Naming Characters

When I shared a short story with my writers’ group, one of the comments I received was a compliment on the names of the two characters—writer Adrian Hackett and literary agent Fredrick Thurston. One member told me the names sounded “real life” and he was right, they were taken from real life in a way.

Adrian was the first name of the father of my boyhood friend, who drove a Kaiser sedan he was quite proud of. The last name Hackett came from my Great-great Grandfather’s Civil War era daily journals where he wrote about a neighbor named Ever Hackett.

Thurston was the last name of a man who, for me, was the epitome of authority, the CEO of the company I worked at some 60 years prior. The first name Fredrick I simply pulled from my hat because it seemed to fit.

This mix and match method of naming the characters was a way to avoid directly taking the real-life name of someone I knew or had known. Not all my characters are as mild as the two I just mentioned and I don’t ever want to malign a real person by portraying that person in a negative way.

One thing that came out of our group discussion was the fact that unusual names from local history were frequent choices. One I particularly liked was a New England lawyer with the first name of Increase.

One of the great places to find character names is a cemetery. I’m talking about older cemeteries where you’re less likely to stir any recent memories. Here again I mix and match first and last names to avoid stepping on the memory of a real person.

Other sources of names include random selections from places like newspapers, the phone book, movie credits and books about what to name your baby. The names that interest me for one reason or another I record in a ongoing notebook where I have a variety of monikers to choose for my characters.

I also keep a notebook of interesting place names for potential towns, streets, streams and natural features like mountains.