Names are delicious to me. I love how the sound and meanings of them filter through my mind and how they immediately give an image of the person they fit. Naming my own children was such a lovely, slow process. How to pick from all the wonderful choices and the phonetic combinations and to avoid the pitfalls of names easily tuned up with silly associations or nicknames a child might not wish to carry for a lifetime was the challenge.
My children number two, hardly enough to satisfy my desire to use the dozens more names on my list. Happily, my offspring are satisfied with their monikers and I found another way to satisfy my naming fetish.
I name characters. Sometimes a dozen or two in a book. It is great fun and a careful process. I admit that most of the time my protagonists show up in my head and introduce themselves. They do, however, willingly submit to name changes, if need be, or the addition of a surname.
Roman, the hero in Dark Splendor and Dark Prelude, needed a surname and a name for his brother. They became Roman and Morgan Toller, names which seemed appropriate for strong, virile, colonial era men of German descent.
Silvia Bradstreet, heroine of the same books, needed a surname that was not aristocratic and which told of her British heritage.
Amanda Fairfax hints at the sweetness and beauty of the heroine of Whispers at Midnight, another colonial era romance.
In Whispers At Midnight, hero Ryne Sullivan has a brother named Gardner. It is easy to tell who is the more steadfast of the two.
Switching to Westerns, I chose Tabor Stanton as the handle for the hero in Delilah’s Flame, an uncommon name for an uncommon man of the west.
Which he had to be to contend with the heroine, Lilah Damon, a soft-hearted woman with a duplicitous nature. Her alias is Delilah.
There are scores more names in each of my books. I strive to make each choice distinctive and a good fit for the character and the story and the genre. Names imply much about personality and station in life for characters. I rarely use names of my friends and family, but occasionally I sneak one in.
I’m sure most readers would agree the names of characters add a special dimension to a story and a carefully chosen name can make a character more real and memorable.
For tips on how to choose names for your characters, read “Name That Character”, my guest blog post on Writers Unite. Thanks to Writers Unite for featuring me and for the terrific support they give writers.
