Tom, Dick, and Harry are all very fine names, but we generally need more than those three. For one thing, the romance between Prince Tom and Princess Dick is going to look a bit odd on the page. For another, that fantasy setting inspired by Medieval Baghdad is going to sound awful strange when all the desert folk and merchants and foreigners are named ‘Tom’ and ‘Tom III’ and ‘Dick IV’ and ‘Harry son of Tom XI’. You get the point; you already knew that three names wasn’t enough. The problem is, naming characters can be hard. Today we’re going to look at some basic principles¹ to guide your selection, as well as some useful sources for names, with a focus on the names of significant characters (protagonists, recurrent side characters, central antagonists).

First, the name you choose needs to fit the character. This quality is a matter of beauty rather than calculation; don’t expect to find some formula that you can plug all the variables into and get out the right name. Search for a name that fits the character and his place in the story, a name that clicks. Sometimes this happens easily, as with ‘Finred’ in my currently-being-drafted novel.² Sometimes it takes multiple tries- Tolkien took quite a while to name his main character Frodo when writing The Lord of the Rings, starting with the name ‘Bingo‘. Aragorn, back when he was conceived as a free-range hobbit, was called Trotter.

Second, the name needs to work for the reader. If the character name works for you, that’s good, but it can’t just work for you. Often these two will correlate, but not always. If you ever decide that ‘Honk’ is a good name for a dark, dramatic villain with absolutely no comedic element, you’ll find that reader don’t really agree. You are the author, yes, but communicating the story to readers will require adapting it to their perspective. Thankfully, while we should always give some thought to other’s perceptions, very often one’s own intuitive sense of a names ‘fittingness’ is sufficient; provided its within sight distance of the reader’s understanding, the author’s individual proclivities therein can help establish the tone and perspective of the story’s world, working together with the other elements similarly intuitively decided (consciously or unconsciously) to form a coherent aesthetic style.

Third, the name needs to fit in the world and in its place in the world. A Numinorean king named Fred (or even ‘Phred’) is just going to look silly; a Narnian named Ahmed is going to be out of place. That’s not to say that these can’t be respectable names, usable names. The problem is that they don’t fit with the history or tone of the world they’re placed in (history being more important for the first example and tone for the second, given the hard vs soft worldbuilding). Think of it in terms of historical fiction. A novel set in ancient Rome is going to have characters named Scipio, Sextus, Claudia (the Elder, the Younger, and the Pretty),³ and Festus. If you name a Roman senator Reepicheep, you’re going to spend rather a lot of your credibility getting the reader to accept it. In fact, he probably won’t accept it; at best, he’ll just ignore the glaring inconsistency.

This doesn’t mean names have to be strictly founded in the setting the story takes place in. The name can derive from the character’s origin as an outsider to the setting. You can fabricate a backstory for it, perhaps as a loanword or a family name. You can, if you want, take Tolkien’s route and give the characters an in-their-language name (Maura, say) which you then ‘translate’ into their in-the-text name (‘Frodo’). There’s also the intermediate version of this strategy where you anglicize their name for the purpose of the text. The constant rule, though, is that the name you use must not break the pretense of the story, must not force the reader to consciously recognize they’re reading fiction.

Fourth, the names you use must be somewhere between recognizable and memorable, at least when it comes to significant characters. If the reader can’t remember what a character is named, he won’t be able to follow what said character is doing. For this reason, it’s also advisable to try to limit the number of duplicate or near-duplicate names you use. If you name four characters, ‘John, Jon, John, and Jonn,’ people are going to start mixing them up fast, particularly if they try to explain the story to somebody else. That’s not to say duplicate/ near-duplicate names are verboten; they can even be intentional plot points. Just be careful. As for memorability, a character can be memorable with or without a memorable name- see John from Towards the Gleam–⁴ but a memorable name does help. It also makes it easier to advertise the story. Do be careful, however, that you don’t choose a name purely for the marketing. Darius VonSquigglesworth the Fifty-Ninth is a memorable enough name, but any reader who sees you’ve used that name for the protagonist of your Regency drama is going to twig to the marketing and be turned off, not intrigued.

Fifth, choose a name that is comprehensible. If you can’t pronounce it, it’s probably not a great choice, assuming you have linguistic capabilities similar to your audience’s. If your reader can’t figure out how to pronounce it from how it’s spelled, it’s probably not a great name; fix the spelling or fix the name.⁵ If the name isn’t comprehensible, it makes it much, much harder for the reader to connect it to the character, much harder to connect to the character, essentially impossible for them to explain what they like about the character. Don’t let your characters have names that look like key-smashes. Whoijrsjrgroirrjfjroasg may be unique, but it’s not usable (unless, possibly, you’re eastern European). For this rule, consider your audience before yourself. Sometimes readers can remember the look of names even when they can’t pronounce them (me with Polish names), so while it’s not ideal, it is workable to partially violate this dictum, so long as the name remains within their capacity to remember. More than the rest of these principles, this rule is negotiable, but only violate it with good reason.

Now, let’s look at sources for names. Where do we get names from?

Puns and aptronyms are a good starting place. Puns we know; aptronyms are names given for a characteristic or literary role. Strider is an in-universe aptronym: Aragorn is called Strider because he ‘strides’ across the wilderness. In allegory, the aptronym is often taken to its extreme, as in Pilgrim’s Progress, where ‘Christian’ is so called because he is the allegorical ‘Christian’. Most uses are more subtle. I might call a character ‘Prudence’ because of her remarkable lack thereof (irony is perfectly acceptable). This method of naming combines well with some other sources in this list, like translation and allusion.

Ban, from this short story, has an aptronymic name which references his allegorical role (and in fact I tried to use literary/ historical references to Irish mythology as aptronyms for the other characters in that story, with varying success). Most of the names I devise that aren’t ‘I like how that sounds’ names are aptronyms. In reality, of course, many common names are aptronyms of some sort. Stereotypically common last names like Smith and Cooper (as well as my own ‘Potter’) are aptronyms for vocations, albeit not always appropriate to the current owner. According to a history book I’m not sure I trust, the name ‘Percy’ is a portmanteau of ‘Pierce-Eye’, given after a literal eye-piercing incident. Further, if you read Scripture and pay attention to the background information, many names in it are given in as semi-aptronyms- as with Job’s daughters (__), Abraham (__), and Jesus Himself (__).

I can also generate names via in-character motivations- i.e., asking what their parents would have named them or what pseudonyms they would adopt. So I might name a character’s daughter ‘Mary’ because it fits with the naming taste of the father-character, or I might name somebody ‘Charles Charleston’ because it fits the sense of humor of the character who, within the story, chose that pseudonym.

Allusions are a fertile source for names. These allusions can be historical, literary, or personal. So I might name a character ‘Jack’ because I want to reference C.S. Lewis or ‘Otto’ because I have an interest in Otto I and Otto von Bismark. I don’t precisely remember, honestly, but it’s possible that I named Alexander⁶ such as a reference to Alexander the Great. These combine exceptionally well with aptronyms by providing more subtle alternatives to Bunyan-style names. Historical allusions encompass the present day as well. Literary allusions are even more fun. I’ve named several characters via literary allusion, usually secondary characters. Penny Scrubbins, the protagonist of my novel, is actually named via literary allusion to Eustace Scrubb from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Literary allusions allow for sneaky aptronyms, homage to literary inspiration, and even private jokes that people may or may not ever recognize.

Personal allusions, allusions to names in your personal life, can be risky, legally speaking, so be careful. You don’t want to be the author of The Yearling who lost a lawsuit and had to pay a lot of money for her depiction of her neighbors. Nevertheless, such allusions are useful, whether to give compliments or otherwise, and if you’ve based a character off of somebody, why not? Aside from the lawsuit, of course.

Using other languages should be a big tool on your toolbelt as well. You can go the Tolkien route: devise both a conlang for the original and a plausible etymology for the English translation. You can also go for Lewis’s route with Aslan, a word which means ‘lion’ in (if I remember correctly) Arabic (this is an aptronym as well, if you note; aptronyms can be for the superficial as well as the essential).⁷ I chose a middle route for my current fantasy, making up names on the spot by mangling words from different real languages (one language per in-story culture).⁸ Translation synergizes very well with aptronyms. Sometimes characters will do the naming themselves, as with Khasiti and Aucun in Why Ought I to Die?, both of which are aptronyms in non-English (Arabic and French, I think, though I’d have to check my rather sparse notes) chosen by the user, as a new name and a pseudonym respectively (Guillemes actually falls somewhat into this camp, having chosen his own name).⁹ If you, like me, lack encyclopedic knowledge of all the necessary languages, online translation software is a wonderful tool.

Finally, just keep your eyes out for useful names. I picked up ‘Finred’ by misremembering Tolkien’s ‘Finrod’ and found ‘Guillemes’ in a Latin workbook (it’s the Latin equivalent of ‘William’). Hear a name you like? Write it down. Come up with one you like? Write it down. When you’re naming your characters, you can use this list as a candidate list. Maybe one of them will work, maybe it won’t, but it’s a good start. If you’re lucky, a name will work just right for a character, or the name will come into existence attached to the character.

Naming your characters isn’t always easy, isn’t always hard. Persistence and willingness to keep working on it pays off, though. A character (nearly always) benefits immensely from a really well-fitting name, so it’s worth the effort. The name will be how the character is remembered, particularly in a verbal rather than visual medium. Don’t slack off on finding the right name for the character. Conversely, don’t be afraid to use a placeholder for a time. Just as you sometimes need to change a name, sometimes you need to stop worrying about it for a while. The second-most-important character of my current story-in-progress had an entirely different name in the first draft, a name I was never quite happy with but couldn’t find a better alternative to. After letting the matter rest, though, I was able to approach it with new eyes and figure out an appropriate name (an aptronym-via-translation, actually). Keep the five guidelines above in mind, consider your sources, and find a good name; it’s out there to be found.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Like nearly all basic principles in writing, once you understand these ones, you can find reasons to break them. Just don’t break them without a reason better than ‘I do what I want.’ They exist for a reason.

2 – Look, I only realized over a year later that it was an anagram of ‘friend.’

3 – If I remember my history correctly, Roman women were named by their family name; sisters were verbally distinguished by nicknames, order, and marriage.

4 – An absolutely excellent book which, unless I missed something, never explicitly tells you the main character’s last name, though it’s pretty obvious from context clues. In fact, the same goes for the slew of historical personages present in the story- the rule being that if they were real people, you don’t get a last name.

5 – Though if they figure out a workable-but-wrong pronunciation from the spelling, it’s on you to decide how much of a problem it is.

6 – From Why Ought I to Die?

7 – There’s probably a philosophical debate in discussing how essential Aslan’s leonine form is to his existence.

8 – By using a consistent language for each in-story language’s fragmentary examples, I try to give each ‘language’ a certain aesthetic without having to actually create the language.

9 – Guillemes is several millennia older than the name ‘Guillemes’. He chose it at some point in his history, though he still answers to multiple other names, depending on who he talks to.