How To Give Characters Random Names

When I started writing erotic fiction on Literotica a year ago I vowed never to give characters names of people I know. Well, about 10 months and 12 stories later I found out I was out of names. I either didn't know enough names or I knew too many people (I hope it's the latter). So when I exhausted the appelations of my obnoxious flatmates and the mean girls on my high school cheerleader team I was faced with a dilemma: I either had to find a way to generate plausible character names randomly, or write about my gay step uncle shooting hot blobs of cum in the mouth of the batty Estonian lady at the drycleaners'.

If you find yourself in a similar situation (gay step-uncles and Estonian cleaning ladies abound) you might find it instructive to duplicate this relatively simple (if you are familiar with the software) Microsoft Excel procedure I devised in order to generate random character names:

Step 1 >>> Here is where your undergraduate tuition is finally going to pay off! You need to access free US Census population data online at: http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/names_files.html

It gives you 1000+ of the most common male and female names in the USA.

Now go ahead and open the "dist.male.first" link. It will open as a text file - a bunch of names and their frequency among US males.

Step 2 >>> From your window menu, click on "Edit/Select All". The entire jumble of names and numbers is now selected. Click on "Edit/Copy" to copy it.

Step 3 >>> Open Microsoft Excel. You need to have it in order for this cunning trick to work.

Step 4>>> Select the first cell A1, then click on "Edit/Paste" in the Excel window. You now have the all the male names on the first 1300 rows of your workbook.

Step 5>>> This is not really essential since it won't interfere with the procedure, but you might want to delete the useless numbers next to the names you need. The easiest way to do that is to click on "Data/Text to Columns", press "Next" "Next" and "Finish" on the window that appears, and then get rid of the columns that the numbers got sorted in. You can also keep the columns if you want to use the data for something else, say a sociology paper ;)

Step 6>>> In cell B1 type (without the quotation marks)the following: "=RAND()". This function generates a random number between 0 and 1 (say 0.1532) adjacent to the first name in A1.

Step 7>>> Now, in cell C1 type this: "=IF(B2<0.999,1)". This means that cell C1 will return "1" if the number in B1 is less than 0.999 and "FALSE" if the number is greater. I chose to do it with "FALSE" because it is easer to spot when you scroll down fast as you search.

Step 8>>> Drag-Paste the B1 and C1 cells on the next 1219 or some rows to repeat the function for each name. If you don't know how to drag paste - select both B1, C1 ro both, then click on the little black sqare that peeks on the lower right corner of the selection border. Holding your mouse down (the cursor looks like a gun sight) drag the expanding selection field down. It makes all the cells equivalent to B1 and C1 (but relative to their own row).

Step 9>>> You are almost done! Now repeat the same process for the female names using the "dist.female.first" file and pasting the names in cell H1 or in another worksheet. The female names are actually 4,200+ but you can use only the top 1000 if you don't like to bother. I personally like the fact that there is a wider selection of femmes to choose from, since my stories often involve several exotic ones doing each other, or touching themselves and pining over some guy with a bland name.

Step 10>>> You are ready to roll! To use your random names Generator, simply press F9 on your keybord. Excel reshuffles the random numbers and you have character names for your stories! Sometimes you will get several or no males, and most often several females (in which case you will be obliged to write about threesomes and foursomes!). You can adjust the probability in the if function to correct for that, but you don't really need to. Just Press F9 repeatedly until you get enough names to fill your plot!

So what are you waiting for? Spin the Fuck-Wheel of Fortune! Isn't it fun?? And you don't feel guilty if the name of someone you know ends up on all fours with two cocks in her mouth! (well ok, I have taken all family members off the list)

Let's see...

Elmo is going down on Deedee tonight...

Enjoy :)

Sidenote: I use the same method to generate fantasy names and random events for role-playing games at my school.