His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
—T.S. Eliot
I didn’t know this for sure and had always assumed they just picked an exotic-sounding name but I recently saw something that Tavoularis was credited on and thought to myself ‘that cannot be a coincidence’. Made me chuckle all over again at how random it is.
Who then turns around and names his own son Dickie?
In my writing, I spend a fair bit of time coming up with names for important characters, but for less important ones (only appear in one book, say), I usually follow these rules:
- I try not to have more than one character in a book with a name starting with the same letter. I don’t follow this religiously, but it’s just as easy to come up with a name that doesn’t share a first letter with another character, so I usually do it. Readers find it confusing when more than one character’s name starts with the same letter (at least if they appear in the same scenes together).
- I look at name lists from the time period when the person was born (and the country). I write urban fantasy, so most of my characters are human. I like them to have appropriate names for when/where they’re born. For nonhuman characters, all bets are off (except I hate names with apostrophes or too many consonants).
- When I just need a name for a throwaway character, I go to IMDB, pick a movie at random, and look through the names of the minor cast and the crew. I might take a first name from one person and a last name from another.
I believe it was the legendary Lionel Fanthorpe who had a book with 13 characters: Adam Baker, Charles Danvers, Eve Fourtis, Gail Hankel, and so on
Schulz and both Patty and Peppermint Patty.
My wife plays tabletop RPGs with me; she once pulled a name from the credits of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, for her character in an 1890s horror campaign: Addison Teague (who, IRL, is a sound editor).
I am a fast reader and can easily “bleep” or skip over difficult names. The problem arises when I realize I have no idea who is talking and who it’s about. Then I have to go back and read it again - slowly.
That is brilliant.
I remembered another source that I, and several friends, have used for character names in role-playing games: highway signs.
Particularly on more rural stretches of Interstates, the signs for exits frequently list the names of two towns which are near the exit. Several examples of characters came from particularly evocative such signs:
- Milton Edgerton (an exit on I-90 in southern Wisconsin)
- Halethorpe Arbutus (an exit on I-95 in Maryland, just north of BWI)
- Montezuma Tama (an exit on I-80 in Iowa)
Just south of Albany on I-90 is an exit for
E. Greenbush
Nassau
which always sounded to me like an eccentric inventor from a 30s screwball comedy.
I know that Lee Child named lots of characters in one of his Jack Reacher books after former Aston Villa footballers. I spotted this whilst reading it and then a quick google that lead to an interview with him confirmed it. I got a copy of his latest novel signed a few years ago and being a big football fan (although not Villa), I wanted to ask him about it but the queue was very long so I decided not to.
A contender for laziest character name of all time: Del Capslock. Really.
I have a book by him where the 26 characters are introduced with names in alphabetical order. I forget the name of the book, I’m traveling now so can’t look it up to see if it is the one you remember. It is far worse than “Galaxy 666.”
One character is a princess of a planet named Bir. I call her Elsabir to imply that the name must be significant in their language, something live “beloved of Bir” though I never go into it.
A love interest has the last name Gold. My first crush, back in 2nd grade, was on a girl whose last name was Silver so I promoted her. No other similarities.
The main character’s first name is Ernest, a pun on Earnest, though it might have been subconscious. His last name is plausible but doesn’t appear to be a name that anyone has in real life, which works for me.
Thanks - we must be thinking of the same book, whatever it is
One of my favorites: Hiro Protagonist
If you want to introduce a little chaos, you can buy a 30-sided die with letters on it. They usually include four consonant digraphs, such as ‘ch’, ‘sh’, ‘th’, and ‘ng’. You can also use a regular 6-sided die if you’re not getting enough vowels.
You can use the dice to tell you where to start looking in lists, if digging through the lists is getting tiresome.
The book Atlanta Nights, written to be the worst novel possible to troll the scam publishers PublishAmerica, used the character names to troll them. Take a look at their initials:
Penelope Urbain, Bruce Lucent, Irene Stevens, Henry Archer, Margaret Eastman, Richard Isaacs, Callie Archer, Isaac Stevens, Andrew Venice, Arthur Nance, Isadore Trent, Yvonne Perrin, Rory Edwards, Stephen Suffern.