What’s in a name (of your characters)?
Naming characters is one of the personal choices a writer has to make in developing a story. You want something recognizable, but not so familiar that it it blends in with every other name. You want it to be unique, but not so strange that it seems forced. You want it to be descriptive of the character, but not as obvious as the labels those Medieval Morality Plays used, like “Everyman.”
Every writer approaches this differently. I don’t know of any set rules, except not to have two characters whose names start with the same letter, though I see that broken all the time. When I was first getting into horror as a pre-teen, I noticed that John Saul (Suffer the Children, Cry For the Sinners, and a bunch of others I swallowed during summer afternoons) always had a character named Jeff (I think), and I wondered if that was a friend of his. Ian Fleming really knew someone named Goldfinger, and George R.R. Martin seems to take common names and changes a single letter: Jeffrey > Joffrey, Peter > Peter (“Littlefinger”), Edward > Eddard. Though Star Wars characters seem to be named random syllables, many original characters are actually carefully named. My favorite is that the Mentor-like character Obi-Wan is related too the Nigerian word “ubio,” or “obeah,” meaning “sorcerer.”
I like to look up the meanings of names, but sometimes that veers too closely to “Everyman,” so often that’s just a starting point. In my first book, Night of the Furies, the main character was based on the mythological character Orestes. I couldn’t used that, of course (though I discovered an Oreste in the mainly Italian cemetery nearby - more on that below), so I played with the sound, and used the “or” to get to Giorgio/George. In my newest, Dark Heat, which is a retelling of the Jason and Medea myth, I took a different route. The main character, Starr, had her name before she had a story. Honestly, I don’t know where it came from. Only after the book came out did I realize it’s Ringo’s last name, but there’s no connection. The Jason character became “Chase,” which I thought was close to the original and suggested his quest, but, using Martin’s formula, was far enough away to be unique. Eventually, though, he became “Jase” because, yes, there was another “C” name that couldn’t be changed.
While the story evolved, the people around Starr took on personalities of their own. They still didn’t have names, but as we drove along 128 heading to our annual camping trip I passed this sign in Waltham, MA:
The alliteration struck me, as well as the idea of a cold, unbending character named Winter, called “Wint.” He became the Aeetes character in the myth, with his beloved son. I followed the nature theme, to come up with “Clay” for that character, which is the translation of the Biblical “Adam,” which fit in with some of the themes of Starr’s tale (no spoilers here!). Faced with the Chase/Clay conundrum, I couldn’t find anything that replaced the latter, so that’s where Jase came from.
One last bit. I live near several cemeteries, which are great for both dog walking and character naming. You get to know what names were popular at different historical points, and some of them just beg for stories. I have a story being published soon with a character named Florence Uglieta Solari, names that come from several Italian-language stones. At first, “Florence Uglieta,” to our eyes, looks, well, ugly and old-fashioned. But it occurred to me that “Uglieta” is probably pronounced “Yulieta,”, or “Juliet.” Suddenly, she becomes the romantic, “Flower of July”! Across the way is sunny “Solari” and the pretty picture is complete. The transformation suggests a slew of stories, and… you’ll just have to wait to see how that turns out.
How do you approach naming your characters? I’d love to know!
