naming mistakes | Life in the Realm of Fantasy

Things have been a bit crazy here at Casa del Jasperson. When your spouse has Parkinson’s, life occasionally gets out of control, and writing falls to the bottom of the to-do list. Everything narrows to dealing with the emergency at hand. That is how things have been here; I’ve been in crisis mode for two months now, but life is settling into a new normal—as much as anything here will ever be.

MyWritingLife2021 Talking about the craft of writing is soothing, something with solid rules. When everything else is chaos, writing is there, offering safety and escape.

I have been spending a lot of time in hospitals and waiting rooms, reading. One particular novel I just finished was—how shall I say this? Good in many ways but supremely difficult to follow.

One of the least of its problems was the number of named characters. I understand how that happens. When laying down a manuscript’s first draft, I tend to give every walk-on a name, right down to the dog.

However, in the second draft, I try to shave my cast of thousands down to a reasonable level. If I miss a few that are just fluff, my writing group will point them out.

This brings up the question of the optimal number of main characters for a book. Some say only four, others fifteen. In my opinion, you should introduce however many characters it takes to tell the story but use common sense.

I have three rules for deciding who should be named and who should not.

First, is this character someone the reader should remember? Even if they offer information the protagonist and reader must know, it doesn’t necessarily mean they must be named. Walk-through characters provide clues to help our protagonist complete their quest, but we never see them again. They can show us something about the protagonist and give hints about their personality or past—but when they are gone, they are forgotten.

Second, does the person return later in the story, or are they part of the scenery of, say, a coffee shop or a store? They don’t need a name if they are only a component of world-building.

Third, we should only give names to characters who return more than once to advance the plot or show us something important about people or places.

For example, perhaps a homeless woman who lives in the alley behind the protagonist’s apartment is seen three or four times over the course of the story. She is part of the scenery and might go by a name or not. As a way to show a compassionate side to our main character, they might take her coffee or sandwiches and worry when the weather is too cold or too hot. In return, the old lady might care about them and offer a bit of street gossip, which could be useful.

In my experience as a reader, the pacing an author is trying to establish comes to a halt when a character who is only included for the ambiance has too much time devoted to them.

When we are writing a scene that involves characters who are just set-dressing, we should ask these questions:

Do these people help or hinder the protagonist in some crucial way?
Do they provide essential background information we won’t get any other way?
Is their presence a necessary part of world-building?

storybyrobertmckee Novelists can learn a lot from screenwriters about writing good, concise scenes. An excellent book on crafting scenes is Story by Robert McKee.

We want the reader to stay focused on the protagonist(s) and their story. We can remove side characters from the scene if they have nothing to contribute. Walk-on characters can be identified in general terms by their dress or appearance. The reader will move on and forget about them.

But how do names play out in real life? I’ve mentioned this before, but in my family, “Robert” is a recurring name.

My father was named Robert, and my two brothers are both named Robert (with different middle names). My mother’s younger brother is also a Robert, so yes, Bob’s my uncle.

My younger brother’s son is named Robert, and so is his son. We have a Bob, a Little Bob, a Rob, a Bobby, a Robby, and a Quatro. Two Bobs are no longer with us, but the confusion continues with each new generation of Roberts in our family.

BNF Front Cover 1 I took this absurdity to an extreme in Billy Ninefingers. In Waldeyn, the most common boy’s name is William, which is why Billy MacNess embraces the name his mercenaries give him after the injury – Billy Ninefingers. In that novel, anyone named William (and there are a lot of them) generally goes by their last name or their trade. Think Mason, Sawyer, etc., etc.

Other than Billy Ninefingers, where the overuse of one name was intentional and integral to the story, my rule is “NEVER name two characters so that the first and last letters of their names are the same.”

I try never to have two names that begin with the same letter. However, since there are only twenty-six letters in the alphabet, some repetition of first letters might occur.

How do we decide who should go and who should stay? And what is the optimal number of characters for a book?

There is no hard and fast rule. I feel an author should introduce however many characters it takes to tell the story but should also use common sense.

names One final thing to consider is this: how will that name be pronounced when read aloud? You may not think this matters, but it does. Audiobooks are becoming more popular than ever. You want to write it so a narrator can easily read that name aloud.

And that brings up the problem of reading aloud. I read Tad Williams’ Memory Sorrow and Thorn series aloud to my youngest daughter when she was old enough to appreciate and understand it. I was too cheap to pay for cable television, and it kept her from being bored. I will just say that while his narrative is brilliant and engrossing, many of those names took some practice to say without stumbling.

Did I mention that names are also a component of world-building? Well, they are. Names offer an image of place and time.

This worked against me in one major way. While recording Tales from the Dreamtime, a novella consisting of three fairy tales, my narrator had trouble pronouncing the names of two characters. This happened because I had invented names that felt foreign and looked good on paper.

Despite my experience of reading fantasy books aloud to my children, it didn’t occur to me that the names were unpronounceable as they were written. We ironed that out, but that hiccup taught me to spell names the way they’re pronounced whenever possible.

In conclusion, don’t confuse your readers by giving unimportant walk-on characters names.

Never give two characters names that are nearly identical.

Consider making the spellings of names and places easily pronounceable because you might decide to have your novel made into an audiobook.

And whatever else you do, go forth and write! Create those worlds and wonderful people and tell those stories. Those of us in waiting rooms and sitting by hospital beds will be grateful that you did.

I normally begin my day at about 5:30 a.m. with editing for my clients–I like to do that when I am at my sharpest which is always in the morning. I spend the afternoons writing, and right now I have two manuscripts that I am working on, and several short-stories. My evenings I either write blog posts or work on designing book covers.

Other than writing, most of my work these days centers around finishing up publishing the second editions of the Tower of Bones Series. The book itself, Tower of Bones, has been republished, and book II in the series, Forbidden Road, is in the process of being proofed and should be available soon–hopefully within two weeks.

In addition to revamping the TOB series, I hope to have the prequel to the series, a stand-alone novel, Mountains of the Moon, published by July 15, 2015, with a few copies to take to the PNWA conference. That means it has to be finished and ready to proof by June 25–which may be pushing it. However, things are moving so perhaps I will be able to meet this new deadline.

As I said, I have two novels in the works: concurrently with The Wayward Son, I am fleshing out the final book of the Tower of Bones series, Valley of Sorrows. This book deals with the aftermath of the events in Forbidden Road and winds up that story.

In the aftermath of an incident that occurred in the last days of the war in Mal Evol, John lost the use of most of his magic. He has managed to keep that disability a secret for thirty years. The Wayward Son is the story of John’s redemption, and explains the events that happened in Aeoven while Edwin and the others were gone. These incidents culminated in John and Garran being sent to meet Edwin in Braden at the end of Forbidden Road.

John Farmer’s story is intriguing to me, because he is a man concealing many secrets. A lot is going on under the surface–he suffers from survivor’s guilt and PTSD, which often develops after a person is exposed to one or more traumatic events. In The Wayward Son, John’s rocky relationship with Garran is explored, and also his love affair with the Abbess of Aeoven, Halee.

While I was re-editing the series to date, I took the liberty of changing several once-minor characters’ names, as they had suddenly become important in the two later books, and their names were too close to other, already prominent, characters’ names. Since I was changing them anyway, I made them widely different. Thus Marta Randsdottir is now Halee Randsdottir. Her original name was nearly identical to Edwin’s wife, Marya, a problem since the two women figure prominently in The Wayward Son.

The problem was inadvertently begun in 2009 when I was writing Tower of Bones as the story-line and walk-through for an RPG, and was scrounging around for good character names. I didn’t know at that time it would become a book, and it didn’t occur to me that NEVER naming any character with a similar sounding, looking, or rhyming name is something every author should take note of. This is important, no matter how minor the characters seem to be, because, just like Halee, they may have a larger part to play later and the confusion will ruin the story.

The magnitude of the problem first became evident when I was writing Forbidden Road, but I thought I was stuck with it. Referencing the two women in the same paragraph was dreadfully confusing, since their names were only one letter off from each other.

For a long time, I didn’t know what to do about the name problem. I thought I was stuck with it, but one of the beauties of being an indie is the freedom I have to make adjustments when a gross error is discovered. Since I was completely revamping the series anyway, it was the perfect time to take the plunge and rectify that mistake. The series now has new maps, new interiors, and new covers.

It was just another lesson I’ve learned since leaping into this mad circus of indie publishing, but now I know to never name two characters in the same book with names that begin and end with the same letters. Don’t do it!