Education

Naming Your Characters 7 Rules To Follow

What’s in a name? Everything’s in a name when it comes to fiction. You want your characters’ names to tell part of your story. Names are more than labels-they are significant features of your characters. Take care when assigning them.
These effective rules will help you assign memorable and significant names to your characters:
1. Keep a chart of names.
This is important for a short story, and it’s vital for a novel. Your chart will show each character’s name, role, and description. As your plot develops, you will refer to this chart again and again. Here’s an example:
Name: Angela Worthing, Role: Actress, Description: 5’8″, blond, tan, jumpy, nervous.
Name: Derek Ambersall, Role: Angela’s boyfriend, Description: 6’0″, blue eyes, slender, shy.
Name:Priscilla, Role: Receptionist, Description: Dark-haired, curvy, flirtatious.
2. Look up each name.
This applies to names of major characters as well as minor ones. Names carry meanings. Consider a male character named Amory, which means brave. That’s a good name, but it won’t work for a character who’s timid or understated.
You probably have a dictionary, a thesaurus, and all sorts of books on writing. In addition to those, you need several baby name books. These are absolutely essential. As you develop your characters, refer to these books as well as to the internet. You’ll get valuable information on meanings, derivation, country of origin, and nicknames.
3. Avoid similar-sounding names.
The longer your list of characters, the harder it is to come up with names that sound different. All the more reason to keep a list.
Anyway, why should they sound different? That’s because you want your readers to keep your characters straight in their minds, and you don’t want to have to keep identifying them. Characters named Jeremy and Jeffrey will be confusing for readers to sort out. Readers are seldom as familiar with your cast as you are.
Instead, if you have Charlie the groundskeeper and Mariano the maitre d’, your readers won’t have to scratch their heads every time they pick up the book and get back into your story.
4. Select names that sound good together.
This is most important when naming a romantic or married couple, a family of children, or a pair of best friends.
“Charles and Diana” is one example of a pair of names that sound compatible, even though their marriage didn’t last. “Ian and Amelie” is not such a good combination. The names don’t sound alike. They’re not common or over-used. But still, the combination doesn’t sound good when you roll it around in your mind. “Ian and Sylvia” is better. So is “Bradford and Amelie.”
5. Consider the name’s popularity.
In any given year, certain names rise to the top of the popularity lists. You can easily look these up on the internet. In most cases, it’s good to avoid the most popular names if you want your character to be distinctive and memorable. “Call me Ishmael,” the beginning of Moby-Dick, commands attention much more than “Call me Tom,” for example.
In cases where you deliberately need a popular name, be sure to consult name-popularity charts for the year in which your character was born. Girls born in the 1950s were much more likely to be named Mary or Susan than those born decades later.
If you assign a character a modern name such as Brittany or Madison, be sure that the timing is realistic. Let’s say your story is set in 2011 and you have a 40-year-old female character named Mackenzie. Unless she changed her given name, she’d be better off with a name more suitable for her age, such as Kelly or Kristin.
6. Consider ease of pronunciation.
This is a matter of taste, but it’s best to avoid complicated names that are hard to pronounce, read, and remember.
7. Make it fun.
Occasionally, an interesting character’s name will pop into your mind uninvited. These are occasions to celebrate in your writing life!
Thus, we have Cornelius Atticus Hooper, the fictional author of a memoir, Generation Forward: From Sharecropper’s Grandson to Princeton Philosopher. There’s a fictional tour guide in the Amazonian jungle of Peru named Elvis Presley Gonzalez. And Tiffany Steele, the owner of a dating service for married people.
As you work on your story or novel, give great care to naming the characters with whom you’ll be living until your final edit is done. These names will resound in your readers’ minds, and they deserve all the attention they can get.
What do married couples fight about? Oh, lots of things, including names for their children. The names you give your children reflect on you, your history, your status, your taste — everything.
In the novel YOU NEVER KNOW, Tobias and Carmela fight bitterly over what to name their boy/girl twins, whose birth is only a few weeks away. He wants traditional names, and she favors modern, stylish names. Who wins? Or do they both lose?

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