Character names

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 82

While we don’t take them into consideration when scoring your contest submissions, I will admit I am a bit obsessed with character names. Maybe it’s leftover from my days as an English major. Unlike those science and math majors (of whom I continue to be jealous), our knowledge didn’t necessarily build on itself from basic concepts to advanced ones; the stories you read as a senior didn’t necessarily have anything to do with (or require that you remember) the stories you’d read as a freshman. Sadly, I’ve forgotten much of the literature I’ve read over the years. I have an especially poor memory for character names, so I am always glad to see unusual ones.

Cholly Breedlove, Ophelia, Addie Bundren, Tea Cake—those’ll find a spot in your brain to latch onto for a good long time. I find it difficult to get into a book when the characters all have bland names—particularly when they start with the same letter or are similar in some other way. I’m sorry, but if you have a Stephen, a Steve, and a Stephanie, I’m going to have a hard time keeping them distinct in my head. You probably know multiple people named John and Mary in real life, but it’s confusing for your reader to let your characters share names, unless of course you want to use last names or nicknames.

You can push unique names too far. A character’s name, in my mind, conveys something about the character, but it says something about the character’s parents too. The illusion you want to create is that this is a real person, named by another real person or persons, not by you, The Author. So if your heroine is a 35-year-old New Age hippie chick named Chakra, you’d better not say her parents are conservative Southern Baptists, unless you reveal that Chakra chose that moniker herself and that her birth name was something more along the lines of Charlene.

The more off-the-wall character names you use, the more memorable they will be, but the more likely it is that you need to explain the name’s origin somewhere in your story. Brian is really good at this. His hero in Morning Glory’s Long Lost Order of Worship is called Steer McAlilly. Within the first 30 or so pages of the novel, Brian tells the story of how the nickname ‘Steer’ came about. It’s a funny story and one that reveals a lot about Steer, his father, and his grandfather. So not only does the reader get an unforgettable name but also a glimpse into the family dynamics and a sense of the character as a real, three-dimensional person, not a phantasm plucked from the author’s imagination.