I came to the conclusion a couple of weeks ago that I needed to rename all the characters in my book except for the MC. Have I managed to do that yet? No. None of them seem right. What’s worse, because I need so many of them, it feels overwhelming.
If you are one of those people who can use a generic name until the right one comes along, more power to you. I can’t.
I really don’t enjoy trying to come up with the right name for each character. It’s downright painful sometimes, like trying on a pair of shoes in the store and you think they feel pretty good but who’s to tell when you wear them to work and it’s too late to send them back and suddenly you have a blister on your heel and you fold squares of toilet paper into a wedge and stuff it into the shoes so you can make in til the end of the day and then the next day the thought of even looking at those shoes makes you want to cry. (This can’t just happen to me, right?)
Tonight’s mission is to find one name, just one and I’ll be happy. Like a name for a rough-around-the-edges adult female character who becomes a mentor of sorts to the MC. Or names for the 3 or 4 kids that are obstacles to the MC through-out the book. Or a name for the dog even. Sheesh. It shouldn’t be that hard. But it is.
Flipping through the baby books isn’t doing it for me this time and I don’t think I even own a phonebook anymore (which is how I came up with my own name). So what do you do to find the right name for a character? And when you pick a name, does it feel instantly right or do you have to break it in, just like that pair of new shoes?
I mostly enjoy coming up with names, but it does stop me when I’m drafting if I don’t have the right name for a character. I’m really picky about names, about how they sound, what they mean (doesn’t always have a one-to-one correspondence with the character’s personality, but it helps me to have some kind of indirect connection), their origin, how they work with other names in the story, what they sound like shouted, whispered, etc. If I have to stop and rename a character because a name isn’t working, it frustrates me to no end.
What’s even worse is when I realize that the perfect name isn’t something I can use. I wrote an entire draft with my antagonist having a name I really wanted for him–it was commonly used in the time period and the country, had a hard sound at the end, and didn’t overlap any of the other names in terms of how it sounded or how it looked on the page. Then, a YEAR into the draft, I realized that I’d given this character, who was rough and abusive to everyone, including his own family, the same name as my brother-in-law, who is not like that at all, whom I quite like, and who would never let me hear the end of it if he were to ever read the story. How I missed that connection for an entire year, I have no idea, except that I was so enamored of the name that I didn’t put two and two together.
Part of the fun–and the problem–with writing historical fiction and/or fantasy is that there’s more research involved in the naming process. And sometimes there’s creation of names, which can be fun, just playing with the sounds of syllables. But they have to fit the language and style of the story world, and, if it’s historical, the ethnicity and the time period. (Not a lot of Lances and Mylies in medieval Cornwall!)
Good luck with your mission–I hope you find more than one right name tonight!
Oh you and I are SO on the same page. The wrong name is just, well, WRONG. I have had the characters in this book all named after airplanes for 20 years. Now I realize that was just a wee bit “over the top”. Argh.
I’ve found one new one so far.
Boy I can sympathize! Personally, I can’t really nail who a character is until their right name comes to me. Often the “right name” will scream itself out while I’m taking a walk or something, and invariably it will sound totally inappropriate and unlikely, but I just know it’s right. Like when I realized the sister character in Whisper wasn’t named Cassie as I originally planned with my rather transparent Greek Mythology symbolism… no, she was named Icka. Why? I don’t know. I had to shrug and change it. Once I did, she came to life. A name makes a person real to me as much as or more than a physical description does.
It’s unlikely to work, but I’d be happy to at least take a crack at coming up with some names for your characters who live in the South Bay today. How old are the kids and adult female you’re trying to name? And what nationality/cultural background?
That is such a kind offer, thank you. I may post tomorrow about my final holes in the name game and see if you have any ideas. I’m closing in on them but heck if it isn’t one of the toughest parts of the process for me. It almost makes me want to plot.
Almost. 🙂
Here’s a thread on Verla’s about name websites.
http://www.verlakay.com/boards/index.php?topic=4430.0
There are name generators, too.
I’ve used The Writer’s Digest Character Naming Sourcebook by Sherrilyn Kenyon with Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet.
Thank you! Those are some great links and not ones that I would normally have gone to for names. They’ll help me think names a bit differently which is good.
Actually, I generally use the first name that pops into my head that feels “right.”
On occasion, I’ve changed names if something in the character changes, or if it just no longer seems to fit, or whatever.
Maybe I’m TOO relaxed about it. 🙂
Nope, that’s usually what I do to. Most times I have a character who starts talking to me and I either hear their name or ask them and they tell me. But nothing about this book is going the way the others ones have. I think it’s because I am spending so much time thinking about plot before writing. Or it could just be that I am, once again, making the complex more difficult. 🙂
Sometimes a name pops right into my head and that’s a happy time! Other times I just know what letter it needs to start with and then I hit the naming books.
Sometimes I have no idea. Those characters usually fail because they aren’t talking to me about other things, too, not just their names.
And once their name is set, it’s SET. It would pain me to change it!
(And yes, the shoe thing happens to me too.)
Glad to know I’m not the only one on the shoe thing. 🙂
I don’t know what hurts more right now, the pain of having to change the names or the pain of not being able to find the right ones right now! LOL.
I’ve found one – only 7 to go.
I love it when I find a name and a character grows from it, like a pearl around a grain of sand. But the other way around? Ack. That can keep me obsessed for weeks. Sometimes I just force myself to stick with a name and it gradually feels like it fits better. For the last character who needed renaming, I started a little contest with a critique as a prize. It worked because I told myself I *had* to pick one of the names.
Whoops, that was me. Not sure why I wasn’t signed in.
I was thinking about your name contest and was almost ready to do that for this one quirky character. I described her to my husband as a lot like the grandma/nurse from Everwood and he said, “You mean Edna?” And I’m like, YES, that’s the perfect name for her.
I think you need to pick up a few teen mags and maybe an Entertainment Weekly or US magazine to have a look at names that might work for you. Maybe the visuals will help spark a little something.
Believe it or not, looking through magazines like those is not something I’ve ever done on a name search. Anything is worth a try. Thanks!
I love name searching. Mostly names come first for me –then the story. I search for the right one amid class lists while I sub, on baby name sites, on the news, everywhere… Once in a while I pick a name, bring a chapter to my terrific crit group and am told it doesn’t work… that stumps me for a bit. I find it more difficult to change a name midstream. Good luck!!
When I first started writing I used to keep a list of names that were interesting to me. Over time I realized that while the list was interesting I never used a name from the list to name any of my characters. But I think I was in a different place then and I might start doing that again.
In one book I wrote now sadly OP, I kept trying to force this name on a character until I finally realized that it was not his name, didn’t suit him at all and I changed it. Names are important.
I feel the same way, Barb, that the write name helps the character come to life or not. I’m sure non-writers think it all very strange.
I stink at names. Usually the mc’s name comes pretty easily, but all the side characters…ugh. On my one novel ms that’s sitting there waiting for me, pretty much all the names need to be changed. Crap.
Maybe this is why I like poetry so much? Hardly anybody gets named in poems!
LOL on the poetry not needing character names. I hadn’t thought about that.
I’m trying to figure out if I can get away with NOT giving everyone last names too!
P.S. What setting do you have it on so that people’s images show up by their comments?
I’m answering the easy stuff first – 🙂
Go to
Customize Your Theme
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and then under Presentation is
Show Userpics on Entries
Thank you, Susan. I feel like such a fraud blogging, sometimes. I don’t know why I didn’t find that. Though I am getting better at some things, like keeping my sidebar full of stuff I want there. But the simple stuff that just requires clicking…that apparently stumps me.
You da blogging bomb.
You and me, sometimes we think too much. 🙂