by Jodie Renner, freelance editor, @JodieRennerEd
Have you ever read a book where the name of the main character was jarring to you, seemed inappropriate, or just wrong?
Or have you mixed up two characters because their names were similar? Or said “Who’s that?” because suddenly the author started using a character’s nickname or first name, when previously all you knew was their last name? What you choose to name your characters can be the difference between annoying/confusing your readers and having the story flow naturally, with all the little details falling into place to make a seamless, believable story world.
A few years ago, I did a critique of a novel in which the cruel, abusive father was named “Danny” and his eight-year-old abused son was named “John.” I definitely thought “Danny” sounded much more like a nice kid than a nasty adult, and why not give the young boy a more kid-like name, like “Johnny”? Switching the two names would have worked fine, too.
Here are some tips for naming your characters:
– Avoid too-common and too-forgettable names like “Jim,” “John,” “Bill Smith,” or “Bob Jones.”
– Avoid really weird, unusual names that draw attention to themselves — unless it’s for a really weird character!
– Choose a name that fits the character’s personality and role. Don’t name your he-man hero “Harold” or “Wilfred,” or your despicable villain “David” or “Josh” or “Jordan” or “Richard” or “Jason” or “Matt” or any other very popular name. People don’t want a nasty bad guy to have the same name as their brother, boyfriend, husband or son.
– Avoid old-fashioned names for contemporary characters, like “Ebenezer” or “Cuthbert” or “Gertrude” or “Henrietta” or “Josephine.”
– Also, to reflect the actual makeup of North American society, be sure to use some characters and names from other ethnic backgrounds besides Anglo-Saxon.
– If you’re writing historical fiction, research common names for that era and location. Don’t make the mistake of calling your 18th-century heroine, for example, “Taylor” (used only for males in that era).
– Even for contemporary fiction, don’t name your 50- or 60-something male Jordan or Brandon or Justin or Tyler or Kyle, as those names weren’t popular for babies 50 or 60 years ago. There are several websites where you can find the most popular baby names for any given year. Here’s a good one: http://www.sheknows.com/baby-names/rankings/yearly. Just type in the year to see a list of popular baby names for that year. For example, if your mail character is 52, here are some of the most popular names for boys in 1960: David, Michael, James, John, Robert, Mark, William, Richard, and Thomas. If you’ve got a 20-year old male, some of the most popular baby names for boys in 1992 were: Michael, Christopher, Andrew, Matthew, Joshua, Brandon, Tyler, Ryan, Zachary, Justin, and Kyle.
– From typing in the year of birth on the same website, here are some popular names for a 16-year-old girl, born in 1996: Jessica, Ashley, Taylor, Samantha, Alexis, Sarah, Megan, Amanda, and Stephanie. For your 25-year-old spunky, savvy heroine, some popular names for girls born in 1987 were: Jessica, Ashley, Amanda, Jennifer, Sarah, Stephanie, Brittany, Nicole, Megan, Melissa, and Danielle. For a 60-year-old woman, Linda, Patricia, Nancy, Karen, Barbara, Susan, Deborah, Carol, Sandra, Donna and Sharon were all very popular names in 1952. And an 80-year-old woman born in 1932 might be named Mary, Betty, Norma, Doris, Helen, Mildred, Dorothy, Joan, Ruth, Shirley, or Alice, among other possibilities.
– Don’t confuse your readers by naming different characters in the same story similar names, like two guys named “Jason” and “Jake”; or two women named “Eileen” and “Ellie.” In fact, it’s best to avoid using the same first letter for different characters’ names in the same book, or even similar internal sounds, like “Janice” and “Alice”; or “Helen” and “Elsie.” You can help the readers out even more by varying the number of syllables of your main characters’ names.
– Be flexible about the names you choose. As your story and characters develop, you may decide to rename some of them to suit new character traits they’ve taken on. Then you can just use your “Find and Replace” function to change the name throughout the whole manuscript in seconds.
– Finally, what about characters who are called different names by different people? That can get confusing for readers who are barreling along trying to keep up with your fast-paced plot. Suppose you have a female police officer named Caroline Hunter. The other officers call her “Hunter” at work, her friends call her “Caroline” and her family calls her “Carrie.” It would be unrealistic to have her friends and family call her “Hunter” just to help the readers out. So, as a reminder, be sure to throw in her full name from time to time, like during introductions or whatever. Also, if you start out a scene using “Hunter,” it’s best to avoid switching to “Caroline,” as the inattentive reader might suddenly wonder who this Caroline is who just walked in. Keep “Hunter” for that scene, with perhaps the occasional use of her full name. If she’s with her parents and sister, she’ll be “Carrie” but you could throw in the “Caroline” or “Hunter” somewhere, just as a reminder, like when she’s answering the phone, or when a neighbor kid addresses her mom as “Mrs. Hunter,” etc.
– Stumped for a name? Look through the phone book or name books, or Google “popular names in the 18th century” or “popular Irish names” or whatever. As you’re searching, make lists of names and nicknames that appeal to you for future writing, under different categories, like “hero,” “heroine,” “male villain,” “female villain,” “best friend,” “minor tough guy,” etc.
What about you? Have you ever read a book where you thought the main character’s name was “off”? Or you got confused as to who was who?
Jodie Renner is a freelance editor specializing in thrillers, romantic suspense, mysteries, and other crime fiction, as well as mainstream, YA and historical fiction. For more info on Jodie’s editing services, please visit her website.
Elizabeth – Thanks for hosting Jodie.
Jodie – You give really good advice here! People do pay attention to names and it is important that they fit the characters well. I especially like your advice about paying attention to the way one’s character names fit the ages of those characters.
I got the most practical piece(s) of advice from author Jeremiah Healy at a conference.
Character names should sound like their parents named them, not the author.
He also warned about similar names. His suggestion, which I began using and now can’t live without was to create a simple table or spreadsheet with letters A-Z in two columns: one for first names, the other for last names. Every time you name a character, write first and last names in the appropriate columns. You can tell at a glance if your book is full of M, J, and R characters. Before I used this system, I had a book with 3 characters named Henry/Hank–and my editor didn’t catch it.
Also, Healy suggested that if at all possible, your protagonists initials should be “dead” to any other character in the book. With series, this can get tricky, but I try to use those initials for very minor characters.
Terry
Terry’s Place
It’s so true about trending names and matching them to an era. My grandmothers who were born at and right after the 1900s names were Sadie and Minnie which are making a come back.
I don’t want my readers to be confused. thanks for the article.
Tereas
Great post. I use baby name sites a lot – both checking via the date and for ethnic names – I do that for surnames too. There are so many great names out there it’s easy to get lost in the research! :)
Thanks for having me back as a guest on your excellent blog, Elizabeth! It’s great to be back!
Margot – thanks for your comments. Can you imagine a spunky, sophisticated downtown 20-something woman called “Gertrude”? That would definitely be jarring! LOL
I write science fiction, so all but one name so far I’ve had to completely make up. I’ve kept them simple though, because the genre is notorious for long, difficult names.
Yes, Alex, I heard some good advice on that topic. Keep the name and spelling something the readers can sound out easily and pronounce in their heads! Otherwise, they’ll be subliminally (or overtly) annoyed at not being able to easily “hear” the name inside their heads.
Thanks so much for posting today, Jodie!
Names are so important–and it’s so easy for readers to get confused with similar names or names that start with the same letter. It’s definitely harder, I think, to figure out who a character is when you’re reading on an e-reader. Not so easy to flip back to see when the character was introduced.
I agree, Elizabeth — the issue becomes even more important with more and more people reading fiction on e-readers, where it is more of a hassle to check back on things.
Naming characters is a challenge and in some genres you have to completely make up names.
I don’t worry if the reader pronounces the name ‘wrong’. I think if the made up/unfamiliar name is short and clear, people will decide how to pronounce it for themselves.
As to generation appropriate names, just looking at the most popular names will fill our books with characters named John, or Jane. I like to look beyond the usual. I agree having a an 80 year old Chrystal is weird, but not impossible. Of course, that might be because my name is unusual for a woman (Perry) and I’m biased to that.
Great post.
Those are excellent tips, Terry. Thanks for sharing them!
Could you explain your last point though, about the initials being “dead” to other characters in the book? I didn’t quite get that.
I agree about the importance of names. If I can’t get the voice of the character, sometimes it helps if I change her name. No matter how much I like it. I say she lied to me :)
Teresa, I’m surprised Sadie and Minnie are making a comeback as names! But then I was surprised when “Emma” came back and it’s been pretty popular for 10-15 years now!
Jemi, I know what you mean by getting lost in the research! Takes will power to get in there and get back out fast! LOL
Great post Jodie. I just recently read a historical romance (unpub’d) novel where the hero, a Scottish nobleman from the 18th century, was called Joe or Frank or something – no title. It definitely seemed wrong to me.
I have fun looking for character names. For wealthy characters I get ideas from the Sunday NYT Style section party pages. And I get great ideas from my town’s weekly newspaper. They list the crew names for our big annual sailing regatta (there really are guys called Boomer, Whitey and Chip). Once, I got a terrific name for a drifter from down South by googling names from a historic cemetery in Georgia. You can actually find entries from the Domesday Book online if you really want good olde fashioned English names. Thanks for a great topic! Margaret
Thanks for your comments and your great tips, Margaret! That’s what I like so much about blog posts – all the awesome info that commenters share with the rest of us! Very useful strategies.
Names tend to come and go in cycles. They’re popular, then they’re not. You’re so right about choosing names that fit the time period. Thanks, Jodi and Elizabeth. I’m going to link to this on the SCN/ES Facebook page.
Good advice, Jodie. I enjoy unusual names, but only if they are written so I can pronounce them. Any time a name or place is hard to pronounce, it stops the story and I lose interest as a reader. I often use the baby names register when selecting names for characters.
In order for me to create a compelling character, I need to know his name. Often they just come to me, but if I need a bump in the right direction and the phone book isn’t helping, I use THE BABY NAME SURVEY BOOK by Lansky and Sinrod. The great thing about that book is that they associate character traits with the names.
Thanks for your comments, Helen, Jenny and Peg. Peg, I’ll have to look for that book – sounds useful.
One other idea: Once you have a name picked out, a quick search (Google/Yahoo/Bing) for that name might save you a bit of embarrassment. In the first draft of Seen Sean? I had a character with an unusual last name, but a search for her full name revealed that there was a character of the same name in an 18th-century free thinker’s novel. Since I didn’t want to be associated with that title, I changed the last name to one that still met the criteria I had in mind. But I still liked the original better.
Thanks for your comments, Perry, Jim and Carol.
Perry, I think as long as the readers can quickly and easily transfer what’s on the page to something they can pronounce, it’s not a problem.
Jim – that’s an excellent idea about googling the character’s name – you never know what you’re going to find.
Carol – I think that’s funny about changing the name of your character if you can’t quite nail the voice – hey, whatever works for you! Then maybe you could cheat and when the book’s all finished, just do a find and replace and change it back to the name you liked better! LOL
Jodie — what Jerry said was that if your character was named John Smith, then “J” and “S” should not be used for names of other characters. He stressed the importance of keeping readers tuned in to those characters and not confusing them with others. As readers, we often skim character names and our brains see the first letter or two and connect it to the character we’ve already met.
I’ve blogged and shared my spreadsheet about character naming–I’m happy to point readers to it if they ask.
Many of the names for my characters came from the Bible – Matthew, Mark, James, Sarah, etc. The others were short and sweet.
Good idea, Diane. Terry, thanks for the clarification. That sounds like a very good suggestion.
Hi,
Interesting idea to check popular baby names for a specific year. I’ve used sites like that for characters born in other countries.
Similarly to the issue of having two characters with similar names, I’ve noted some difficulty distinguishing characters in novels from Japan. I enjoy reading Japanese literature in translation but it can be difficult remembering a Miko from Musashi.
Lance
@lanceliot
This is such great advice. As a matter of fact, just yesterday I switched the name of my main character. She’d had a pretty name, but when I read it out loud, it didn’t roll of the tongue easily. But now I need to change her last name too, because both first and last names now end with a “y.”
Hi Elizabeth and Jodie – I so agree .. I ‘hate’ reading a book when the character’s name doesn’t ring true somehow … can quite understand what you’re saying: or the name is out of date as far as history timeline is concerned ..
Cheers Hilary
Good idea to change the last name too, Julie. And make sure neither of the names start with the same letter as or are too close in sound to any other character names.
Thanks for your comment, Hilary. :-)