Naming Your Characters

At the beginning of any novel, or more likely, in the earliest stages of the novel's conception, one of the key elements is choosing names for your cast of characters. Naming your characters is an important decision, as not only will you be writing this name over and over and thinking about your character for quite some time, but naming also should be a deliberate choice on the part of the author.

Of course, some initial thoughts about naming are simply that you don't want to choose a name that is too common or too strange; or a name a character after someone in your life (as that can be come potentially problematic); or a name that really means nothing to you. Like real life people, names become part of the fictional character's identity. So although a name may not actually tell you all that much about the character herself, it does need to be true to your character.

Additionally— and in my mind, most importantly— a character's name also creates an initial impression in the reader. And that impression is where names really start to matter. The name of the character often serves as your first bridge of connection with a reader. Imagine someone picking up your book and reading the jacket copy. What do you want them to think when they first read the character's name? Is the character meant to be a relatable, everyman type of guy who lives in the reader's reality-based world? Is the character from a distant planet where surnames follow an entirely different convention or rule? What can the reader immediately gather from the name - and more specifically, what do you want the reader to gather from that name?

For my new novel, tentatively titled Blinding and not yet appearing on my book page, I put some real thought into my protagonist's name. Set in a contemporary setting, I wanted him — the boy protagonist who is thirteen years old in his current stage of fictional life — to have name that reflected our culture's move towards more non-traditional names, but yet a name that wasn't so shocking or rare that it would be hard for the reader to accept. Therefore, I strayed away from the Matthew's and James' but didn't move quite so far as choosing a name like Blue or Moroccan. For a previous work, in which my girl protagonist had both an adopted, American name, and a name native to her Chinese heritage, I needed to find a pair of names that worked together as I wanted to establish a tangible link between her two seemingly disparate cultures. I therefore chose a set of American and Chinese names that were both the names for two flowers within the same species.

Some people seem to obsess over selecting the right names, while others simply seem to know. And it can certainly vary from project to project. But what happens when you don't have the predestined feeling that your character was simply meant to be named Luke, or Hamlet, or Marie, or Dolly? Choosing a name for characters can be difficult. My best advice is to spend some time really thinking about it, throwing a few names back and forth, and cruising through the online naming websites or baby naming book. I find the websites to be particularly helpful because you can search by categories like popular names of a certain decade, or a name's language of origin. You can also isolate names for countries, meanings, and thematic groupings.

Naming characters is an important choice, and while you don't have to slave away choosing the name for every character who appears in the ensemble of your novel, making sure to select a deliberate, and intentional name that both reflects a protagonist's identity and connects to the reader is something you want to spend some time considering. But, if you get into the novel and find it isn't working for you, changing the name is always an option, too! You have the power. You can change it anytime (and no one even has to know). Just make sure that in the end, it is a name you feel good about, for the character and for your future readers.