The Art of the Name: 6 Tips for Choosing Character Names in Fiction
This post is excerpted from Fundamentals of Fiction Writing: Mastering the Short Story.
In her terrific collection of vignettes on writing, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, playwright Sarah Ruhl observes, “The art of naming a character is sacred and mysterious.”
While a character’s name is important—your reader will have to live with it for the entire length of your book—don’t let naming tie you up in knots as you begin to write your novel or story. A name, like anything, can be changed in revision.
I rarely choose the protagonist’s last name until I get to the point in the book when someone needs to say it, but I know the first name from page one. From the moment I began writing The Wonder Test, I knew the protagonist of my story would be Lina, a recently widowed FBI agent, mom to a teenaged son. Before I typed the first sentence of The Marriage Pact, I knew I was writing about Jake, newly married, caught in the grip of a powerful organization he feels powerless to escape.
I don’t think of names as sacred so much as I think of them as practical. The first name of each character is simply a way to anchor the character in my mind. Names, like setting, ground the story and help the reader keep track of what’s happening. They also ground you, the writer.
Technically, I wouldn't have to know my protagonist’s names on page one, because all of my novels feature a first-person narrator who is also the protagonist. Theoretically, with a first-person narrator, you could go the entire novel without ever stating the character’s name, as in The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (the blog Keeping Up With the Penguins has a good list of novels with unnamed narrators).
Yet the name, along with a deep sense of who the character is, exists in my mind before the name is stated on the page. It’s not that I’m writing about a “friend” (I don’t feel that way about my characters), but in order to convincingly write about a complex person, someone with needs and desires and flaws, I have to know three things about her: first name, what she does for a living, what she’s up against at this precise moment (i.e., why this story is being told by this person at this particular time).
Here are a six tips on how to go about about naming (and not naming) characters in fiction, plus thoughts on names in memoir: