The Month I Outsourced My Character Names to Total Strangers

Naming a character is the one part of writing where I turn into a lunatic. I've spent entire afternoons on a name for a guy who appears on one page. I keep baby name websites open like it's a problem. So last spring, in a fit of frustration, I decided to stop asking myself and start asking literally anyone else.

The rules were simple: for one month, every character name had to come from a stranger. I couldn't explain why I was asking beyond "I'm a writer, long story." I wrote down whatever they said, no vetting, no take-backs. Here's how it went.

Week One: The Cashiers

I started easy. Every checkout lane I hit, I asked the cashier for a name — "a name for a character, any name." The grocery store cashier gave me Doreen without hesitating, like she'd been waiting for someone to ask. The guy at the hardware store said Marcus and then suggested, unprompted, that Marcus "seems like he'd owe somebody money."

He was right. Marcus became a small-time fence in a story I'd been stuck on for weeks, and the second he was Marcus — a guy who owed somebody money — the whole plot unstuck. Names carry baggage. I'd been picking luggage-free names for years and wondering why my characters felt weightless.

Week Two: The Bus Drivers and the Barbers

Bus drivers are a goldmine, possibly because they spend all day watching people. The driver on the 42 gave me Renata and said, "She doesn't take anything from anybody." Okay. Renata is now the spine of a story about a woman who runs a failing flower shop and refuses, on principle, to sell funeral arrangements at a markup.

My barber gave me Tuck, and when I asked why, he shrugged and said, "He sounds like a guy who fixes things he shouldn't." I wrote that down as a logline, honestly. It's better than half my outlines.

Week Three: The Party Experiment

This is where it got weird, because party people don't give you names — they give you performances. My friend's neighbor, three drinks in, insisted on Duke Wainwright, which is a name for a man who definitely has a boat and definitely shouldn't. A quiet woman by the snack table said June, then added, "like the month, not the person," which I've been chewing on ever since.

Duke Wainwright ended up in a story as a minor con man, and the name did so much heavy lifting that I barely had to describe him. Readers fill in the gaps when the name does the work. June became something quieter — a story about a woman who keeps a list of everyone she's ever lied to.

What I Learned From Surrendering Control

1. My taste was the bottleneck. The names I pick are all suspiciously similar — safe, literary, vaguely Midwestern. Strangers have no such loyalty. Doreen, Tuck, Renata, Duke: that's a range I'd never have produced alone.
2. Strangers hand you the character for free. Ask "why that name?" and people give you a whole personality in one sentence. It's the fastest character development session I've ever run.
3. Chance beats intention more often than I want to admit. Every name I'd normally reject — too old-fashioned, too flashy, too specific — turned out to be a door into the story I didn't know I needed.

Try It Yourself

You don't need a month. Try a week. Ask one cashier, one driver, one relative at Thanksgiving. The only rule is you can't say no to the first answer.

I've gone back to naming some characters myself, because a person needs to keep a little dignity. But every story I write now gets at least one name from a stranger — a small souvenir from someone who will never know they're in the book. Honestly, it's the best collaboration I've ever had, and none of us ever met.