The naming of characters is a difficult matter
As anyone who’s ever acquired a baby or a pet knows, choosing names is difficult. Every name comes with associations. Names for characters are just as difficult – but at least you’re on your own, rather than having to bear with your other half’s assertion that ‘we can’t call her Grace because there was a girl at school I didn’t like called that’.
Even so, I find my characters are bafflingly wilful, rejecting this and that name as unappealing. Naming the heroine of The Day The Earth Caught Cold was incredibly difficult – she seemed to dislike everything I suggested. I eventually settled on Catriona, which she grudgingly accepted. The hero was far less difficult – my long-held admiration for a character in a certain TV series was an inevitable influence, although his personality was more of a surprise – I originally envisaged a dark antihero, but this character took a different path from the beginning.
Naming of minor cameo characters is the easiest and most fun activity. I collect unusual surnames – Glass, Yellow – and wait eagerly for the opportunity to use them.
I’m around two-thirds of the way through writing my current novel, The Crooked Man, but that doesn’t mean the names are settled. In fact, often I use a change of name to rejuvenate a character who is proving irritating or failing to come to life at all. There are other considerations, as well – too many characters with the same initial, first names which don’t go with surnames, accidental real-life similarities – which mean you need to review the names at the end, however settled they seem as you plod through.
Currently, I have a hero who has settled happily into his name – Xan Ross is, or was, a private security specialist who has grown tired of his career – but the young woman he meets has been lacking a satisfactory name until recently. It was a chance encounter with Mary Stewart’s The Wind Off The Small Isles which has given me inspiration. I had rejected the Shakespearean name of Perdita as too outlandish (and incidentally difficult for the hero to shorten in conversation – one has to consider these things). But the heroine of this lovely and long-lost Mary Stewart novella is named Perdita and she’s delightful. So I’m very tempted to borrow yet another name from this most inspirational of novelists. I’d like to think she wouldn’t mind.
Even so, I find my characters are bafflingly wilful, rejecting this and that name as unappealing. Naming the heroine of The Day The Earth Caught Cold was incredibly difficult – she seemed to dislike everything I suggested. I eventually settled on Catriona, which she grudgingly accepted. The hero was far less difficult – my long-held admiration for a character in a certain TV series was an inevitable influence, although his personality was more of a surprise – I originally envisaged a dark antihero, but this character took a different path from the beginning.
Naming of minor cameo characters is the easiest and most fun activity. I collect unusual surnames – Glass, Yellow – and wait eagerly for the opportunity to use them.
I’m around two-thirds of the way through writing my current novel, The Crooked Man, but that doesn’t mean the names are settled. In fact, often I use a change of name to rejuvenate a character who is proving irritating or failing to come to life at all. There are other considerations, as well – too many characters with the same initial, first names which don’t go with surnames, accidental real-life similarities – which mean you need to review the names at the end, however settled they seem as you plod through.
Currently, I have a hero who has settled happily into his name – Xan Ross is, or was, a private security specialist who has grown tired of his career – but the young woman he meets has been lacking a satisfactory name until recently. It was a chance encounter with Mary Stewart’s The Wind Off The Small Isles which has given me inspiration. I had rejected the Shakespearean name of Perdita as too outlandish (and incidentally difficult for the hero to shorten in conversation – one has to consider these things). But the heroine of this lovely and long-lost Mary Stewart novella is named Perdita and she’s delightful. So I’m very tempted to borrow yet another name from this most inspirational of novelists. I’d like to think she wouldn’t mind.
No comments have been added yet.
