Family names appearing in stories

I wouldn’t use the names of my close family in stories but fill them with the names of people I have known or met. I have occasionally read a story in here with a character with my name, and I find it quite amusing.

Reading stories doesn't concern me too much, but I definitely avoid using the names of the people I know closely from the stories I write.

I have had no reservations about using the surnames from my extended family, what with them being so commonplace: Plumpbottom, Prisiwell, Whiffle, Tinglebutt, Bigrump, and of course Marlowe. One of my cousins is named "Julie Baker," but the author here of that name won't own up to being my relative.

I based most of my stories on real people and events and use the real names in the early draft of my writing. i then use "find and replace" to change the names but I usually retain the same first letter to the name to help myself with the characters. I haven't publish here yet though.

My "only you" comment was glib. On reflection, I don't have any problem with reading stories that use close family names but I don't use such names for characters in my own fiction. It's just that if any of them read any of my stories, very unlikely in my lifetime, I wouldn't want them thinking that it was wishful thinking on my part. It wouldn't have been, but that might be the perception.

I intentionally use names of spankees that I know or have known, as I would want them to think it was wishful thinking on my part.

Rarely, I use names of females with whom I have fallen out of contact, not always spankos, in combination with circumstances that they would remember, so, were they to read that particular story they would recognise themselves, and might be tempted to renew contact. After all, they wouldn't be accessing LSF if they weren't spankos. It hasn't happened yet!

Geoffrey Stirling.

The names I use most often come from pages listing the top 1000 names in the US and UK. I figured that the readers would feel most at home having familiar names in the story. I copied a list and then I tick them off as I use them, trying to get a variation from story to story. I think I have used close to a hundred different names so far. For seedy persons or femme fatales I often pick combinations from the scene names on a page listing the 100 most popular US porn stars. So when authoring, for me it's usually not what name to pick, but rather scrolling down a list to see what names I haven't used for a while.

I'm writing on a story about three Swedish exchange students and for them I picked names with Swedish spelling, lika Ängla, Älva and Örjansdotter. Incidentally, there are 53 different Swedish female names beginning with the vowel Ö alone (that's not the same vowels as A and O by the way), so thinking of it, I could actually use different names with the letters å, ä and ö for all my characters forever, making them really stand out in the crowd, but I wonder what scenario the reader would imagine then, when finding such odd names of the characters

Gloup/glagla

I used to have (lost it when my computer broke down) a list of names I'd already used, to avoid re-using them. I remember I had a lot of Sarah's.

Sometimes I mix-and-match author names from my bookshelves, or, if I'm really stuck for a distinctive name, look at online lists of baby names, which are often broken down by nationality.

Player-Character name generators for RPGs could be useful for fantasy stories, but possibly a bit too unusual for more ordinary settings!

Part of the reason I write stories involving the same people so often is so I don't have to come up with as many new names, basically, laziness.

Seriously, many of the names I use are people I know or have known, or at least their first names, I never use the surname of someone I know, at least not coupled with their first name. The few stories I've written that are historical, or set in the fairly distant past, I've tried to use names that would have been in use then.

At times I've used first names from people who fit the characters I'm writing about, such as two teachers who were disagreeable and mean old bats, who's first names were "Eurilla,", and "Bertha." I used different surnames, and never used the city they were teaching in. However, I can imagine someone being saddled with the name "Eurilla," or "Bertha," being a grouch just because of the name they got stuck with.