Hi,

Just wondered how you all come up with your characters names. Are they bits from people you know, like the first name from one and surname from another? do you think hard about what to call your character? or do you just choose any name at random?

Talking about names, I worked with a guy who was called Richard Kinghorn. The other guys used to say he had the name of a porn star, you could just imagine it - 'Erotic Fantasies' starring Dick Kinghorn!

He got so fed up with it, he changed his name by deedpoll.

kat

I have a Biographical encyclopedia I sometimes use. I often don't name characters at first (maybe X and Y) but then when they are more fleshed out the names tend to suggest themselves to me. There's no exact science, although Celia Brayfield, in 'Bestseller' (crap title but lots of really good advice) has a section on naming.

I find any Ordnance Survey map an absolute goldmine.

Grinder

I just wait until the right name strikes me.

Names for me come from various sources, bills, emails, old myths, people I call at work... but half the time, they seem to come from nowhere. I like chewy sounding names, and unlikely names, and names you'd be proud of. Like Ubergoyle, Grymrtrell and Darkstein.

JB

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I like a lot of Grinder's character names as well, though obviously I don't use these. ;)

I do use the Oxford Dictionary of First Names, and find it annoyingly unscholarly when I need to know a date, though amazingly good on non-English names. Some names just feel right - for period, for character - but for important names I would always want an extra layer of meaning. For example, the narrator of the 1820 part of The M of L is Stephen Fairhurst: Stephen is the kind of plain, English name he'd have, but not as sturdy or royal as William or George. The extra layer is that St Stephen was the first Christian Martyr. His surname conjures up his rootedness in rural Suffolk. Two important women in his life have variations on the name Katharine: Katrijn and Catalina. Maura in 'Maura's Arm' is a pun on the Moor's Leg that's central to the story, but being Irish is also part of a thread of ideas about London's history as the centre of colonialism and also immigration.

But may I have some sympathy? Some of the main characters in my new novel are, or rather were, real, so I'm stuck with the names. One has SIX important men in her life called Richard: her father, her brother, her dead father-in-law, her brother-in-law, and TWO sons. Two are called Richard Duke of York, three of them are Sir Richard and two of those later become Lord Rivers. There are only a few short forms I can use, and in this case at least, you can't keep things clear by calling the baby son Little Richard, now can you?.

Emma

I'm of the school of thought - for shorts, I will wait for a name to come ot me out of the ether.

For something longer I try to think about the character's past, what would have been the influences that would have made the parent's choose the name that they did. If the MC has siblings, did the age gap mean a new fashion of names were bacoming popular when they were born? Were the parents the sorts to go for fashions?

Where there's gaps in my knowledge (I don't know too many octogenarians for instance) I will use the power of google to find me a few people of about the right age from about the right area. With the net being what it is, it's an easy task to remain time-line consistant.

Of course, as Emma says, there can be further reasons for choosing a character name that are pertinant to the tone or content of the story.

Incedentally, Emma, one of my best friends was called 'Kate Fairhurst', and a lovely girl she was too.

the narrator of the 1820 part of The M of L is Stephen Fairhurst: Stephen is the kind of plain, English name he'd have, but not as sturdy or royal as William or George. The extra layer is that St Stephen was the first Christian Martyr. His surname conjures up his rootedness in rural Suffolk.

Emma - you've thrown me a curve here, sidetracked me and messed up my 'office' with all my not-very-organised bits of genealogy research material, which was filed away waiting for me to get back to it at a later date. You see, my grandmother was a Fairhurst, and as there are zillions of them round here, I kind of thought it was a Lancashire name. Having watched Jeremy Paxman's 'Who Do You Think You Are?' on telly last night, where he discovered that the Paxmans were not, as he thought, a Yorkshire family, but actually rooted in Suffolk, I had to check, just in case my ancestors turned out to be Industrial Revolution migrants, too. But, ah ha, my trusty Oxford Names Companion confirms that Fairhurst is a Lancashire name: 'Habitation name from a hamlet near Parbold, not far from Wigan.' The main genealogy websites confirm that most Fairhursts originate in Lancashire.

On the subject of finding names to match the period, I use the Guinness Book of Names, which is much more fun than the Oxford, and has lists of first name fashions from 1700 to 1990 (I've had it a while!) Mind you, what it says on a birth certificate may be fairly meaningless, as people have always had their names 'changed' by friends, family or even self. My grannie Eliza Ellen Fairhurst was universally known as Nellie. Huh? Her mother, Mary Elizabeth Eden, was always known as Tizzie. I'm Juliana but was only called that as a child when I was in trouble. The variations I've heard over the years are endless. And I've never found one I like!

Julie/Julia/Julian/Jools

My partner’s name is Hayhurst which, he tells me, derives from High Woodland. Taking that logically, Fairhurst would mean Fair Woodland… which doesn’t help Emma with her crop of Richards, I'm afraid.

Names, for me, define my characters. I can’t write them without having their names. For as long as I've been writing I've wanted a character called Fynn McColl. In my mind there is a tangle between myth and reality. Most people have heard of the mythical character with the huge black dog. I was confused as a child because my parents had a friend with this name. I still have a lingering suspicion that I was being conned… It’s too late to ask now, but I often wondered what it was like to go through life carrying the name of a mythical hero… and so The Winter House was born.

Dee

Kat

Somebody told me once that if you're stuck, look at a map and use a place name for your character's surname... apparently it works.

Pete

Julie, I didn't know Fairhurst came from Lancashire, that's fascinating. Names do move, but you'll still get concentrations in certain ares. My own surname is a variant of Darwen in ?Lancs, but the family were in the midlands by the 17th cent. Now I shall have to think of a family history for Stephen that explains why they ended up in Suffolk. The Oxford book of English Surnames I have is the opposite, almost too dauntingly learned. I must get hold of your book.
Emma

Dee, I love that angle and would love a mythical name myself! My surname means 'To Serve the King With Good Grace' apparently. What King, I wonder?

Yes Emma, so many dicks it's a wonder we're not on a porno shoot!

JB

Since someone's brought up Dicks (no crap joke intended), I have a friend who most people know as Chester, but is really called Richard. As an illustration of how people define themselves/segregate various areas of their lives via what they are known as to certain people, when he worked in a factory he called himself Dickie to his workmates. Now he works for a bank and calls himself Richard, but he's still Chester to anyone who first met him back in the 1970s!

Actually, my mum's a Bennett, and I can't imagine her serving any king with good grace, so I checked in the Oxford Names Companion: 'English, from the Medieval given name Benedict (Latin Benedictus, blessed' and some more waffle about 12th c versions Beneit, Benoit, 'common amongst the Normans'. I doubt if my mum considers herself blessed!

I agree with Dee that major characters MUST have a good name that either means something relevant (even if it's not obvious - one of mine's called Keith, which means 'wood', because he's good in bed) or was given to them by their parents for a reason. Eg. Frith's name is his mother's maiden name, given to him by his father, who didn't want children and was attempting to distance himself from the child.

There's a spooky story behind my name - my grannie Nellie Fairhurst, as a child of 8 or 10, was walking home from her violin lesson when she saw Sister Juliana, a nun from the local convent who was friendly with her mother. But Sister Juliana had been dead for several months... so Nellie dropped her violin and ran. So... Nellie grows up, gets pregnant, gets married, loses husband 3 months later (in that order), leads a dance-band (most unladylike), has at least one affair with members of the horn section, and generally forgets she's a Catholic. Her son - my dad - who never knew his C of E father, was, nevertheless, brought up C of E. Then sometime between my sister's birth and mine 7 years later, Nellie presumably became aware of her own mortality and not only returned to Catholicism, but made my dad, mum and sister convert. Hence me getting the ghostly nun's name, and not my older sister. I'm sure having such a 'Catholic' name had an effect on me - I'd lapsed before I left Primary school!

I suppose that's why I place a lot of emphasis on names for my characters, and find the whole subject of names so fascinating - I know just how character-building names can be. I took some stick at school for being called Juliana, but whatever I thought about it then, as an adult I'm extremely grateful not to be plain, ordinary Julie. (No offence to all the other Julies out there!)

Blessed? Hmm, maybe I was reading a family coat of arms instead.

JB

Juliana, you are going to write that story, aren't you? If not, I'm thinking of starting a thread where we can all put ideas and stories that we know we won't use, for people to help themselves.

I know what you mean about names as part of one's self-defining. My sister was always Carrie at home and Carola at school, and decided to abandon Carrie aged about 18, but to retrain us, she would only answer to Carola. Is it something that lots of people try out in adolescence, when one's trying out all sorts of alternative realities? I went through a phase of wanting to be Henrietta for some reason, though I've never disliked Emma.

Emma