Some people who write stories spend a lot of time thinking about names for their characters. (Or at least I do, how about the rest of you?)In my current WIP, about a mother and a daughter-first their names were Iris and Ivy. People said they sounded too much alike, so I changed the mother's name to Lily. But pure as a lily-she wasn't.
So I decided I'd call her Eve but people said Eve and Ivy sounded too much alike.
So now their names are Eve and Christine. These names finally feel right and I am sticking with them.
As a reader, do you give much thought to character names? Do you ever say, I just don't believe in a villainous woman named Mary. Or a saintly woman named Eve. Or do you seldom think about names at all? I can't ever remember thinking a name didn't suit a character as a reader, but I sure think about it all the time as a writer.
What character names were perfect? Lew Archer, surely.
Luke Skywalker was such a great name that I know an attorney who changed his name to it. No kidding!
37 comments:
My wife has an eye for that and constantly (and thankfully) has me changing character's names. Because, if left up to me, everybody would be John, Mary, Bill, and Sue. And their friends would be Jack, Margie, Bob, and Lou.
Better too plain that too fancy, I think. And those names are coming back so perfect for children now.
What else could Mike Hammer be named?
I don't spend too much time on names, but I also change them fairly often as the story moves along. (Thank God for Find and Replace.)
I have only two rules for names when reading, and i try to follow them when writing: they can't be too similar (without a reason), and I need to be able to pronounce them--or at least think I can--in my head. Keeps me away from a lot of Russian and Asian novels, many of which I'm sure are good, because I get tired of fumbling through the names.
One of the more "interesting" names for a story's character appears in Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People": Manley Pointer, the predatory Bible-salesman, "seduces" the no-so-attractive Hulga and runs off with her wooden leg as his conquest trophy.
Let's face it. You gotta love that kind of a name for a backwoods Casanova.
The only problem with find and replace is if those letters are in other words-sometimes you don't spot them
Perfect name-George Babbitt and Elmer Gantry were perfect, too. Atticus Finch, 'Ratso' Rizzo, Holden Caulfield and Scarlett O'Hara all memorable, too.
Names are important; they shouldn't jar or feel off. When in doubt, I usually check popular names for the year my character was born.
I tend to think in themes, otherwise I take names from the books facing me on the shelves (thus a recent hero was Damien Michelet because I had been sitting in the witchcraft section). The novel I'm revising now, almost everyone has names related to birds. I do tend to use obscure connections that only the weirdly obsessed will know and will chuckle over (how many people would actually recognize the name Kit Barrington anyway?). I've used peripheral stops on the Tube; at present I'm using beers for names in a book I'm working on (thus the bad gal is named Abita). In Pelzmantel I named the heroine and hero after the two most hated people in Njal's Saga, which amused me and maybe three other people in the world. As I said, obscure.
I'd agree that Iris and Ivy were too close just because I do find it easy to confuse characters with the same first letter, but I like having the floral theme.
Great character names? Modesty Blaise -- liked it so much I swiped it for Chastity Flame. Kilgore Trout, Sweeney Cassidy, Moll Flanders, O.
I don't want the names to be close, and that includes the same number of letters or even what I think of as "feel". I read a novel with two main characters Morgan and Duncan. I had a very hard time remembering which was which until I used a mnemonic for each.
I don't mind complicated or unpronounceable names if I can keep them straight, but if there are several (such as in the Icelandic mystery I read a year or two ago) it's hopeless.
The Find & Replace feature has an option to find only whole words. Used in concert with autofill it's very handy and saves a lot of keystrokes.
Assign your character, after you have a name, an auto-fill code (say the character is named "Beverly". Assign bvy to her and type that for her name throughout. Later, F&R bvy for Beverly, or F&R bvy for another name... )
I'm just going through this with a story. I stared with the name Jamie for a male adult character and decided that didn't work. So now I'm using "Hugh" but am still not happy.
Perfect character names? How about Bruce Wayne? Also coming to mind are Gandalf, Peter Wimsey, Charlene Harris' Sookie Stackhouse, Frtiz Leiber's Grey Mouser, and Lennie Small from Of Mice and Men.
I just use the names of people I know.Oliver Robinson, in my story The Tut, is actually called Oliver Beacock Robinson but I thought the name was a bit too weird. Maybe I should have left it in?!
Marlow is a good name because of the Conrad hat-tip to another 'searcher'. Nick Glass in Alan Guthrie's SLAMMER because he's aboit to shatter...
Patti - Oh, I think about character names, too, and I know just 'zactly how you feel about names just feeling right. In my own WIP, one of the characters has been created just because his name popped into my head, so I created a character around the name. Of course, I took the easy road for two of my characters; other people named them ; ).
If I don't have the right name, I can't write the character. Odd, but true. I try not to have names that sound too much alike, or names that are too difficult to pronounce.
oh I'm terrible with coming up with character names. I am also ashamed to admit that I have a hard time remembering people's names sometimes, which can be very embarrassing.
As a reader I don't pay much attention to names as long as they're easy for the reader to keep straight. But some really do stand out. R. T. reminded me of what a great namer Flannery O'Connor was. My favorites are Tom. T. Shiftlet from "The Life You Save May Be Your Own", and Pitty Sing, the cat from "A Good Man is Hard to Find".
Yes, similar middles are as bad as similar beginnings. Also two names that are really last names.
And it does irk you to not have the right names. Yes, a great name can create his/her own story.
Cullen-wait until you begin to forget faces and names. I have never thought about using the names of people I know. Hmm.
I use the social security roles all the time.
I won´t say I spend a lot of time on it, but it means much to me to get the names right. I check that people were really called that name at the time when my character was born, and I ´taste´ the name carefully - a cold and nasty person should not have a name that is too cute or vice versa. And I also try not to give characters similar name - a tough task, though, when you write in more than one language which is why I usually change the names if I translate a Danish story into English. It may not be necessary the other way.
Character names are great if they're perfect, but they can so easily slip into self-parody if you try to hard. Better to be a little boring than laughable.
Dull over dopey any day.
I don't spend a lot of time on names - they usually snap into place quite quickly. The only thing I do occasionally is look up surnames common in a certain part of Ireland - there is a strong geography to surnames - so that I can get a good smattering to make it match what you might expect there.
Some of my family came from Londonderry. I wonder if there's any family left there. It was in the 1860s. She came first, then brought her brothers over and they opened a tavern in Philly. Stewart was the name. Probably Scottish first.
You're right about the power of names, Patti. My wife told our daughter Katie that if she'd been reading Sue Grafton before our daughter's birth, Katie would have been named "Kinsey."
I wonder what percentage of women choose a name based on their fondness for literary or historical characters. Look at Madison. And I know more than one man who named their son Holden.
Perfect names? How about Ignatius Reilly? Horace Rumpole? Otherguy Overby?
Jeff M.
A good name can save paragraphs of exposition. As in Caspar Milquetoast or Snively Whiplash. Great nicknames work well, and honorary titles are superb, as in Colonel Blimp. I have a diminutive friend who was named Dink when he was a baby by his parents' close friend, Ernest Hemingway. To this day he's Dink. I wrote a novel with a hero named Dink, who was a rat catcher as well as private eye.
Hope this doesn't seem too macabre but--I've lost a lot of good friends over the last few years so whenever I think one of their first/ last names fits a story I use it. [Or their nicknames, and man, there were some good ones.:)]
John McAuley
I like the idea of honoring friends.
Don't you love that with google, you can find out who Otherguy Overby is in a second. Great one.
Nicknames-we just had a discussion on whether nicknames like Dink were disappearing. If Ernest Hemingway had nicknamed me Stinky, I would have kept it.
In a novel I ghosted, I had a guy who was like Geraldo, an asshole TV reporter who had a talent for getting in the way. I needed a name.
My daughter was in the University of Richmond at the time and my wife had scribbled a note by the phone abbreviating it to URich.
Urich, I thought, was a good last name. But the first name had to nail it.
The athletic teams at Richmond are the Spiders. So, we had a reporter named Spyder Urich.
It was the easiest character name I've ever worked on.
Changing the i to a y made it more distinctive, too. It's nice when it just pops up instead of all the changes or agonizing. I wonder if females fret over names more--like with naming babies.
Names are always a problem for me. I can't write a story about a Sue thinking that name isn't right but I'll change it later. I can't get into the character's head if I don't even know her name. Yesterday was particularly bad. I was writing a story with all Chinese characters.
I could never do that. I can barely handle Southerners.
Well, Kilgore Trout was Kurt Vonnegut's lovingly back-handed tribute to Theodore Sturgeon. I think it's hard to miss. Though it was also clear that Vonnegut wanted his analog to Sturgeon to have a name that sounded a bit like "Kurt Vonnegut"--since KV said Trout was himself, as well.
Ian Fleming was clownishly bad at character nomenclature. While Arthur Conan Doyle named his characters with elan.
Fleming -- wow, he really was the worst. Pussy Galore! FFS, there's a lot to be said for subtlety being more effective. Even for all the silly funny names, the best and most effective names Douglas Adams created were Arthur Dent (how much more quintessentially English can you get?) and Ford Prefect (the perfect attempt by an alien to capture that perfection, missing by a mile [yet also capturing the English anxieties about American productivity also).
Austen's names were always good. How perfect Fanny Price - for the shy, retiring do-gooder to have such a scandalous name (possibly; it may go back to Cleland's heroine, another fine name).
Word verification: waltr (perhaps a character whose name is misspelled and birth but he keeps it?
Your post title is the epigraph to Johnny Porno. We used that name at the risk of turning off some readers/libraries but it couldn't have fit the storyline better.
Characters names are important to me and after reading a few Checkov plays again, I gave myself a few headaches; then again, I doubt Mr. Chekov was concerned about his future English audience. Names can get in the way or make the ride a smooth one. I like to be able to identify quickly with names, so I do care about them.
As for book titles, only 1 of my books wasn't my own title (the first--suggested by my first agent); for me it has to feel right (the title) so it's important.
As for buying others books, I'm a huge sucker for both titles and covers ... never blurbs, but titles and covers will do it almost every time.
I tend to go for exotic names for characters once they have a page or two written about them. Often it depends on what that character is (human or non-human).
I wrote a short story which included a character named Myrna Plumley: “Her yellowed frizzy hair was even more disheveled than normal, which, along with her spindly legs and decrepit body, was not a vision you wanted seared into your memory.”
I based her on my late mother-in-law. The story was posted online for a couple of years. One day I got an e-mail from a woman named Myrna Plumley who wanted to know how I happened to choose it.
A poorly chosen name will ruin a story/book. Years ago, a blogger asked his readers for help with his WIP. He named the main character Jake Black, who was supposed to be something like Clint Eastwood, but everyone kept thinking of the gross 'funny man' Jack Black. The story was good, but the name ruined it.
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Myrna Plumley-wow. Would think you were safe with that one.
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