How Do You Choose Your Character Names?

It varies from book to book. Often the name just pops in my head, with no real reason for it. That happens most often for my contemporary books, like the Knights of the Board Room and Nature of Desire series. Sometimes I hear a name on a TV show, or stumble on a historic figure I like, and I use their name. I do collect interesting first names in an MS Notes file, so if a name doesn’t appear in my mind, I’ll browse that list and see what grabs me. Paranormal names are usually the ones where I want the meaning of the name to have some significance, so I’ll go to a baby name website and browse names and their meaning until I see one that strikes me as just perfect. For example:

Daegan Rei, hero of Vampire Mistress – means Black Ghost

Anwyn Inara Naima, the heroine from that book, means beautiful, heaven-sent (or ray of sun) and tranquil, respectively.

I have no respect for consistency of origins. Anwyn is Welsh and the other two parts of her name are Arabic (grin), but in all fairness, Anwyn left behind her past and put together the name she best liked for herself.

Choosing the name for a character is very much like a Ouija board—I have to feel the right “pull” toward it when I create the character. And I can’t change it if it gets lodged in my head. This proved problematic when I wrote Vampire Instinct. The muse insisted my hero’s name was Malachi. The problem was there were already two secondary characters in the series whose names were Malachi. One was a minor character, the other was more significant. To try and change my muse’s mind, I even ran a contest, asking my readers’ help to choose my Vampire Instinct hero’s name.

I received a bunch of wonderful names, many of which went on my name list to be used for future books, but my muse was not swayed. I had the red-faced situation of having to say to my readers: “Hey, these were all great, but I’m sticking with my original idea.” In order to avoid confusion, I just included a casual comment in the book to the effect of “Hey, is this the Malachi who’s on the Council?” to clarify that they weren’t the same person. Yes, lame, but you don't argue with the muse. You just don't.

But that situation did tip me off to a problem I have. Sometimes I will use the same names and not realize I’ve used them before. It’s almost always a major character/minor character problem. For instance:

Celeste is the main heroine of Soul Rest. A different Celeste is Thomas’s sister, and Thomas is one of the two main heroes in my m/m book, Rough Canvas. I had him nickname his sister Les to avoid some of the confusion.

But speaking of Thomas, he’s REALLY my problem child. Apparently I have a thing about the name Thomas, because I’ve been “pulled” toward it no less than three times for three different characters:

Thomas: Main hero of Rough Canvas

Thomas: Lady Lyssa’s former servant in the Vampire Queen series (secondary character, but a major one)

Thomas: Hero of Choice of Masters, one of my earlier single titles.

So, moral of this story. Do a series bible, keep a master list of ALL character names, and check them whenever you choose new ones. Do I do this? Of course not (pfft). But I am more careful than I used to be about this issue.

I hope this somewhat answers the question of how I choose names. There's no real rhyme or reason to it ultimately, It's just what "feels" right, with a few cautionary checks to be sure that I haven't "felt" right about it too often (lol).

Note: My thanks to Julia for this post topic!

Next week's topic: Which of my characters is most like me...a scary thought for sure!