I ran into another character name situation a couple of days ago…a story in progress kept hanging up on the protagonist’s surname.\u00a0\u00a0 None of my early readers had seemed troubled by the one I was using, but I kept feeling that niggling sort of feeling when you’ve left the door of the fridge ajar, and your mind’s trying to tell you to check it.\u00a0 And finally you do.<\/p>\n
So, character names…how to pick them, or make them up, in a way that helps the story feel right to readers.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve mentioned before (but can’t recall if it was on this blog, or another, or another site altogether)\u00a0 that when my first books were coming out, and I did a lot of book club visits and library visits…I ASKED people what they liked and didn’t like in SF and fantasy and mysteries, and so on.\u00a0 The answers surprised me.\u00a0 The thing disliked the most about SF and fantasy?\u00a0 Weird names.\u00a0 Names the reader did not know how to say, names full of unfamiliar characters (like apostrophes or difficult consonant clusters.)\u00a0 Some people have trouble with unfamiliar words–foreign words, words with sounds their language doesn’t have.\u00a0\u00a0 Second to weird names: too many characters whose names look or sound too much alike–names that start with the same cluster of letters (I’m guilty!! Arcolin, Arvid, Arian.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We have only 26 letters in our alphabet, so if you’ve got a long series and more than 26 characters in total, some of them WILL have their names starting with the same letter…but make something else different.\u00a0 Again in the Paksworld books, I have several POV characters starting with B.\u00a0 Beclan and Burek are both short, two-syllable names, easy to figure out, but with the different vowels and the tall letter “l” in the middle of Beclan, and the tall “k” at the end of Burek, they *look* different as well as sound different.<\/p>\n
Readers want to be able to see the name and ‘hear” it in their head.\u00a0 So even though a name like Sztkrink\u00a0 is distinctive…what does it SOUND like?\u00a0 A glossary helps, but then the reader has to stop the story to look up the pronunciation…not ideal\u00a0 A book full of unpronounceable (for that reader) names may very well languish unread until it ends up donated somewhere.<\/p>\n
And all this sort of thing–making names distinctive enough, easily readable, easily pronounceable–assists readers in keeping characters straight.\u00a0\u00a0 So does giving them time to become familiar, in a concentrated passage, so the reader “knows” the character, before introducing the other one somewhere else, after a transition of space or time.\u00a0\u00a0 Beclan and Burek have not, so far, ever been in the same places; they have very different pasts.\u00a0 When you have large families sharing a surname (the Serannos and Suizas and Meharrys of the Familias group) and thus in the same place at the same time (thinking of the book where Esmay met a a good chunk of Barin Serrano’s family,\u00a0 or was home on Altiplano with her Serrano family) the individual names are unique.<\/p>\n
But names don’t have to just make life easier for readers. They must fit the character, too.\u00a0 In a society that uses more than one name for a character, both parts of the name need to fit.\u00a0 And that’s where I was stuck on this current story.\u00a0 The setting is a society that uses a minimum of two names; no “middle” name is required but some people have them.\u00a0 Some areas still use patronymics of the Scandanavian type: Name\u00a0 Name-son, Name Name’s dotter.\u00a0 In other places, the surname is typically related to occupation: weaver, tanner, fisher, hunter, mason, tailor, thatcher etc.\u00a0\u00a0 There are multiple distinct cultures in each geographical region, and each has its naming conventions.\u00a0 In the cities that are on “great” trade routes, there’s mixing, and thus mixing of potential name types.<\/p>\n
This story starts in a large trade city, and since it’s a fantasy story, the names are readable, but not exactly the names in the phone book (if you still have one.)\u00a0\u00a0 The principal POV is a trades in grain (primarily), a youngish woman (late 20s? earl 30s?)\u00a0 who inherited the business from her father; she has a sister who is blind.\u00a0 Her father’s father left a distant farm to move to the city with a pushcart he’d built himself, and traded trash to get started.\u00a0\u00a0 His son grew the business until he could rise to a wagon, and then to a half-share in a narrow building.\u00a0\u00a0 Shortly before his death, he secured a membership in the Sutler’s Guild, but with only one wagon his city license and membership really curtail his ability to go bigger.\u00a0 She is a small trader–she has a wagon and team to pull it, but not much more; to support herself and her sister as a trader has been hard since her father died 12 years ago.\u00a0 She’s hardworking (or they’d be destitute), very practical, but capable of dreaming of doing more, doing better.\u00a0 I\u00a0 figured out in the first week that her first name was Grethan, that she and her sister shared one room in the house and rented out two more.\u00a0 But her last name escaped me for a long time and when I found one, it didn’t feel quite right.\u00a0\u00a0 Since “Sera” is the polite address for women, it had to go with Sera.\u00a0 It needed to sound like it fit that part of the setting–the city, the region, her social class as well.<\/p>\n
I inched toward it just rolling sounds around in my mouth.\u00a0 And going online to listen to videos set in different parts of England.\u00a0 Cornwall.\u00a0 Wales a definite NO for this one.\u00a0 Worcestershire.\u00a0 Lake District?\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0 Um…Yorkshire?\u00a0\u00a0 It helps to have a lot of different interests, because suddenly I was watching a video of the last place in England that had machines that could put fringe on a woolen throw…weave them that way from the start.\u00a0 Tweedy kind of things.\u00a0 Fascinating to watch and the narrators voices were feeling “right.”\u00a0 They source wool from particular farms in Cumbria, native breeds of sheep…and suddenly I heard a sound combination that felt like Grethan’s family name…sort of.\u00a0 I watched that bit several times.\u00a0 Name of a village or farm, I wasn’t sure which.\u00a0\u00a0 Took those sounds and mumbled them around in my mouth again.\u00a0 And again.\u00a0 And moved a consonant over…changed a final vowel–argued with myself about the final consonant, back and forth, until it settled with the first name.\u00a0 Grethan Hoddal.\u00a0\u00a0 Was there ever a Hoddal family in our world?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0\u00a0 It was an uncommon name in one county in Scotland in the mid-19th c.\u00a0 As Tolkein said, whenever he thought he’d invented a name he would later find out someone already had it.\u00a0 Just about anything people can say will turn into someone’s name somewhere.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Grethan Hoddal looks a fair bit like a friend of mine (much younger friend of mine) when the friend was younger still and has a similar “feel.”\u00a0 She is nothing like Paks or Dorrin or Ky or Esmay…she’s a sutler, a supplier to some of the mercs in Valdaire.<\/p>\n
So if a character doesn’t hand you a name from the first…be patient.\u00a0 Think about it.\u00a0 Will it work for readers?\u00a0 Will it work for you?\u00a0 Will it work for that character in that story at that place at that time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I ran into another character name situation a couple of days ago…a story in progress kept hanging up on the protagonist’s surname.\u00a0\u00a0 None of my early readers had seemed troubled by the one I was using, but I kept feeling that niggling sort of feeling when you’ve left the door of the fridge ajar, and Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,10],"tags":[7,26],"class_list":["post-1505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paksworld-stuff","category-the-writing-life","tag-the-writing-life","tag-tools-for-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1506,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions\/1506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}