Willa Valentine asked Maggie Stiefvater:

How do you come up with last names for your characters?

Maggie Stiefvater Dear willa,

Although many things pop into my head on any given day, names are very rarely one of them. I give a lot of thought to all names in my books — not just protagonist names. Place names, last names, street names, pet names. Everything that gets a capital letter represents more than a passing level of thought on my part.

What sort of thought? I know a lot of authors name thematically, a la Charles Dickens or J. K. Rowling. A thief gets named Bradley Grabgobble or a werewolf gets named something really cunningly meaningful like, oh, Lupin. That’s not really how I pick my names. I’d rather they developed out of the world itself — take the Lynch family, for instance. I knew they were going to be an Irish-American family, and so I fetched them an Irish last name that I felt had a nice, hard sound to it. Irish American families don’t always name their kids Irish names, but my Lynches were the sort that taught their kids how to play traditional music and dreamed up herds of Irish cattle for themselves. So Irish names for the brood, too, then. Ronan … looked like I wanted Ronan to look. It seemed like a name that could embody both aggression and kindness. Declan is a name that is hard to say in a nice way. Matthew is a nod to the Catholic side. Plus not named quite the same as Declan and Ronan for Spoiler Reasons.

I pick place names the same way. They must follow world-building conventions first and then also look the way I want them to look. A good name will take the burden of description off you, sometimes, or add a dimension that would be clumsy in other places. A lot of old Southern towns are named after women’s names: Henrietta sounded pretty, old, and quaint to me; naming the town that did part of the work for me in describing it. 300 Fox Way — another opportunity to characterize the psychics that lived there. Foxes are clever. The psychics are clever.

And finally, some of my names are chosen to amuse myself. Malory and Monmouth are nods to the the Raven Cycle’s Arthurian roots. They fit the world-building rules I’ve set, but they also sound right and entertain me.

The biggest thing to ask yourself when you’re about to put your characters at the McDonald’s on Maple Street in Appleton, State, is if you can possibly put some more specific names in there to better paint the characters or place for your readers. Is it absolutely necessary? No, you can get away without it. But just like a great painting has much attention given to the edges and shadows, putting well-placed specifics in your novel whenever you can will give your reader a firmer belief that your world does, in fact, exist somewhere.

urs,

Stiefvater

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