The wild change in my dialogue after I stopped using fancy character names

I was writing this short story for months and every character had these elaborate names like Aurelius and Cordelia. Then last week I just switched to simple tags like Bob and Jane for a bar scene. Suddenly the conversations felt real and fast like people actually talk, instead of reading like a Shakespeare play. Has anyone else hit that point where fancy names just kill the flow of your dialogue?

2 comments

2 Comments

rivera.keith23d ago

Honestly the whole naming thing is a trap we all fall into because we think weird names make characters seem deeper. But here's the real issue nobody talks about. When you name your character Aurelius you subconsciously start writing dialogue that sounds like what you think Aurelius would say which is usually stiff and formal. Bob and Jane force you to write natural human speech because nobody imagines Bob speaking in iambic pentameter. It's a psychological trick on yourself more than anything. You gotta remember most real conversations are boring and repetitive and full of filler words. Throwing a crazy name on that just makes it look even more fake.

robinwalker23d ago

That bit about forcing natural speech is dead on. I had a character named Lysander once and caught myself writing stuff like "I shall not yield to such base demands" and I had to step back and realize nobody talks like that. So I renamed him Leo and suddenly his dialogue became "I mean, no way man, that's not happening." Its like the name Aurelius has a gravity that pulls the whole story into pretentious land. Bob and Jane dont have that baggage. They just talk like regular people because you cant picture Bob saying anything that wouldnt fit in a real conversation.