The Surnaming of Characters

Earlier this week, I offered some advice about choosing character names and avoiding common naming pitfalls. While most of the suggestions in those posts apply to all parts of a name, I wrote them with first names in mind. Today I promised to talk about specific issues related to last names.

So here's where I admit that I have no real advice on this topic. I hate coming up with last names, and I find that in most cases, characters don't need them, so I only give surnames when it's absolutely necessary.

For the first novel I ever wrote, which I spent several years on, I had a database of character information that included -- I kid you not -- where the protagonist's friends' parents went to college, even though that never came up in the story in any way. I never gave the main character a last name.

My recently completed novel is about a family. I did choose a last name for them right from the start, and fortunately, that took care of a whole bunch of characters at once. There's one other family in the novel with a last name, and a doctor appears briefly and is referred to only by title and last name. That's the extent of the surnames. One character who marries into the family doesn't take her husband's name, and that's a fact I know in my head, but I never worked out what her last name is.

I don't have a good reason for my aversion to last names. They might be slightly harder to choose than first names due to carrying more cultural information, but they also have somewhat less "must feel right for the character" pressure, so it probably comes out about even. Certainly it's fine, and even advisable, that the majority of my characters don't have last names, but I shouldn't be so intimidated.

This is what I do know about last names:

→ Research is a good idea. Last names, even more than first names, are tied to ethnicity and potentially a great many other familial background factors. I've picked surnames imagining that they signified one culture, then later learned that I got it completely wrong because I didn't bother looking anything up.

I also had a weird (though kind of cool) thing happen once when I essentially made up a last name by putting together some syllables that sounded plausible. This was for one of my early NaNoWriMo novels, and at the time, I had the whole thing posted on my web site. A stranger emailed me, excited because he searched for his extremely rare last name and found my site, and he wanted to know if there was any family connection (it wasn't apparent to him that the name was in a story). While he was tickled by my explanation that I had fabricated the name, I did think that in the future it would be worthwhile to search and verify that any name I use isn't practically unique.

I don't have a single go-to internet source for last names. My method tends to be that I think up or find a name somewhere and then do a search to learn more about it. But like I said, it's not something I've dealt with very often.

I'd be thrilled to know your resources or strategies for identifying and researching names. One reader has already pointed me to a great character name generator that asks you to input ethnicity and birth decade before spitting out a random first and last name matching the criteria (plus a detailed personality profile).

→ Last names can overload the reader. If some readers have a tendency to not fully absorb first names, you can bet that even more of them are skipping past last names. I get irritated by books that keep giving me new characters with both first and last names, because I know I'm going to have enough trouble remembering one name per person, let alone two.

In most stories, most characters don't need last names. I gather it's more of a convention to introduce every character by full name in some genres, such as mysteries and thrillers, and maybe if I read more in those genres, I'd be more tolerant of the phenomenon. But I'm perfectly happy not learning a character's last name unless it's going to be necessary, for the purposes of logistics or realism, to have the narration or a character use it. The reason I was able to write multiple drafts of my first novel and never know the main character's last name is that throughout all his many plotless adventures, it just never became story-relevant.

That said, if you are going to use a major character's last name, it's good to introduce it sometime early in the story even if it's not important until later. I recently read a book and was totally jarred when halfway through, the protagonist's last name appeared, and I realized I hadn't seen it before then.

I already know that my new novel is going to require quite a few last names, so please, share any advice you have. And I still haven't made a lot of progress on even the first names, so wish me luck!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Tor.com, a group of science fiction authors discuss food in SF: "Food is an excellent way to do very elegant worldbuilding, the kind that can make a fictional world seem real, like it extends way past the edges of the frame."

Character Naming Pitfalls

On Monday, I talked about the difficulty of choosing character names. As if it weren't tricky enough to find a name for each character that feels right and fits with their personal background, you also have to watch out for situations that could make the otherwise perfect name problematic.

I've run into all manner of poor name choices in both my own early drafts and in other people's published books. Here are some ideas on how not to go wrong when picking names:

→ Avoid names that could be confused with each other. This is the big one. It's crucial to examine all your name selections as a group so that you don't give awesome names to your three most important characters without noticing, for example, that they all start with S.

It's a peeve of mine when multiple major characters have names beginning with the same initial, and I've spoken to a lot of other readers who feel the same way. I've even spoken to people who explained that while reading, they never fully process the character names and just take in the first letter and a general sense of the length. Sure, you might feel that readers ought to pay closer attention, especially to those great names you've chosen, but this is the reality of how some people read, and it's better to recognize that and plan your naming scheme accordingly.

In real life, I've hosted gatherings where half the attendees had names starting with L, but in fiction, I like to keep the initials more evenly distributed so that newcomers to my novel won't be as perplexed as newcomers to my house. Of course in a novel with dozens of characters, there are some repeats, but with the major characters -- or any characters who frequently appear in scenes together, or might otherwise be confused -- I avoid duplication. (As a bonus, when everyone has a different initial, I can refer to them by single letters in my notes.)

Avoiding name conflicts is a little more complicated than just the first letter, though that's the most obvious. I was preparing for one of my NaNoWriMo novels when I realized I had characters named Larry, Gary, and Terry. In most cases, you probably want to steer away from rhyming names (unless you're writing a picture book). Other similarities are harder to detect. You wouldn't necessarily guess that the names Walt and Hank could be easily mixed up, but I've rarely heard a conversation about the TV show Breaking Bad that didn't include someone accidentally calling one of these characters by the wrong name, and that must be due to a resemblance in the shapes of the sounds.

My strategy for spotting potential sources of name confusion is to keep a document that lists all the character names for a story. Whenever I add a new name, I go through the list, both looking at the letters and saying the names aloud, and if anything strikes me as too close, I choose a different name and try again.

→ Avoid names that could be confusing, period. Sometimes a name is fine on its own and fine in relation to all the other names, but something about its context in the story makes it problematic. Early in my novel, I have a character thinking about the long-distance girlfriend he recently broke up with, and the trips he would make to see her. For a while, the name of the ex was Charlotte, and then one day I reread "the last time I visited Charlotte", and I realized it wasn't clear if that was the woman or the city. (And then I started singing a line from the musical Avenue Q, "Her name is Alberta, she lives in Vancouver.") The character got a new name that didn't sound like a destination.

→ Only name characters who must be referred to by name. Stories can have a lot of people in them, and you don't want your reader to store any more names than are absolutely necessary. If a character's role is minor enough, they may not need a name. That character from the last paragraph finds a new love, and her parents come to the wedding, and then there are multiple visits. Her mom has a name, and her dad doesn't. I never even gave the poor guy a name inside my head, and I feel a little guilty about it, but he doesn't have a speaking part, and there's never a need to call him anything outside of "her dad", so I don't bother making readers learn his name.

Names can be hard to remember, in fiction as well as in real life, so make things as simple as possible for your readers. In the final installment of this series, I'll talk about issues specific to last names.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Scott Westerfeld explains at the NaNoWriMo blog how rewriting is like growing up: "Sadly, when looking at old pictures, you can't go back and give yourself advice, or change those unfortunate clothing choices. But with first drafts you can. In that moment before revising begins, you're no longer embedded in the hurly burly of what-happens-next and what's-this-character's-motivation. You have perspective."

The Naming of Characters

I still haven't named any of the characters in the new novel I've been planning. I had thought that even making notes would be too cumbersome while the characters remained nameless, but it turns out that I'm having no trouble referring to them by their roles, or by letters that signify the roles. I could probably leave the characters unnamed throughout the entire planning and research phase, and only choose names as a final act of procrastination before I embark upon drafting, but I think it might be time to start making some concrete decisions about this story. Naming the characters is a good place to begin.

The naming of characters is a difficult matter. The name of a major character might appear hundreds of times throughout a story, so there's pressure to choose wisely, but it's not clear what that means. In theory, it's an arbitrary decision, unrelated to the many elements that create a stronger plot or a more compelling conflict. In practice, names carry a huge amount of baggage, some that will be familiar to the writer as part of a larger culture, and some that individual readers will bring to a story and that the writer has no chance of anticipating or controlling.

You can see why I've been reluctant to approach the naming problem. Occasionally a character has appeared in my head with a name already attached, but more often, and in the case of this new novel, I've thought up fairly detailed stories for these people without imagining what any of them are called. That means I'll probably end up scanning the lists at 20,000 Names in search of possibilities. Like most name sites, that one includes name meanings, but I almost never pay attention to those. I don't pick character names for symbolic purposes, so the meaning only concerns me if I think it would have mattered to the character's parents.

When I choose names, what I'm focusing on are these considerations:

→ The inscrutable quality of rightness. I recommend finding a name that feels good to you as the writer, and I have no advice about how to do that. I may reject a dozen names because they don't fit before deciding that one is perfect, and it's a completely idiosyncratic decision that I couldn't hope to explain. In the best case scenario, that perfect name I've chosen will also resonate with the reader as embodying every facet of the character. In the worst case, it will be the name of the reader's most despised ex, but there's nothing you can do about that.

→ Suitability to the character's background. Consider when and where your character was born, their ethnicity, and any other familial factors that contribute to naming patterns. Do your research on this. When selecting names for the three different time periods in THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, I spent hours with NameVoyager charting popularity over time so that the names would be appropriate for each era.

→ Neither too common nor too unusual. It's strange if everyone in a story has a top-ten name, or if they all have extremely unfamiliar ones, so unless you're going for a specific effect, aim somewhere in the middle. Usually my major characters have medium-popularity names, perhaps with one that's odder or more prevalent, and then I give the smaller characters a whole range, so that the balance is a set of names that feels neither too generic nor too ridiculous.

→ Not the name of anyone I know. This is trickier than you'd think. First of all, I'm acquainted with a great many people who monopolize a great many names, so I actually have to narrow it down to only excluding the names of my closer friends and family. Then it turns out that I have a weird tendency to give names to characters without even noticing that they match the names of my nearest and dearest. This led to some awkward conversations about my earliest manuscripts, which were only ever seen by those same nearest and dearest, and I now take extra care to avoid unintended overlaps. Finally, I do have a natural bias toward names that are familiar to me, so I often draw from the name pool of people I once knew but haven't talked to in decades. I don't have any motive in giving a character the name of an acquaintance from high school, it's merely that the name was more likely to appeal to me than one I'd never encountered. All of this is to say, if you ever think I've named a character after you, please be assured that I haven't.

Those are my basic criteria for selecting character names. Later in the week, I'll be back with thoughts on avoiding naming pitfalls and the special pain of picking last names.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Vulture, Kathryn Schulz identifies The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature: "Once in a while, though, a bit of punctuation pops its head up over the prose, and over the prosaic, and becomes a part of a tiny but interesting canon: famous punctuation marks in literature." (Thanks, The Millions!)