Naming My Characters

Most of my fiction begins with an image of a man or woman engaged in some act, caught in a freeze-frame of intent and purpose. I can see him or her, usually her, moving forward, the goal just out of view but I know it's there. This person's identity is only partly unknown. I don't have a name or full view of family and friends but I can see how she or he behaves. 

I spend time thinking about the names for my characters. Only once, after writing most of my first novel, in college, I had the bizarre idea that the main character's name was wrong for him, and decided to change it. The student who was typing my handwritten drafts was surprisingly upset. She said the story just didn't feel the same. And she was right. I took the lesson to heart. 

 

The name for any character may come as a sudden inspiration or after several minutes—or days—thinking about it. The name for my first series character, Chief of Police Joe Silva of the Mellingham series, reflects the Portuguese heritage of the area, as well as his approachability. Silva is a common Portuguese name in the towns and cities around Boston, and Joe, from Jose, underscores his basic amiability and implies all that he brings, from the Hebrew meaning "God will add." It also sounded very familiar, as typical of the Portuguese I encountered growing up.

 

In the second series, featuring Indian-American photographer Anita Ray, I wanted a name that could be both Indian and American, as well as having the lightness and cleanness of sound that most Indian names have. (This is just my bias.) I wanted the last name to also sound both Indian and American Irish, and gave considerable thought to both. When a friend casually remarked that another writer had once said her name was perfect for a character, I knew I was on the right track, and Anita Ray was born. Auntie Meena, who in India would be addressed as Meena Auntie, came easily after hearing a child call out.

 

The main character in Below the Tree Line, the beginning of a new series, had to express her Irish heritage but also her particular heritage of the female line, as a healer. The women in her family tree carried names that are mostly forgotten today—Justice, Charity, Faith—but I wanted one that expressed her character. Felicity O'Brien inherited the family farm, and practices her healing gift among friends. 

 

In a short story that first appeared in AHMM ("How Do You Know What You Want"), a social worker in child welfare delivers a teenager to a new foster family. It's a walk-on part but I knew who she was and her name just popped into my head. I didn't expect to deal with her again, but she has shown up in two more stories and is now the protagonist in a novel I'm working on. Ginny Means is forty, unmarried, and devoted to her work, but she has a secret that she carries uneasily, but someone else wants it exposed. In an online discussion I mentioned her and another participant said, "That's a good name for a social worker." 

 

When I struggle with naming a character, I think of Dickens, who was brilliant at this along with just about everything else in composing stories. Capturing the right name, one that doesn't feel "wrong" or "ill-suited" two months or two years later, takes time and effort. It doesn't have to be unusual or startling, like Sarah Strohmeyer's Bubbles Yablonsky or Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. But it should be like the name Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, able to tell you about the character on some level. The right name lifts the story and carries the personality.

 

That's where my thoughts are now as I ponder naming the minor characters in my current WIP, beginning with the various villains (and there are several) and the townspeople who encounter them.

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Naming Characters

 

Revising my current work-in-progress requires one or two new characters, so I’m trying to come up with names that suit their role and personality. This is a task that is both fun and important. The wrong name can make the character feel like a misfire in the story, and throw off the reader.

Some years ago I submitted a manuscript to an editor I knew who had accepted other work from me, and when she returned it she pointed out that all the character names began with the letter P. Until she wrote that, I hadn’t noticed. How had I missed that? I was clearly in a rut.

Over the years I’ve tried whatever name comes to mind, which is what often leads to characters with the same initial letter, the same cultural background, or names so similar that they confuse the reader. Then I tried a couple of name generators, but they tended to produce names all from the world of WASPs.

Like any writer I have various print resources, including a book that brags it has 15,000 baby names organized by language, ethnicity, gender, and including definitions and some famous individuals by them. Reading through these lists can be fun and distracting, and not always productive.

Did you know that Mhairie, Scottish from the Hebrew Miryam, means “bitterness,” “rebellion,” and “wished-for child.” The last definition is lovely, but a child carrying the first one could resent her parents mightily. Dyami means “eagle” in a Native American language, and would perhaps carry the child to great heights.

Most of these techniques or devices didn’t satisfy me. When I used what I thought was an easy to accept but unusual name, one of my Beta readers struggled with it, so out it went. And yet I see more and more in print names that I’ve never encountered before and whose origins I can't begin to identify—a sign of our expanding world and cultural environment but one that doesn’t really help me.

Instead of looking around me for the perfect name I’ve taken a closer look at the character and tried to get a name that seems to speak about who he or she is. Hence the main character in the first book of my new series, Felicity O’Brien, is both Irish and endowed with happiness and occasionally bliss, but also with a love of knowing. She is the daughter of women who also bore unusual names that spoke to their character. Her mother, Charity, is shown to have an especially generous heart in the first book. Not every character has an unusual name, but I enjoyed calling the owner of the local sawmill Dingel Mantell, and his daughter Padma. 

Names that were once common seem unusual to us now, even idiosyncratic and peculiar, and among these I often find just the right one for a particular character. This is a task in the writing of a novel or short story that seems obstructive when I want to get writing, but in the end I generally feel so comfortable with the person I've uncovered with the appropriate name that I count the time well spent.