Naming Characters

 

Hannes, a friend and beta reader of mine recently suggested this topic, and at exactly at the right time, since I was at a complete loss as to what to write about this week. The topic is, how do I choose names for my characters?

The short answer is that I stare at my keyboard for a while and pick out a starting letter, and add a few more until it sounds right. There are, however, three more personal rules that determine how a character gets a name in my mind.

My first rule is that a name should be easy for English speaking readers to pronounce. We earthlings speak many languages and in making this rule, I’m not elevating English above any other language. It is just that most, though far from all, of my readers speak English as their first language, so it makes sense for me to give my characters names that use familiar, English, letter patterns that they can easily put sounds to.

My second rule is that I want my names to be short and snappy so as to not bog down the narrative flow. The use of long and strange combinations of letters, can break the narrative voice in the reader’s mind, bringing the story’s flow to a brief halt as a reader tries to put a sound to it. I realize that strange names are often included in speculative stories to indicate a non-human character, but I don’t write aliens – at least the ones that speak. In other genres unfamiliar, non-English names, are given to indicate ethnicity, which brings me to my third rule.

My third rule is that, since most of my stories are set in the distant future and on planets long removed from contact with earth, l don’t want to give my names any strong ethnic connections. Even on the earth of my stories, those ethic distinctions have long since been lost. I will, however, include some traces of ethnic names in some of my names, though they will be short and snappy when I do.

This desire for short and snappy names often gives some of my characters names that look a bit like Chinese names. Sometimes this is deliberate, but most times, it’s just a matter of keeping them short.

Often times, the names I choose also invoke memories of characters I’ve run across in my life.

Take Wil Litang for example. Wil is short for Willie, my favorite farm dog that my grandparents owned in my distant youth. Li is the most common family name in China, and Tang is the Western name of a Chinese dynasty, so that Litang recalls China, without being exactly Chinese, Plus, the “Li” or “Le”, also gives it a French flavor if spoken out loud. The idea is to mix and match ethnic references.

Now take Naylea Cin. Cin  is a play on “sin” since she is a thief and assassin of the mercenary order of Saint Bleyth. I had toyed with the idea of finding a historical saint to name the organization after, but in the end decided against that, as it might be overplaying my hand by having an assassin working for an order named in honor of a known saint.

In the case of Sella and Lessie Kaah I choose the name of Raah as a deliberate nod to the Indian subcontinent. Lessie was my second choice for her name. I wanted to call her Lessa, so it would be Sella and Lessa, but Lessa is a significant character in another fantasy series, so after some debate, she became Lessie instead. Usually I prefer to use the more formal, family name, in my non-dialog text for each character, rather than the character’s given name, but in the case of the twins sharing the last name, it had to be their first name for both dialog and description. In Taef Lang, we have an English sounding last name, with a made-up first name. Lang is a call back to Lang, the narrator of Islandia, by Austin Tappen Wright.

Rafe GilGiles (and his younger self, Rafe d’Mere) are a homage to Jack Williamson’s poor old Giles Habibula in his The Legion of Space. Rafe is a nod to my favorite classical music composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who preferred to be known as “Rafe.” The “Vaun” in Vaun Di Ai refers to “Vaughan” Williams.

Botts is a one name character designed to sound like “Jeeves,” the role he plays, as does that other sentient machine, “Mactavish.”

Ren Loh owes her name to a character in the Taiwanese TV series “Office Girls” with its lead female character named Xing-ren that I am very fond of.

In my first two books set in the near future, I did use names to imply ethnic backgrounds. For example, Selina Beri -- Selina comes from the story “The Twenty-first of October” by Kenneth Grahame. In it Selina is a young lady who lets her enthusiasm for the English Navy and Admiral Nelson get her into trouble. Beri is a short, English sounding, Indian family name, as her ancestors came from India, as is Hugh Gallagher’s roommate, Omar V Shinge. I used “Alasandr Say,” for my Summer in Amber narrator, as it sounded English but is actually a Russian name, as I envisioned his Russian ancestors settling in England a generation or two before. Nesta Mackenzie is Scottish, as her name implies. I came across the name “Nesta” in the delightful first chapter of Erskine Childers’s “The Riddle of the Sands.” (One of my favorite chapters in all of my reading.)

So while my choice of names does reflect past readings and interest, when it comes time to invent a character’s name, other than a leading character's name, it involves little more than staring at my keyboard and deciding on a letter to start with, and then adding a few more to finish it off. Beyond that, I can offer no science or secret to share when it comes to inventing names.