led a couple of writing groups, just for fun. I didn’t do the writing tasks, I set the group to do them. The members were mostly people who had never written before, or maybe had written a little but ran out of steam and needed some support. It was great fun and the groups lasted for about five years until the world stopped. When life began again I didn’t restart the groups – I think we were already running out of steam, and I think they weren’t keen to meet in groups after so long being careful about contact.
One task I gave them was about characters; I had already given out pictures of anonymous people and asked the group to imagine who they were, and to give them names. Now, I know I do love unusual names in my writing and have to rein in my imagination sometimes, but the group were very timid with their naming. I followed the photos the following week with a list of names which I made up, and the group had to imagine characters who had those names. I was thinking about this today , and idly googled “random names” and came across a list of 1,000! I don’t know if they are names of real people, made up names or even AI generated – it’s something we have to think about these days, I guess!
Here are the first ten and some of them are quite interesting:
- Alia Shields – if I had her as a character, I might write her name as Allia, or Alya/Allya. Although unusual, it strikes me as a believable name for a girl or young woman
- Devon Morris – I once taught someone called Devon; I also taught someone called Devron, and it was only realised once he’d left school that a spelling mistake had been made when he first started and he too was Devon – a random ‘r’ had mysteriously and incorrectly been inserted.
- Genesis Gallegos – I’ve never taught anyone called Genesis
- Jonas Collins – Jonas is a very popular name these days
- Kinsley Wolf – this makes me think of the character Kinsey Millhone in Sue Grafton’s detective stories, except of course this is Kinsley
- Jase Stanley – is this person really Jason, James, or has the initials J.C.?
- Gracelyn Price – I’ve never heard the name Gracelyn before, but it’s very pretty and apparently it’s originally American
- Brooks Osborne – it was common in the nineteenth century to have surnames used as first names, and it’s popular again these days
- Shelby Cervantes – as above!
- Kamari Bauer – another pretty first name; apparently Kamari is a name from Swahili, but was in turn from Arabic. I thought it pretty as a girl’s name – but no, it is a boy’s name!
Lois Elsden 