TL;DR
A name is the first sentence you write about a character. Anton Chigurh unsettles you before he speaks. Dolores sounds harmless, and that’s the trap. Names signal class, culture, era, and psychology before the reader processes anything else, and this course teaches you to choose that signal deliberately. It also shows how to use AI to push past the default names every generator produces, never to name your cast for you.
Anton Chigurh. You can’t picture that name on a friendly person. It sounds wrong in a way you can’t place, and it makes you uneasy before Javier Bardem says a word. Cormac McCarthy didn’t pick it randomly. Dolores in Westworld sounds plain, dated, a little dowdy, a name built to make you underestimate her. When she becomes dangerous, the name turns ironic in the best possible way.
Most writers treat naming as an administrative task. Pick something, move on. The writers who treat it as craft get a tool that works on every page: a name that carries class, culture, era, and psychology before the first line of dialogue. This course teaches the difference.
Few craft choices get less respect than naming, and I think writers pay for that in every chapter.
A reader meets the name before the face or the voice. If you grab the first thing that sounds okay, you’ve handed the reader a first impression you never examined. I’d take a writer who agonizes over a name for a week over one who treats it like filling out a form.
Names are working before the reader knows it
Names do their work before the reader notices.
Readers form opinions about characters before the first line of dialogue.
The name arrives first, and it carries signals whether you chose them or stumbled into them. Vito, Michael, Sonny, Fredo: nobody in that family is named Brad. Every Godfather name places its owner in a culture, a family hierarchy, a generation, without a word of explanation.
The Sopranos ran the same discipline. Tony, Paulie, Silvio, Janice sound like they came from a specific neighborhood because they did. Ozark gives you Marty, Wendy, and Ruth, and each one carries class and region before the character opens their mouth. Get the name wrong and your prose fights that signal on every page. Get it right and the name does quiet work every time it appears.
The Godfather names still make me grin. Nobody explains that family to you, and nobody has to. Compare that with a manuscript full of characters called Jack and Sarah because those were the first names that came up. Names like that carry no signal at all, and an empty name makes the writer build from scratch, on every page, a person the name should have started.
Watch: 4 Tips for Naming Your Characters (Fiction Writing Advice), Writer Brandon McNulty
Naming systems hold invented worlds together
The Expanse built a naming system for an entire solar system of cultures and held to it across six seasons. Naomi Nagata, Amos Burton, Camina Drummer: Belter names follow different phonetic rules from inner planet names, and both differ from Martian names. Each name tells you where its owner sits in that universe before anyone explains the politics.
Sword of Shannara shows the opposite. Shea Ohmsford and Eventine Elessedil sound like words run through a fantasy generator until something felt sufficiently elvish. No system, no cultural logic. Readers feel that absence even when they can’t name it. The course walks you through building consistent systems from scratch, with phonetic rules for which sounds appear, how syllables combine, and what patterns repeat, so your invented world feels inhabited.
The Shannara names bug me more than they probably should. A clunky name I can forgive. A world where the names obviously came from a different process than the cultures did tells me the writer never sat with the people who supposedly live there. Readers pick up on that carelessness, and once they catch it they start doubting everything else you invented.
Cultural authenticity takes research, and it shows
For The Last Candle in Constantinople, a short story set during the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the names had to be right or the story wouldn’t work. Anna, Nikolas, Theodoros, Father Gennadios. Each one is period-correct and culturally specific and establishes that world before a single line of description. Anna is a mother’s name in that world. Theodoros is a baker’s name.
That research took more time than any other element of the story, and it was worth every minute. Baby name websites can’t tell you what names existed in fifteenth century Byzantium or what they signaled about class and religion. The course covers where to look, and how to recognize you’re getting it wrong before readers call you out.
Writers skip this research because they assume nobody will check, and that assumption is lazy. Somebody always checks. A reader who knows that period or grew up in that culture will stumble over a wrong name and feel you didn’t care about their world. That reader won’t send you a polite note. They’ll close the book.
The lazy choice costs you on every page
I’ve named thousands of characters across novels and short stories, made the lazy choices, and paid for them. A wrong name is a small tax charged on every appearance: the reader’s picture of the character fights the signal the name keeps sending. The right name pays the same way, unnoticed, on every page.
That tax is the part I wish every writer would picture. One lazy name looks harmless in chapter one. By the last chapter the reader has seen it hundreds of times, and every appearance nudged them toward the wrong person. I’d sooner spend an extra hour on a name up front than pay for that mistake across an entire book.
The full handbook runs 200+ pages and covers reader psychology, genre conventions from romance to hard science fiction, and nine case studies: The Expanse, Westworld, No Country for Old Men, Dickens, Star Wars at its best and worst, Justified, Animal Farm, YA naming trends, and what happens when long-running TV series lose control of their character names.
How can AI help with Character Naming?
Your characters are yours, and no tool should name them.
Left alone, AI defaults to Wei Chen, Yuki Tanaka, and Maria Garcia, the same names every other writer using the same tool gets. The course includes 50+ prompts built to push past those defaults: generating candidates inside the phonetic rules of a naming system you designed, checking a period name against its era, and stress-testing whether a name signals what you intend. The tool widens the search. You make the choice.
The default names every generator spits out irritate me, and the writers who accept them irritate me more, because they had a free chance to tell the reader something and wasted it. Pick your names on purpose. Your readers will feel that care on every page even if they never think about it once.
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