Character Names

I feel almost positive I’ve posted on this topic before, but I can’t seem to find it in the archives (some day, I shall create and index of this stuff…), and besides, it’a really important topic to me, so let’s go ahead and talk about it again. About a moon and a half ago, Kristen Painter posted on this topic over at her blog, and I somehow missed it, which is too bad, becuase it’s one of my favoritest topics of all time.

I once attended this lecture by this famous Dickens scholar, and he said that Dickens had four rules of writing that he’d picked up from his childhood nurse who used to tell him scary bedtime stories about a pirate named Captain Murderer. I really can’t remember the other rules, but one stuck with me, lo, these many years hence. (Which is actually quite impressive, given that I did this in high school.) The rule is: give your character a name that helps to reveal his personality.

And, goodness gracious, but was Dickens a master at this. Little Nell and Scrooge and Tiny Tim and Pip and Betsey Trotworth and Oliver Twist and on and on and on… I think JK Rowling does similarly well with her character-naming. I like Mr. Olivander and Professor Sprout, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin especially.

I find that I think about names more and more with every work. With my first two books, I picked names that I thought sounded good. Looking back, it’s kind of obvious to me that I wasn’t doing so well in the realm of last names. I was just using first names. Only later did I realize that if I made a hero’s last name “Connor”I was keeping myself from using Connor in future books. Ooch.

My first book, the main characters were Jill Jensen and Nathaniel (Nate) Harvey. He called her J.J., and there was a whole running “giant rabbit” joke going on with the Harvey name.

In my second book, the main characters were Ethan Connor and Margaret (Garet) Ross. Again with the first name-as-last name thing. I was also going in weird directions with nicknames. I still think it worked well in the story (Garet was a tomboy, so her masculine nickname looked cute on her), but I hadn’t yet realized what an overused device that was, and how every amateur writer and network sitcom developer on the face of the planet thought it as fun to give their characters cutesy and unusual nicknames. A few years on the contest judging circuit cured me of this particular ailment.

Book number three (unfinished) starred Tai Leavengood and Dylan Morrow. I was getting better with the last names, and had managed to even get a little meaning in there. Tai was a good time girl, and Dylan was the one who was going to make her settle down. It worked well. Wish the booked has worked as well.

Finished book three wasn’t a romance, and it had a lot of characters with very complex names, all of which had multilayered meanings. My heroine was Kathryn (Kix) Hamlin, and there’s a nickname I’m still happy with. She had a de facto parental group, Bernie and Bianca, and even a family of nemeses, who had the last name Gudrun. She also had a love interest by the name of Vincent Voronin, who was one of my more interesting naming stories.

His name was originally Victor Voronin, and he had an attitude like Vin Diesel. But as I was writing the first scene in which he appeared, his name suddenly switched, of its own accord, to Vincent, his character clicked into place, and he became very unlike Victor. He became much more suave, urbane, walk-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick, tender, and had a much better sense of humor, making him the perfect foil to my embittered, tough, by-the-book heroine. I didn’t even realize his name had changed until the end of the scene, but by then, I knew it was perfect. So Victor got the ax, replaced (occasionally, find-and-replaced) by Vincent — kind of like when movie starts recasting mid-shoot. It was awesome.

This book is probably the unsold book of mine that have the most interest in selling some day, not least because of the cool story told by the names, which are major clues to the plotline. Unfortunately, the one market I sent the book to did not share my vision, and wanted me to not only change all the characters, but change their names as well. I’m still mystified as to how the editor in question could have taken offense from the origin but not have picked up on the homage. However, I shall put it on the list of things that mystified me about breaking into that market. The list is long.

My next book had some fun names as well. The heroine, Cristina Yanes, was a spinoff character from the unfinished book, and taught me never to give my secondaries throw-away names, in case they eventually became main characters. But, more importantly, it taught me that I didn’t need to give my characters bizarre names to make them interesting. And despite her rather every day name, it did reveal soemthing about her character — namely, her heritage. (Later, I had a conversation with a multi-pubbed friend who said that she thought my chances of selling a book with a Latina heroine if I was not Latina were pretty slim — but that’s a post for a whole other time.) Cristina’s costar was Jonathan (Jonah) Gallow, another name that I’m particularly fond of. Jonah means “unlucky” in carnie-speak, and Gallow has an awesome resonance with “gallows” — especially appropriate given not only his family’s rather public character assasination but also the fact that the man hunted ghosts for a living.

The next book was Secret Society Girl, and there’s going to be a whole section on my (soon-to-be-live) website about the character names and why I chose them. Stay tuned…