Naming Your Story People

Naming your story people is something you will want to give full care and attention to, because finding perfect character names can make the world of difference to how fictional characters are perceived.

If you are anything like most writers, you will probably go through several names for your story people until you settle on the right ones. But fortunately, with modern word processing, changing character names mid-draft is a simple case of searching for the old one and replacing with the new.

Here are four tips for coming up with the perfect character name:

1. Make the Names Fit the Characters

The ordinary guy next door in your novel will likely be a John or a Dave, while his smarty-pants lawyer will be an Augustus or a Barnaby. John or Dave's wife, who frequently terrifies him, could be a Ruth (as in ruthless), while Ruth's sweet best friend is a Daisy.

The names you give your story people, then, must be meaningful, must say something about who they are as people. But beware of being too obvious about it...

• Calling a character Frank Stone is great - so long as he is a tough, straight-talking, dependable kind of guy.

• Calling his humourless landlady Miss Sowerbutt might be overdoing it.

2. Don't Forget Nicknames

It is rare that a person is called exactly the same thing by everyone they know...

• Ruth calls her husband Dave for most of the time, but David when he's screwed up (again).

• When she's feeling amorous (which, unfortunately for Dave, doesn't happen often), Ruth calls him Stud.

• While to his golf buddies, Dave will always be Sandy (on account of his always landing in the bunkers).

3. Make Life Easy for the Readers

Have you ever read a novel and mixed up the characters? It might have been your own fault for not concentrating, but the writer might have been partly to blame by having made all the character names too similar.

So if you have a Jack in your novel, don't also have a Jade, a John and a Jane. If you have a Bob, don't have a Rob. Or a Polly and a Molly.

If you can, try to follow these three rules:

1. Have all your characters' names start with a different letter.
2. Vary the number of syllables in each name - first names and surnames.
3. Strike a balance between everyday names and more unusual ones.

As with a lot of things in novel writing, naming your story people boils down to not confusing the readers.

4. Know Where to Look for Help

Sometimes when you are brainstorming for names, the perfect ones come straight to mind. More often, your mind barely functions at all (or is that just me?)

If you do ever become stuck searching for the perfect name, try these reference sources:

• For surnames, a good telephone directory. The more urban the area covered, the more ethnically diverse it is likely to be (if it's foreign-sounding names you are after).

• For first names, try one of those books on naming babies. Not only do they suggest names you never even knew existed, they give you their meanings too - which brings us back to what I said at the start: the names you give your story people must be fitting.