Nov. 14, 2008
What's in a name?
I didn't like or accept my first name until I was in my mid-twenties, so when I have to pick a name, the responsibility seems almost paralyzing. I can hardly pick a name for a pet, so you can imagine how difficult I find it to choose a character name for a story. I once told myself that if I ever needed to name a pet, I'd open the newspaper on the day I got the pet and just pick a name from there. You can see how that could lead to a cat named Britney or a dog named Cheney. I suppose that method might be OK for a pet, but it's probably not the best for babies or story characters.

While it's true that a character can have any name (after all, as an author you can be just as dangerous as a parent when it comes to names), you might want to consider some of the following points when making your choice:

• Time period: It's highly unlikely that your heroine would be named "Madison" in the 1800s, so you might want to consider what names were popular at the time your story takes place. Two fun Web sites to use for research are BabyNameWizard.com and the Social Security Administration's "Popular Baby Names" database. Caution: These track only names used in the U.S. back to 1880, so the information won't be helpful for an historical romance set in France in 1770.

• Ethnicity: In her article "Ivan, Ian, Johann, Juan or John?" on our Web site, author Janet Elaine Smith explores the importance of using the right name according to the character's ethnicity to lend credibility to a story. She also recommends The Everything Baby Names Book by Lisa Shaw as a great resource for finding the variations on a name by country.

• Context: Have you thought about the how your character's name might have come about? If your character is a child, how do the personalities of the parents influence the names they might have chosen?

I learned early on that my name alone could shape people's impressions of me before we had even met. A former co-worker once told me that when she was told that "Martha" would be her new supervisor starting the next week, she thought I'd have blue hair and be 65 years old. That was more than 20 years ago and I was 22 at the time. Please, I'm begging you, be kind to your characters.

--Martha Lundin, editorial associate 

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A couple of books I found very useful were "The Guiness Book of Names" and "First Names First" by Leslie Alan Dunkling.  The first includes not only personal names but also house names, pub names, street names and others.  "First Names" lists which names were most popular in  different decades from 1850 onwards and includes American Top Twenties 1975 Graduates by State!  

Both these books were published 30 or so years ago and no doubt there are websites giving similar information in a more easily accessible form.  I agree that getting the right name for a fictional character is very important.