The other day a friend asked me how I come up with names for all my primary characters and other characters. Not just in novels, but in fanfiction as well. From what I understand, it’s an age old question, a naming convention of sorts.

Have you ever tried the game where you see someone and try to guess what their name would be?

I was at a party with my husband once, and he noticed a woman across the room who kept smiling at him as though he should know her. He leaned over and pointed her out, telling me how embarassed he felt because he thought he should know her but he couldn’t remember from where…or what her name was. I turned to my husband and told him she looked like a “Heather” to me. After a moment of stunned silence he gasped and said “Oh my God it IS Heather! I dated her in High School!”

First names can be difficult because you need to have something that not only fits your character, it also fits the storyline, the timeline, and the location. You also want a name that people aren’t going to be stumbling over whenever they read it. I remember reading a novel once where I had to stop every time I saw the person’s name because I couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to be pronounced. It really broke the plot up for me, and made the book itself quite unenjoyable. I couldn’t just read the story and fall into the plot because I kept stumbling over the heroine’s name. It’s a lesson I immediately vowed to learn and a mistake I do not want to do myself.

Sometimes a last name will pop right into my head, like it did with the hero in Second Chances - Jackson. I kept thinking of a stormy night, summer heat and hail, and decided I really liked the sound of Hail as a last name. But the spelling didn’t do it for me. When I saw the first and last name together, Jackson Hail just didn’t look strong enough. It was too schmancy for my retired Marine, so I swaped it around. Even in print it looks much stronger. Jackson Hale.

I like to choose last names that are reflective of the ethnnicity of the character I’m trying to portray. If I know what their background is, I will try to find last names that reflect that. Google is a great way to find information on surnames for a specific ethnic background.

My story ideas usually start with a scene, and from that scene, I create my hero and heroine. I want their names to reflect who they are, what they do, what they look like. My current WIP (work in progress), the hero is a television actor, so I wanted him to have a name that was easy to pronounce, but strong in stature. I wanted something slightly different, but not so out of the way that he was a Bob or a Jack or a Joe. The more I pictured him in my head, the more I could see the name forming around him. Dark hair, mussed and slightly unkempt, the kind we women want to run our fingers through and make even more a mess of. Blue eyes that are such a deep, clear colour they would match the sky on one of those amazingly hot summer days when there’s not a cloud to be seen. The more I concentrated on how he looked, the more clear it became that he needed a strong name. Emmett. And since Emmett is a third generation New Yorker of Irish descent, he needed a good, solid, old country last name. And so, Emmett O’Connor was born.

Names can be tricky, but if you can wrap them around the character, it’s much easier.

- Nika