Well, a lot depends on what kind of story you are writing. If you are writing general fiction you can use fairly standard names. There are a couple of tricks that can help you quickly choose one. If you are writing high fantasy, then names like Joe Murdock probably won't sound too good, and you need some more ancient/medieval sounding names. Baby name books and name origin books work fairly well. But there are other good references too. And if you are writing hard SF then you can use fairly standard names, but you may need to get a good regional/ethnic mix. I have a few tricks for that as well. First off, for general fiction I keep a phone book and a 30 sided die handy. If I roll a 6, then the characters name begins with F the 6th letter of the alphabet. I flip to the F's in the phone book and get a name at random (usually by closing my eyes and pointing). So let's say I got Foster. Then to get a first name, I just flip to any page and take a stab this time I got Brittney. So the character's name is Brittney Foster. But I wanted a male character, so scan up to the first male name, and I find Johnathan. So the guy is named Johnathan Foster. A quite believable name in modern American society. Sometimes I use street names too. That way I can just go with one page of the phone book, which is a little faster. I pick a page at random, stab at a name, take the first name and the street name for the character's name. If I don't like the street name I just scan up until I find one I like. Just now I got a Megan on Hazel Avenue. I don't care for Megan Hazel as a name, so the next person up lives on Forest. Megan Forest seems reasonable to me. Like I said, I use baby name books and name origin books all the time for fantasy characters. But I have a few other books that I like better. I have a whole shelf of books like The Anglo Saxon Chronicles, Mythology of [Pick One], The Elder Edda, etc. You see, ancient names sound, well... ancient. They often fit quite nicely. And don't forget to use the character substitution in your word processor to get those cool looking diacritical marks and special characters. Athelred the Unready just looks better as Ǽthelred the Unready. Now with Hard SF I will often find I have a crew of highly trained professionals of various ethnic/national origins (think of the Star Trek bridge). So I need first and last names that work correctly together. Here is where I use the web almost exclusively. I generally use two sites; kabalarians.com and Google. Go to the Kabalarian Philosophy web site. It's at www.kabalarians.com/ . I think it's a bunch of hooey but they have a fantastic database of names of just about every ethnic/national group. A wonderful site for foreign names. They seem to have recently put restrictions on access to some of the names in the database, but you can still get a good sample. Need Japanese male name? Click on View Baby Names in the left column and then from the ethnic index that comes up click on Japanese from the Male portion. They have 2000 of them to choose from. I use the die at this point to decide on a first initial. I rolled a G. The only Japanese male name listed is Gaizaburou. Then I do a Google search for the nationality I'm interested in and search for Surnames. So I'd ask Google for Japanese surnames. You'll usually find something. I found a site with the 10 most common, so I pick one Nakamura. So my flight engineer is Gaizaburou Nakamura, but his friends call just him Gazzy. Well, that's how I do it. Hope it's useful. jon

 
~jon
My Blog - Mad Utopia Writing in a new era.