Matching Names to Characters

 

In Act II, Scene I of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet says “What’s in a name! that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” While that may be true for a rose, it doesn’t work with fictional characters. Readers who hear a name before becoming familiar with the character often form their own ideas about background and personality, so choosing an appropriate name can be crucial to creating the right image.

I’m currently reading Some Die Eloquent by Catherine Aird, and she has a secondary character named Dr. McCavity. He’s a physician rather than a dentist, which would have been too flippant for a mostly serious work. The name does fit him, though, because it makes me think of a buffoon. Dr. McCavity is an alcoholic who keeps running into bollards, those permanent posts that line roads to keep drivers from leaving the roadway. If the name had been given to a strait-laced elderly man, I’m not sure I could have treated the character seriously even if the story called for it.

I always put a lot of thought into choosing character names. The graphic represents a dilemma I had several years ago when I originally selected Warren for my protagonist’s last name. Then I discovered that the book’s locale—Vicksburg, Mississippi—was in Warren County. I didn’t want any of my readers associating my protagonist with a wealthy or important family, so I change her last name to Gibson.

Then there is one of the protagonists of my murder mystery. Victoria McDonald is the victim’s daughter. Her mother was a successful attorney, but she had a tough road reaching that place in her career and her personal life was quiet and unpretentious. So I wanted them to have an ordinary family name that is easy to remember but isn’t showy. McDonald just felt right.

My protagonist’s first name is even more telling. The victim named her daughter Victoria because she wanted her to have a victorious life. But Vic has insecurities and doubts and she doesn’t feel victorious. Since she knows Victoria doesn’t suit her personality, she insists that people call her Vic.

So where do I find my characters’ names? When I’m writing my middle-grade historical novels, I get the first names from lists showing the most common names given to babies born in the same decade as my protagonist. Then I go through the top twenty or thirty to see which one best fits my protagonist. This can be a dangerous approach because readers have various experiences with those names, and someone who remembers a Karen as her best friend will have a very different response than someone who was bullied by a Karen. But unless I want to use names that are cliché (such as using McCavity for a dentist or Candy for a super-sweet girl), it’s a risk I have to take.

Choosing last names is a different process. Yes, I do want family names that create the right image for readers, but it is more complicated than that. If I have an ethnic background in mind for my character, I look for a family name that works with it. And I don’t always use something as common as McDonald. On trips in the U.S., I watch the exit signs while Roland is driving and keep a notebook handy to write down the names of likely-sounding towns. Or I may take a last name from a novel, such as using Gardiner from Pride and Prejudice for one protagonist’s maternal grandmother.

It isn’t easy to pick the right name.

But it is important.

Who is Who?

One of the hardest things about writing characters is giving them distinctive identities that stand out on the page. All primary characters and many secondary ones should have identifiable personalities. Still, readers sometimes forgive lapses for less-important role. They don’t forgive the writer if the protagonists are too alike.

My current work-in-progress has two protagonists, and both are point-of-view characters. Julia and Fannie are 12-year-old cousins. They have very different personalities, and that must come through in my writing.

Both girls are upper-middle-class, intelligent, and have good vocabularies, so I can’t use any of those characteristics to distinguish them. But Julia has an imagination while Fannie is practical and has a literal mind. As a result, Julia’s chapters incorporate metaphors and similes and vivid images, while Fannie’s tend to be straight-forward.

That raises another issue. Julia’s chapters are fun to write, and hopefully that will make readers enjoy them as much as I do. But it’s harder to add interest when metaphors and other creative figures of speech are unavailable. So what can I do?

One way to create interest is to fill the Fannie chapters with heart-stopping scenes. Interesting events also occur in the Julia chapters, of course, but Fannie’s experiences are more intense. Another strategy is to make Fannie an unreliable narrator of her own and Julia’s motives. She reports the facts accurately but doesn’t always interpret them correctly, especially when they involve her own feelings. Since the reader has a more objective view, Fannie’s misperceptions produce an occasional laugh.

But however characters are written, it isn’t enough to make them interesting.

They must also be distinctive.

__________

The picture at the head of this post does not represent my image of Julia and Fannie, but it does show two women from that approximate time. The drawing is in the public domain because of its age.