KEEPING CHARACTER NAMES STRAIGHT

Jennifer Moss is a novelist http://jennifermoss.com/ and an expert on names, especially baby names. http://www.babynames.com/ She recently started sharing her naming ideas for authors via http://characternames.com/

To Jennifer’s helpful list I would add the method I use to keep my characters straight at I write. I use the initials of the person’s role for his or her name. For instance, the county sheriff might be Charles Slabaugh; the first wife, Fran Winslow; the bar tender, Brad Taylor, if he’s young, and Bud Taylor if he’s old, and so on.

As I write, I know, of course, I know that my case includes a county sheriff, a first wife, and a bar tender, so their names come quickly to mind.

If the sheriff’s county is in Scandinavian territory, and that is germane to the story, I would use Slajus instead of Slabaugh. If the first wife is French, she might be Francesca. Taylor isn’t a highly memorable name, so if I want people to recognize the bar tender quickly, and outside the bar, his last name might be Thistle or Toomey.

Of course, you need to be careful of duplicates. If there are in the story both a pervert preacher and a philosophy professor, you might get confused, but there are obvious workarounds.

[I can’t resist cutesy names, so I’m likely to call the philosophy prof something like Plato Professino as I write and then realize that will make readers cringe and have to change it to Peter Parker. Oh, wait, that won’t work…]

A further suggestion I make as a reader: Don’t assume that the reader can keep character names straight. If Amy Reynolds, the army recruit, hasn’t shown up for a few pages, don’t just refer her to as Amy. I don’t want to have to waste time thinking, “Is she the volleyball player or the sidekick’s girlfriend or…” Either say directly “army recruit Amy,” or let her appear as “Amy, a bit awkward in her new army uniform…”

John Robert McFarland

My novel, VETS, will be published by Black Opal Books in late 2014 or early 2015.

In case you missed it, a Tweet Repeat: What will writers do when everything has finally been compared to everything else?

I tweet as yooper1721.

A RANDOM BOOK REVIEW: I don’t normally like dead-eyed psychopathic villains. They are one-dimensional and thus not very interesting. However, Michael Koryta gets around that in Those Who Wish Me Dead. The villains have a different way of relating to each other, and the other characters are able to rise to their challenges. Koryta keeps getting better.

           

I also write Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/

MY OTHER BOOKS:

NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and Japanese translations] Paul K. Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount, called it “The best book for cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”

AN ORDINARY MAN [HarperPaperbacks] Randall MacLane just wanted to be an ordinary man. But sent with a message for Custer, he became a drifting lawman with a knack for killing, and a deep well of loneliness. Then a twist of fate brought him full circle…

THE STRANGE CALLING: Stories of Ministry [Smyth&Helwys] I didn’t want to be a preacher, but I made a deal with God to save my sister’s life. Was that really a “call,” though? I said, “I’ll try t for 50 years, and if I still don’t know, I’ll do something else.” These are stories of what happened in those years of questioning the call.

WHEN FATHER RODE THE MAIL and Other Stories of Christmas [lulu.com] ISBN 978-1-300-38566-0

If you like baseball poetry, take a look at “Frosty & the Babe” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml