Reasons why I'm bad at this
1. I hate naming characters after people I know because I can never distance myself from the person I know.
2. I hate incredibly strange names that nobody can pronounce. And they sound like their parents must have been some famous person to want to name their child something so ridiculous.
3. Too plain and you don't remember the character.
Once in the book I wrote previously but gave up on, there was this one character that I could never come up with a name for. I needed a name just so it would make sense and I'd be able to keep track of him. He was kind of like the bad guy so as a stand in name I picked the name of someone I hated... I picked Justin (as in Justin Bieber) you know, as a joke, I was going to change it later. But after I finished I realized the character had kind of just grown into the name. It's like when you meet someone they might not look like their name but that's how you picture them and it just makes sense. Or like, if you saw someone for the first time with glasses on and years later they get contacts they don't seem like the same person. So needless to say the character became that name even if it didn't really suit him. And I think that's the problem, I can't just give my characters random names because although in the end, it might make sense to me for them to be called that, to the readers it is going to seem absolutely ridiculous.
4. That's another problem I have... I don't want the names to have too much meaning but I don't want them to have no meaning at all. Because, what are the odds the parents of the character would name their child something that meant like warrior and they go on to save the world in some epic battle. It just seems too perfect.
Anyway, that leaves me scrolling through lists of names going... "No, no, nope, no, no, how is that even a name?! no, no, definitely not! no, nope."
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