Notes In The Margin #2: What's In A Name?

There is one part of the novel writing process that fills me with equal measures of excitement and dread: Naming characters.

It excites me because before I start the whole process is full of a shed-load of potential and my imagination can be let off the leash.  The rules are simple.  Find the best name for each character than I can possibly come-up with!  It sounds so simple, doesn't it?

Well, yeah.  That's where the counterweight of dread comes in.  Almost anything is possible.  When faced with a massive blank canvas like that it can become a bit overwhelming and like a child in a sweet shop with too much choice, I sometimes find myself dazed and confused by the sheer abundance of choice.  I usually feel I've made the wrong choice and that a better answer is evading me, hiding out there, somewhere in the creative ether...

Over the last two decades that I've been writing, I've tried numerous methods for finding character names.  They've ranged from looking at the premise of the piece and seeking inspiration from that to literally sticking a pin in the phone book.

I should point out that both methods have had their fair share of success and failures.  360's main protagonist, Nick Hasben, got his name from the starting point of his character considering himself to be a "has-been".  If I say "has-been" enough times, it comes out as "Hasben".

It struck me as a fitting name, so a character's surname was cast.

I'm less inclined to use the phone book these days.  The main reason being is that we don't really see them around anymore.  When I was a kid we had volumes of the things around the house.  Nowadays, I have one book and that's mostly full of area code information rather than names.  I suspect for some younger writers a phone book may already may seem an antiquated name generating tool!

Thankfully, there are Twenty-First Century tools available to the modern writer to help them when inspiration runs dry. I tried the Linux version of Scrivner recently.  Scrivner is an amazingly powerful piece of software for writers.  It's not a word processor, but an application written specifically for writers whether it be for writing blogs, dissertations, articles, short stories, or full-length novels.

Suffice to say for now, one of its many tools is a character name generator.  You can choose to generate either first names, or surnames from different parts of the world, or different time periods (like Saxon), or mix it up and have each name suggested on different criteria, or starting with a certain letter.  Even if you don't use the names it suggests, sometimes it's enough to spark the necessary inspiration for that elusive character name,

Scrivner is far more than just a name generator, so well worth a look if you're looking for something to help organise your writing projects.  It's a fantastic piece of software and warrants a NITM post of its own sometime (other writing software is available of-course).

At the other end of the scale is another, more low-tech, method that I've tried recently. I wrote names that were in the ball-park of what I thought my character should be called on small sticky notes.  Once I had good number of each, I mixed and matched forenames and surnames trying the different combinations, or adding new ones to the mix until something jumped out at me.  As I say, it's very low-tech, but it was a fun way to explore the possibilities.

Also remember, however you find your characters' names, until you publish nothing is set in stone.  They can change at any moment (search and replace permitting).  So even if that inspiration strikes three quarters of the way through the first draft, you're perfectly free to change your mind.  One of the characters in my previous work in progress, The Wickedest War, spent several years called Murray.  A friend pointed out that there were several characters whose names began with "M".  I struggled with the idea that this character that I'd become so used to calling Murray should be called something else.

But reason won the day and Murray's not Murray anymore.  He's Tamblyn. It suits him far better.  It's the name he always deserved.

If you're struggling with finding suitable names for your characters, relax and try to enjoy the freedom to create rather than dread the possibility of messing it up.  Use software, sticky notes, an old phone book, or your own form of creativity.  If you have your own methods, let me know.

Either way, have fun with your name making and you might surprise yourself with the results!