What's In A Name?

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are those of our guest blogger, author Chris Graham, and not necessarily those of Selfishgenie Publishing.

Making a Name for Yourself… from a novelist’s point of view

Names, where do we get them from?

They usually come from our families, both the surnames we get automatically, and the forenames that can be reliant on a number of factors. Sometimes a kid gets lucky, and is given a nice normal everyday name, often from the annals of his or her family’s history.
 
“Oh look… she’s got old uncle Samuel’s eyes. Let’s call her Samantha.”
 
Of course this can backfire. We can all think of a celebrity cook whose father was a famous politician. Doubling the ‘l’ and bunging an ‘a’ on the end of her dad’s name could have gone so badly wrong, but our favourite middle aged man’s fantasy kitchen goddess seems to have done OK out of it (Yes, I do know that ‘Nigella’ is also the name of a herb - case of nominative determination perhaps?).

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The Emperor Justinian - who gave his name to all the little Justins in the world.

Sometimes it’s the time of the kid’s birth that lumbers them with a name. How many little girls born in the eighties answer to ‘Kylie’, or from more recent years, ‘Beyonce’?

I’m sure there are young Bieber fans pushing buggies carrying little ‘Justins’ around the supermarket aisles too, although Justin has been a forename for many centuries. There was a Roman Emperor called Justinian back in 527 AD.
 
Of course, there’s those who simply want to be different, whether famous or not, just for the sake of being being different. Those who, without a thought about when their offspring goes to school and gets the mickey taken out of them, give their little ones names more suited to a pet, a dessert recipe, or an address in downtown New York. 

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‘Fifi Trixibelle’  or ‘Strawberry Shortcake’ are not what a strapping thirteen year old lad wants to be known as. Even for a girl they’re a bit on the bizarre side.

‘Brooklyn’ doesn’t sound too bad, though like ‘Lourdes’, and ’Chelsea’, it sounds more at home on a girl.
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I worry that this is setting a trend. Are we going to see classrooms filled with young ‘Shepherds Bushes’ or ‘Neasdens’ in the future? Perhaps for a transatlantic equivalent they’d be ‘Yonkers’, “Bronxes’ or ‘Haight Ashburys’.
 
But I’m not really talking about our own names, or our children’s names.


I’m talking about the names we writers choose for our characters. Where do we get those from? Do they work? Can our readers identify with them? Can our readers even remember which one is which as they make their way through our novels?
 
I was reminded of this when a former publisher asked me to look at a few pages of a submitted manuscript. There were a number of characters introduced within the first couple of pages, of which there were several with the same forename, and others who, because they were related, had the same surname. 

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Now I know that in the potluck world that we live our real lives in, this kind of thing isn’t uncommon. The crowd I hung around with (and still know most of) had a surfeit of ‘Ians’ at one point. Fortunately, as was the spirit of the time, they all acquired nicknames, and so became ‘Ahmed’, ‘Abdul’, ‘Fang’, ‘Screwy Lewie’, ‘Mr Magoo’ and ‘Ian Mac’.
 
However, to help our readers, we need to have ‘real’ names for our characters that define them. During the narrative, and particularly as markers in dialogue, we may call a character by his forename - full or shortened - his surname, his nickname, his rank - as in ‘the Sergeant said’ - or some other descriptive title, such as ‘the older man’ or something similar.
 
One of my police characters, Detective Chief Inspector Nick Wilson, is known as ‘Nick’, ‘Wilson’, ‘The Guvnor’, ‘Guv’, ‘the DCI’, ‘The Chief Inspector’, (or just plain ‘Inspector’) throughout periods of dialogue and narrative to avoid too much word repetition. Others have similar selections to identify them.

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So… How do we deal with this? How do we populate our novels with names which are individual?

Every writer needs to compile a list, and keep topping it up: a pool of names for their characters, but how do we come up with these characters’ names in the first place? Where do we find them? Do they grow on trees for us to just go out and pick?
 
Well the answer to that is ‘almost’. In fact trees are as good a place as any to start, as are any other interests that you might have.
 
Trees?
 
Well there’s ‘Beech’ and ‘Birch’, ‘Sycamore’, ‘Redwood’, ‘Ash’, ‘Pine’, ‘Maple’, just for a start. All of them perfectly believable surnames, or they can be with suitable modification like ‘Ashwood’, ‘Oakley’, ‘Elmsleigh’, etc.

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I’m into motorcycles, so I’ve gleaned names from that world like ‘James Villiers’ - most post war James motorcycles used Villiers engines - ‘Frances (Frankie) Barnett’ (though she prefers ‘B’ as a nickname) - my first bike was a Francis-Barnett, or ‘Fanny B’ as they were known.

​Another is ‘Lucas Bright’, and I’ve used ‘Plug Champion’, ‘Tillotson’, ’Douglas’, ‘Benelli’, ‘Blackburn’, ’Henderson’, and ‘Ancilotti’ with appropriate forenames. If these aren’t familiar words to you, Google them. It’ll be a fun game looking for the motorcycle connections.
 
From an interest in pioneer aviation comes names like ‘Saulnier’, ‘Anson’, ‘Guynemer’, ‘Voisin’ and ‘Fonck’. Then there’s towns and counties, with ‘Georgia Didcot’, ‘Noel Caversham’, and ‘Adrian Kent’… more Googling games for you to play.
 
A fellow author published by Selfishgenie litters his books with the names of well-known rugby players from both the present and the past.

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They say, ‘Write what you know’ ...

Turn your friends into characters

Most productive of all, though, is that rich vein of people we know, or have met, that we can mine for suitable character names, though when putting these in my pool, I have a certain convention that I try to follow.
 
I’ll almost always mix the names up, rarely using both forename and surname from the same person as a character’s name. Usually I’ll only use full matches in the case of people who were either long deceased acquaintances, family, or friends, of my late parents’ generation, or are just names I’ve heard.

There’s no point in upsetting your mates by using their names in print, then describing 'them’ as someone they may not like to be, though there is one old friend who actually asked me to use his name and physical description as a character in a novel. It was on his bucket list. As he’s a cat lover, and tireless worker for local animal charities he, of course, became a corrupt vet in one of my novels.
 
Sometimes it’s particularly satisfying to name a nasty piece of work as an old boss or other bad memory from your past, but there’s one thing to beware of. When you do choose a name for a really nasty villain, it’s a good idea to Google that name to make sure that he or she isn’t someone really famous, even if you’ve never heard of them, and particularly if your character falls within a similar field. It might not look too good if your mad wheelchair bound evil genius was called Stephen Hawking, would it?

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Remember history

A lot of names fall out of favour over time (You won’t find many Germans called Adolf born after 1945), so you can add a flavour of authenticity to your historical work by including period names.

Archibald isn’t a name you hear much these days (If at all), but right up until the 1960s there were plenty of them about. One was even a ventriloquist’s dummy on a radio show (No, I kid you not).
 
Similarly, Ernest, Stanley, Norman, and others all had their day in the Sun then fell out of favour. A friend of mine said she could tell the age of a woman by her name, with gemstones (Beryl, Pearl, Amethyst and others) all denoting pre-war births, alongside Mavis, Agnes, Agatha, Cecilia and a whole lot more.

Flowers were also popular as names until the late 60s but now are hardly used at all (Though I do know a Primrose who is under 30 and there's also the singer Lily Allen). After World War II, many boys were given the name Winston in honour of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, but you won’t find many with that name these days.
 
Helpfully, there are lists of names popular in different decades available on websites.  The “Gender Construction Kit” website provides popular names for decades between the 1950s and the 2000s, for example. And, of course, the national census provides lots of historical names for you to conjure with and you can access that in the UK through the Office of National Statistics website.

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Get it right… Do the research, then save for a rainy day

Even fictional character names have to be believable, so for foreign characters, or those from different ethnic backgrounds, it’s worthwhile to Google ‘common names’ for a nationality or culture for names, or to mix and match the names of well known people from that nation’s culture or history.

But be aware that some cultures alter names to suit a gender, even surnames. For example, in Icelandic culture, a surname ending in ‘son’ may denote its bearer to be the son of the first part of the name… e.g. Erikson as ‘son of Erik’… However the female offspring of ‘Erik’ in Iceland won’t take her father’s surname, but instead will have the surname ‘Eriksdóttir’ (Erik’s daughter).

Thanks to a change in Icelandic law, parents can now use the mother's name instead and children can switch to their preferred parent's name when they grow up, if they wish. Yes, I found this confusing too.

Likewise, even in English speaking cultures, some forenames that are considered female in one country will be more commonly male in another. In the UK, ‘Tracy’ is usually a girl’s name and ‘Robin’ a boy’s name, but in the US these are more likely to be the other way around.
 
Keep your ears and eyes open. If something comes into your sights, whether in the local curry house, or on the TV news, remember to put it into the pool, even if you’ve no use in your current work in progress. These things will always be useful one day.
 
Add all these names into your list. Don’t bother with putting them in any order as they’re as random as the opportunities to use them but keep adding to the list as new ones come to mind. Don’t forget that there are forenames that can be surnames, and vice-versa. In Scotland the likes of Fraser, Cameron, Donald and others can be either a forename or a surname.

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Finally, if you are really stuck, there are lists of gender appropriate baby names published for almost every country in the world.

​Many of those lists also provide a “meaning” (real or imagined) for the name, so if you want to indicate that a character has the strength of a lion, you can find which name might be appropriate; Leona for a girl, perhaps, or Leonard for a boy, but there’s also Aerial, Braylen, Dillon and others.
 
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