There's something about Mary

[pbray]

Find the right names for your characters isn't an easy task. People ask me where I find my character names, and the true answer is everywhere. Over the years I've taken names from street signs, telephone directories, the town where my postcard supplier was located, alluded to genre tv shows, scoured lists of Olympic athletes, and even used the name of a popular manufacturer of plumbing fixtures.

Earlier this year I wrote about character naming, and for those who are interested I'm posting the article here under the cut.

There's something about Mary: Find the right names for your characters
by Patricia Bray

Choosing the right names for your characters is vital. Names set reader expectations, as much if not more than the physical descriptions that you provide. Just think of the images that come to mind when you compare the names Jack Archer and Clarence Witherspoon. Which one do you pick as the romantic hero? Will Jack be more likely to be attracted to Sydney O'Malley or Tiffany Devine?

It's important to find names that fit both the characters' personalities and the story that you are writing. Guillaume may be a lovely name for the hero of your medieval romance, but if you are writing a contemporary romantic comedy, you'd be better off with William.

Sometimes names can be used to reveal character. Think of Sara Paretsky's character V.I. Warshawski--a private detective doing her best to live down her given name of Victoria Iphenigia Warshawski. Here the author used the character's name to tell us something about the character--showing us someone who refuses to allow others to judge her by her gender.

When picking names for my characters, I'll consider the meaning of the name, as well as how it sounds when read aloud. Jane Sedgwick was the perfect name for a Regency country miss, a woman who embodied practicality, and was unused to high society. When a later book featured a wealthy and sophisticated heiress, I chose to name her Lady Felicity Winterbourne.

When I needed a name for the hero's best friend, someone whom every woman treated as a younger brother, I gave him the name Lord Frederick, known to one and all as Lord Freddie. Here the nickname was a clue to his character arc, as he struggled to be taken seriously by those around him.

Beware of using names that are too similar, especially for minor characters that make infrequent appearances throughout the book. If the reader has to pause to try and remember whether Harold is the family black sheep or if that was Howard, you've just jerked them out of your story. In real life, you may go to a cocktail party and be introduced to three Michaels and two Jennifers--not mention Harold, Hayward and Howard--but in your writing you should strive to avoid such confusion.

So, how do you find the right names for your characters?

What's in today
If you're writing a contemporary story, your best friend is a book of baby names. I gravitate to books that include ethnic origins as well as meanings. There are also numerous websites offering collections of baby names, but I prefer to page through a book as I'm collecting potential names.

For last names, there's the ever popular phone book. I'll also write down interesting names as I see them, from newspapers, sporting events, television credits, et cetera.

Beware of mixing and matching names from different ethnicities. If you don't know the ethnic origin of a name, do a little checking before you decide to use it. Consuela Murphy, whose name combines a Hispanic first name with an Irish last name, may be the product of a multicultural family, or simply named after her mother's best friend, but it's unusual enough to be noticed. For similar reasons, Hiroshi Wang, which combines a Japanese first name with one of the most common Chinese surnames, is also an uncommon pairing. There's no rule that says you can't combine names in this way, but it should be a deliberate authorial decision, one that is consistent with the character's back story and family history.

Writing about the past
Madison is a popular girl's name today, but before the movie Splash, it was unheard of. To give your story an authentic period feel, you need to research names from that era. Most baby names books don't mention when a name first came into general use, but the more scholarly references will, such as the invaluable The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names by E.G. Withycombe.

If you are writing about the recent past, there are websites that list the most common names for the past century. For other periods, you may be able to find census records, lists of tax rolls, genealogies or even entire newspapers on the internet. And remember to jot down potential names as you do your general research, especially when you have access to primary sources such as letters or diaries.

Writing about a place that never was
For my first fantasy novel I needed to create two very different cultures. The first was that of Duncaer, where my hero Devlin was from. After being exiled from his homeland, he travels to the rival kingdom of Jorsk, which has its own language and customs. To give the feeling of a common culture, I used Celtic sources to create names for people, places and things in Duncaer. For Jorsk, I used Scandinavian names, referring to Viking sagas and lists of royal genealogies to find appropriate names. Because the names in each culture share the same linguistic roots, they sound natural together. Devlin is clearly from a different culture than Solveig, Drakken, Oluva and King Olafur. I don't have to keep describing his alienation from his hosts, their very names provide subconscious clues to the reader that Devlin is a man out of place, far from his home and everything familiar to him.

This is where a name book that groups names by ethnicities, such as Sherrilyn Kenyon's Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook, is invaluable.

Here a Grimes, There a Grimes
When I was writing Regencies, I would sometimes find that I needed a name for a minor character--someone the viewpoint character would know by name, such as a housekeeper, the gentleman seated next to her at dinner, or the family solicitor. I would pause while writing to think up a name, and inevitably the character would be given the name Grimes. A solid, British sounding name, one that would disappear into the narrative. Except, of course, if you've populated your book with six different characters named Grimes. In this case the astute reader will detect a conspiracy by the Grimes family to infiltrate all levels of Regency society.

Fortunately I caught the problem during the revision stage. To prevent this from happening again, I began making lists of potential names for minor characters, and keeping that list next to the computer. As I use one of the names, I cross it off. When I start to run low, I begin trolling through my research books to come up with new ones.

When I'm working on a multi-book series, I find it helpful to keep a style sheet that lists each character. A typical entry is: Chenzira, Lieutenant Imperial Navy, illegitimate nephew of Proconsul Zuberi, Ch17. This tells me the brief facts about the character, and when they were first introduced. I can also sort the style sheet alphabetically to see which names I've already used in previous books, so I'll know not to accidentally reuse them.

So where do you look for help in find the right name for your characters? Here's a sampling of the resources available:

Books
A Dictionary of Surnames by Patrick Hanks, Flavia Hodges
From Aaron to Zoe: 15,000 Great Baby Names by Daniel Avram Richman
The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names by E.G. Withycombe (out of print--check libraries or used bookstores).
Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook by Sherrilyn Kenyon. The one naming book every writer should own.

Internet
Most popular names by year of birth (covers United States from 1879 onward): http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/

Most popular names for selected years (United Kingdom): http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nscl.asp?id=7557

Nameyourbaby.info: website from the author of From Aaron to Zoe: 15,000 Great Baby Names http://www.nameyourbaby.info/default.asp. Note, as of July 2007 this website is no longer active.

Recent popular names by country/region: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_popular_given_names

About the author
While researching this article, Patricia Bray added a new book on names to her collection, but she swears she's not addicted. A multi-genre author whose career spans both romance and epic fantasy, Patricia's latest novel is THE SEA CHANGE, which will be released by Bantam Spectra in August 2007. For more information visit her website at http://www.patriciabray.com.

This article originally appeared in the May 2007 issue of STARbursts.

Copyright 2007 by Patricia Bray. All rights reserved.

Comments

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

This is also useful for roleplayers, both players and GMs, in coming up with names.

I've sometimes borrowed the first or last name of a character from a book I've read, and appended a new one to it. (I've not touched Devlin, but I have borrowed names from Bujold and Erikson, to name two authors, and remixed them: Ingrey Wererathe, Gareth Beddict, Cazaril Sawall.)

[pbray.livejournal.com]

You're right, gamers face very similar challenges in creating unique names that fit the culture/era of the game.

Anything can be grist for the mill, and if I see a cool name, I'll add it to the list of potentials. You can always tell those who have experience, since they know to stay away from the obvious traps like Frodo, Voldemort, or Kal-El.

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

The only time I would use a name like Frodo would be if I was going for a humorous/parody sort of situation. Or a real life person.

For example, the time I created a pugnacious, warrior character called Mike, son of Ty.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

:-)

[chichiri-no-da.livejournal.com]

*coughs* Hi, I'm new XD You may recognize me from such LJ communities as novel_in_90.

Names are a huge challenge for me, because I generally either hate every name I come up with for a character, or something will stick that I'm not 100% sure is appropriate and I won't have any choice about it. I've actually had a name dictate my choices about a character's ethnicity, simply because his name stuck and would not go away.

My solution recently has generally been to pick a general ethnicity and then search genealogical websites and baby name websites. Since I scarcely ever write stories set on Earth, I generally don't have to contend with the timeline issue. (My human characters are usually either from modern day, or the future). But it's a lesson I'll take to heart in case I ever do write something set historically.

I'll definitely be bookmarking this article to refer to when I need to go searching for names. Thanks so much for posting it!

Your 'Grimes' example reminded me of when I first started writing seriously. I was about 12-13 years old and I hated coming up with names for my characters, so I started a list of names based on all kinds of things. I remember adding 'Baccus' to my list, and I think I even used the name for a main character in a short story. I had added it because it was someone's username on an IRC channel, if I recall, and I thought it sounded cool. I had absolutely no idea that it was the god of wine, and the name actually was totally inappropriate for the character that I used it for. *amused* Thus the importance of research, even for (what you think are) collections of syllables used for fantasy characters.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

*Waves Hi!*

Love your icon, by the way.

One of the nice things about the internet is that there are many good web sites where you can find ethnically/linguistically related names. These resources just weren't out there fifteen or twenty years ago. Though personally I like to flip through a book of names when I'm putting together the list of potential names to use for secondary and background characters.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Excellent stuff! Thanks for posting!

I've discovered recently that (a) it's a mistake to start naming your characters before you've had a good think about the cultural contours of their world, and (b) sometimes they just name themselves and there's no re-naming them, no matter how hard you try. My book has a character in it whose name is Joanna -- a nice, ordinary English name, and perfect for her, except that it comes from Latin via Greek and Hebrew, and, as it turns out, my characters are all happily pagan, and the Jews and Christians of my world are small, unassuming sects with little outposts around the Mediterranean, considered by the "civilized" (polytheistic) peoples around them to be eccentric and misguided but mostly harmless.

So I tried to change it, of course (and I did succeed in changing the names of several minor characters -- a Jack became a Gautier, an Evans-Jones became an Evans-Hughes), but Joanna was having none of that, in much the same way as I had intended her to be a minor character and instead she elbowed her way to centre stage. So instead I had to think about the implications of her having that name, and out of that grew two rather nice and interesting scenes that shed light on other things. I like those scenes, but every time I think about them I also remind myself that one should always look up the origins of names before allowing characters to take possession of them!

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Getting the right name for your character is like fitting a key in a lock. There's a solid connection, and once it's made, you can't rename them.

I completely understand about Joanna. Minor characters can be renamed, of course (see Grimes, above). But if it's a POV character, once I've found a name that fits, there's no changing it.

Like, oh, say, Josan, whose name is linguistically completely off the map of my world building: Latin/Roman (old nobility), Italian (lower class), Egyptian & Greek (new nobility), and French (Seddonians).

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I did kind of wonder about Josan, and thought perhaps he'd done a Joanna on you ;^).

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Well I can tap dance around it by saying that Josan was a bastard given to the monks to raise, and whoever was on naming duty that day picked a name from the book he was reading at the time. Which is completely in keeping with everything that's been revealed about his world.

So if I was a famous and self-important author I'd insist that it was planned that Josan's name be completely different, to illustrate that the monks aren't really part of the dominant culture, they are instead iconoclasts in their own little world.

But since I'm not a famous author, I'll cheerfully fess up that he did a Joanna. His name was already fixed before I did the worldbuilding.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Well I can tap dance around it ...

You mean like this?

*

“Master,” said Gray, having gently extricated himself from Joanna’s too-enthusiastic embrace of his midsection, “please allow me to introduce Miss Joanna Callender. Joanna, Master Everard Alcuin, usually of Merlin College.”

“Joanna,” Master Alcuin repeated, studying her and tugging thoughtfully at his beard. “A most unusual name.”

“Joanna is a most unusual young lady,” Gray told him dryly. Joanna sniffed – but Sophie thought she looked rather pleased.

“It is a name used among Christian sects of the Mediterranean and the Orient,” the don continued; “a Latinisation of the Greek Ioanna, which comes from the Hebrew Jokhanan, meaning, roughly, ‘gift of God’.”

“Which god?” Joanna inquired, frowning.

Master Alcuin chuckled. “Most Christians believe there to be only one,” he explained.

“How peculiar,” said Joanna. “He must be terribly busy.”

“Interestingly,” the Master replied, clearly warming to his subject, “there are other sects whose belief is that their one god is a tripartite entity – in essence, not unlike the concept of—”

“Master.” Gray’s tone was a curious blend of impatience and affection. “Another time, perhaps.”

“Of course, of course,” his teacher said, looking rather comically chagrined.

Joanna did not seem interested in pursuing the matter; but Sophie, being more inclined toward the metaphysickal, could not help remembering her mother’s words on the occasion of Joanna’s birth, and wondering.

*

It still needs work, but, as a solution to the problem, I'm rather fond of it...

[pbray.livejournal.com]

“How peculiar,” said Joanna. “He must be terribly busy.”

Loved this!

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Thanks :)

You must admit, it's a logical supposition ...

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

It's sometimes fun to play with the meanings of names, too. :-) For example, in my current WIP, there are two heroines, one of whom is dark, slender, and quietly competent, the other of whom is blonde, curvacious, and demands to be the center of attention.

So the quiet one is named Diondra (variant of Dion, From the God of wine and revelry), and the noisy trouble maker is named Iryna (Peace).

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

I think that's a great idea -- it happens to parents in the real world all the time (I have a friend whose mum named her Rosemary, obviously hoping for a frilly pink sort of girl, and instead got ... not a frilly pink sort of girl).

[melissajm.livejournal.com]

I love playing with name meanings! My current WIP, full of seraphim and demons, has names chosen for biblical meaning.
(I THOUGHT my main character, Malak, was the exception-I made up the name just because it "sounded right." Then I found out that it's Arabic for Angel. Perfect! ;))

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Very cool.

[melissajm.livejournal.com]

Serendipity is such fun. ;)

[mikandra.livejournal.com]

Cool post. I'm here through novel_in_90 and I hope you don't mind me friending this blog.

I think names are terribly important, and so are naming conventions. Just as there is a reason for Spanish girls and boys to be given Spanish names, and Jewish ones Jewish names, people start wondering if a Jewish girl has a Spanish name. So I get terribly annoyed when I read a fantasy and suddenly a character is called Jonathan.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Hi, glad to see another Novel_in_90'er.

I have the same reaction whenever I see a name that just doesn't fit.

The wrong name jerks the reader out of the story--instead of wondering what's going to happen next, they're puzzling over why there's a heroine named Madonna in a novel set in the American civil war. If I'm that reader, I start thinking "If the names are wrong, the rest of the details are probably wrong as well."

[mikandra.livejournal.com]

I read and write mostly SFF, so I'm thinking that if the author took so little care in building a believable world that he/she couldn't even find an authentic-sounding name for a character, the rest of the worldbuilding is going to be pretty slipshod as well. Seeing as worldbuilding is the major factor separating SFF from mainstream, and the reason why people read the genre... I'd be pretty darn careful about your Jonathans if I were an SFF author *grin*.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

So do I. I remember, for intance, that in a certain five-book series (sequel to a certain other five-book series) which I read in my teenage years, there are all these great, perfectly suitable names for characters and countries and stuff, and then all of a sudden a guy gets a war-horse (a boy war-horse, naturally), and the war-horse's name is ... the feminine form of a French noun.

The horse becomes a fairly substantial character, and this totally inappropriate and obviously insufficiently researched name that his author gave him made me so twitchy that I almost couldn't finish the books.

This was in The Time Before Google, I grant you, when it was harder to look stuff up without knowing what it was you might be looking for because you actually had to have some clue where to look. But still.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Ah, I remember being an author in the time before Google, back when my references for Regency names were books and journal articles.

I remember giving a presentation in 1994 to fellow authors talking about how the internet would transform our writing processes, as more and more resources became available through the world wide web.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

And did they believe you? ;^)

It really is amazing how much things have changed. I got my undergraduate degree in 1996, having spent four years in the library stacks surrounded by piles of books and endlessly photocopying journal articles from bound volumes, all found either through the hard-copy MLA Bibliographies or via long hours seated in front of a library terminal; I had Internet access only through the Writing Centre on the library's top floor, and even that was e-mail (and maybe Gopher) only, no Web. In my fourth year, when I had moved off campus, I finally got remote access to my university e-mail account (via Telemate and a 2400-baud modem). Yet colleagues who graduated only four or five years later tell me they did all their research online, had 24/7 access to the library catalogue and to resources like Project Muse and JSTOR, ordered articles through online ILL, communicated with instructors and TAs by e-mail, had course Web sites, submitted term papers electronically ...

Just amazing.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I got my masters in Information Management in 1995, and the required courses included how to use online databases, and techniques for constructing efficient search arguments, since most of these systems were pay by the minute. At the time, I was the envy of the other students, since my employer had access to Dialog, Lexis/Nexis, etc right from my desktop, whereas they had to go to the campus library to use the specially hardwired terminals to log on and do their class assignments.

Of course, I also remember logging on to campus with a 300 baud modem in my undergrad days. And my Commodore 64 terminal emulator which could only display 40 characters at a time, so you scrolled from side to side as you were editing your programs.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Whoa, desktop LexisNexis in 1995? Holy moley!

I should admit at this point that I started out as a total Luddite, using the family computer only to play Jeopardy! (from a 5.25" diskette) with my brother and bloody-mindedly writing all school assignments in longhand or on an ancient portable typewriter until the fateful day (or, rather, night) in 1991 when, with less than twelve hours to go until I had to hand in to my Grade 11 history teacher the 2500-word Guided Coursework that I hadn't yet started writing, I got my mother out of bed to teach me how to use WordPerfect 5.1. (To be fair, between my mom's work and my brother's endless series of BBSs and Quest games, it would have been hard for me to get much computer time even if I'd wanted it.) These days she e-mails me for advice when MS Word misbehaves, and I have trouble imagining what my life would now be like in the absence of practically 24/7 Web access -- not to mention that great and hallowed über-implement in the copy editor's toolbox, Google...

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I'm that smidgen older than you are-- when I was an undergrad, I would occasionally earn spare cash by typing papers for people. On my manual typewriter. Computer terminals were for writing software and using the primitive campus e-mail system. And playing Zork, of course, but it was all text based and worked just as well on a printing terminal as it did on a display screen.

I've thought before about how much a wordprocessor is part of my writing process--I'm not someone who enjoys writing huge chunks by hand, instead I like being able to type a sentence five or six times till I get it right, then move on.

If I was living back forty years ago, when typewriters were the gold standard, I'd be a different kind of writer.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

I used to write a great deal of fiction (fiction which, if rediscovering it now, I would be forced to class as Embarrassingly Horrible Juvenilia) in longhand, in notebooks of various kinds. These days, if I write anything in that way my tacit assumption about it is that it's purely for my own amusement, not even worth trying to polish up for (even limited) public consumption. A word-processor allows me, as you say, to type the sentence (or paragraph) out as it comes to me, read it back, futz around with it for five or ten minutes until it's more or less right, go on to the next thing, and still come back to it later for as much further futzing as seems necessary -- without erasings and whitings-out and mess. I can also, when I've written something and it turns out to be unnecessary, excessively purple, going in the wrong direction, or what have you, copy the offending chunk into a Deleted Bits file and thus get rid of it without actually losing it, which reassures me greatly (you never know when some rejected bit of scene-setting or conversation is going to come in handy!).

And I don't think I could be an editor without word-processors and Google and online library catalogues.