It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about how I do something – I think the last one may have been writing about first kisses ages ago? – so, I shall do a new one today, about how I come up with the names for my characters.
Usually, in all the books I’ve attempted to write before, I’ve picked ones that have specific meanings, or are literary names – for example, in a previous one, the heroine was called Hero Bronte Murphy (before I developed a deep-seated hatred for whichever Bronte sister wrote Wuthering Heights [I really should figure this out before I sit the Wuthering Heights exam in June]) – Hero because of the character from “Much Ado About Nothing” (again, before we started studying it in English) and Bronte because of the literary connotations (my justification for this is because it’s set fairly far in the future and deals with humans away from Earth, the parents would want to keep the memory of classic literature alive).
Then, when it came to this one, naming characters came very naturally. There was no looking online or searching for fancy meanings – all the names just occurred to me when I was writing about the characters. The two main characters are called Lilly and Adam – Lilly because I was reading Harry Potter at the time, and Adam because it seems to sound nice with Lilly and is a fairly modern man’s name, which is what I was looking for. There is a Welsh Celtic warrior called Daeron Pentraeth – Daeron was just a celtic-sounding one, and I wanted it to begin with a D because of the person his character is very loosely based on. Pentraeth is Welsh for head of the beach, and to be honest there’s no real meaning behind it, he isn’t the head of a beach or anything, I just wanted a Welsh surname and that’s the first one that occurred to me. Another character is a young girl, Imogen Love – again, just because I like the name “Imogen”, and Love is a cool surname which completely contrasts with her family life.
There isn’t actually anyone with an out-there name, I don’t think – my characters this time have names like Charles, Ella, David, Bryce, Aaron, Joe, Harry etc compared to when it used to be ridiculous names I couldn’t even pronounce, because I set so much store by the meaning of it. Obviously I try not to pick names with stupid meanings that make the name ridiculous, but for many of them, I haven’t actually looked at what their names mean – obviously Lilly is after a flower, and I think Adam is Biblical, but Daeron is completely made up and I haven’t the foggiest about the rest of them, and the meanings had no influence on what I chose.
I hope that’s a sign that my writing skills are improving and maturing, because I want to focus on making a more natural, believable story than one where I’ve picked names I’m really pleased with, but possibly to the detriment of the story itself!
However, if you do want to pick names with a meaning, a website I’ve found to be absolutely invaluable is behindthename – http://www.behindthename.com – because you can search for names by meaning or words in the description, and you can also search by language and origin. I don’t want it to come across that I’m saying picking names with a meaning is wrong all the time, but the way I did it was very wrong – even if the name didn’t suit the character at all, I’d pick it because I liked the meaning, which made the stories quite bad to write because I didn’t like writing about the characters.
the life of a moomin 