Won't You Tell Me Your Name?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: The frustrating thing is that sometimes it is so easy and sometimes it is so hard. And right now it is so hard. I am working like mad on a book synopsis, a proposal, and all I need, all I need! is the name of the main character.

Sometimes the names just show up, like Prime Time's Charlotte McNally, there was no question but that Charlotte was her name. (Although, if I had to do it over, I'd bet I would change it, the McNally at least, it seems too cute now,  but that's another story.)

 

And, come to think about it, everybody in the Prime Time series had an instant name, they just arrived, fully formed, Franklin and Penny and even Josh Gelston, which was an amalgam of a strong first name and the last name of my first boyfriend. (Imagine my surprise when I got an email from someone named Josh Gelston, who was something like a caterer for a rock band, who wondered where I had found his name. In my imagination, is the answer!)

Anyway, Jane Ryland, let’s see. That one was SO hard! I had Jane Elizabeth, right off the bat. I worked and worked and worked and had 1 million last names for her, I cannot begin to tell you, and honestly on the way to New York, for a publishing conference I realized I had to come up with a last name for her.  And I said to myself: the next name I see out of the window of this train is going to be her name. And there it was, a massive billboard, I am not kidding, for Ryland Industries. Okay, I thought, got it! Everybody loved Jane Ryland. And then, in one of my first book events, someone ask me “why did you name your main character with the same last name as yours. I was completely baffled. And then I realized. No wonder it sounded familiar.

Anyway, as I said,  I am now trying to name characters in a synopsis in progress. (And I use the term "progress" loosely.) And I cannot come up with the main character name.

I am sitting here looking at the 2025 commencement program from the University of Massachusetts that has fifty million names in it. I have looked through the entire graduating class, thousands and thousands of names. And there is not one that I can find that I can use. Just randomly Ana Gretchen Chapman. Sara Elizabeth Chappelle . Haley Charles . Mia Charles. Desteny Ann Charon. Christina Chen. Catherine Grace Chu. Erica Clarkman. Katie Lynn Clifford. Bridget Breanne Coughlin. Riley Collins. 

Okay, Wait, Riley Collins? Briley? Or maybe Collin Briley. Or, no, Colleen Briley! Wait, I had a Briley in another book.  See the problem? AND a Colleen.

I know there are all those things like the Social Security list of names, and the missing money list, I always look at that. I always look at the credits at the end of TV show shows, they are always fascinating, and maybe why I have so many British sounding names in my books.  

There’s also the tendency to come up with the name with the same first letter. In a previous attempts at a synopsis, I had Annie, all good. Then another character Ava. Then Aiden. That’s just not gonna work. 

Sometimes I just open a random book and look at the names and see if those names remind me of any other names that might remind me of any other names. I really think the best way of finding a name is that it just comes to you at some point. 

You just have to let it appear as you write.

Jenn, your dubious main character has such an interesting name, where did that come from? And Rhys, you’re always having to be careful of history when you choose a name.  And people who write contemporary novels have different kinds of choices.

Reds and readers, tell me your thoughts about names! 

RHYS BOWEN: As Hank said I do have an extra challenge for names as I write historical characters. They have to be right for the time and place.  And in the case of the Royal Spyness novels they have to witty or amusing. So I adore using silly nicknames like Binky and Fig and Podge (some of which are stolen from John’s family members who still have silly nicknames.). My favorite name so far is Lady Wormwood, Fig’s mother. I still chuckle every time I use it.

Sometimes I find I’ve used the wrong name for a character and the story is  plodding along and one day the character says, “Why do you keep calling me Richard when my name is Robert?” And I say “oh sorry” and then the story leaps ahead. It’s true that I believe Elmore Leonard said Once you have the name you have the person. Get the name right and you know exactly who they are. I changed my Scottish inspector’s name in the upcoming From Sea to Skye about five times until I finally realized he was Melrose.

So the only advice I can give to Hank is not to try too hard. Let the name come to you. You’ll wake in the middle of one night and say “Oh of Course. She’s not Abby, she’s Maddy!"

HANK: That is absolutely what happens! 

LUCY BURDETTE: This is funny Hank, as I've just been finishing the murder mystery for the Key West library to be held in February.  The Key West Woman's Club is co-sponsoring the event with the Friends, so I wanted it to have a KWWC cookbook theme. I took several of the characters from the list of Woman's Club members who worked on previous editions of the cookbook, with names like Mrs. Lee Goddard, Mrs. Frank Bowser, Ruth Munder, etc. I lifted the victim from my own THE KEY LIME CRIME. So in answer to your question Hank, it depends on the project!

JENN McKINLAY: Such a great question, Hank! The main character from WITCHES OF DUBIOUS ORIGIN - Zoanne Zakias - was taken from a girl in my judo class when I was 10 years old! I knew even back then it was a cool name. Thanks, ZZ,  wherever you are! 

 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I have a terrible tendency to insert the names of friends and family members for incidental characters and then not being able to change them out later because they become those names during the course of writing the first manuscript!

 

My biggest bugaboo when it comes to character names is getting them right for the age of the character and the socio-economic class they were born into. There's potentially a wide gap between Nathanial and Jaxon, and there's fifty years of time between Billy and Braydon.

HALLIE EPHRON: For me, names evolve, and I OFTEN change the name of my protagonist once I figure out who she is by what she does. I try not to start with a name that will be difficult to isolate by the search-and-replace function. (No Sue’s or Ann’s - those letters turn up together in too many innocent words.) I can be changing names in the final edit. 

HANK: Oh, definitely. Me,too. 

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Hank, I look at TV and movie credits, too, mostly British, and authors of books on my shelves, or people in the news. But one thing I always check is the most popular UK baby names for the years around my character’s age. Which doesn’t mean I can’t pull something out of left field, or have a character named after an older relative, although that would have to be mentioned. And sometimes names just click. A character in the current book is called Karo, short for Karoline with a K. No idea where that came from. Also Quill, whose last name is Quillen. No idea on that one, either!

HANK: That’s my very favorite, when the name just pops into your mind. It proves it's the right name! 

How about you, Reds and readers. Do you like your characters to have quirky names?  Do you think there are names that  instantly  fit a category, like Tiffany or Rex or Claire or Trixie or Emmaline or Betsy?  (Oh, Emmaline!) 

Do you prefer your characters to be Janes and Davids?

Do you notice diversity in names? Do you ever notice a trend in names? Once my pal Hannah and I came out with a book the same cycle–with the main character Lily. How does that happen? We did NOT know about the other’s naming.

Let’s talk about whatever strikes your fancy about names! (Oh, Fancy!) I mean, you've all done it when you named a child or a pet, right?

Character Names

JENN McKINLAY: I recently handed in my latest WIP. It was a marathon of writing to get it done. My final day was almost 5K words! But here’s the problem: I don’t love my character’s names. I changed them several times while writing and I’m still “meh” about them. 

Yes, we have talked about this before but we’re living in the modern age so it should be easier, right? I mean I used to name my characters by scrolling through the white pages of the phone book - paper version!

It being 2025, I tried a name generator but that was awful, too: REEDSY CHARACTER GENERATOR Another blow for AI, I just don’t think it can craft something as cool as this:

Thankfully the lack of love for my character’s names didn’t impede my writing process — sometimes it does. I’m hoping my editor has some input about them. But if she likes the names so be it.

Of course, when thinking about this I started thinking about some of the great names of characters in fiction —Atticus Finch, Katniss Everdeen, Ebenezer Scrooge, Holly Golightly, Scarlett O’Hara, and James Bond to name a few. Like naming a child, I started to ponder if the story is what makes the character’s names iconic or if it’s the name itself.

Here me out: If Ian Fleming had named 007 Harvey Bean would the “spy who loved me” still be as memorable? If Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara had been named Doris Winkle, would we think of her as the vain selfish force of nature she was portrayed to be? Would Jay Gatsby really be as interesting if he’d been named Timothy Dickson? 

Of course, none of this pondering has made me feel any better about the names of my characters. So, I’ll turn it over to you, Reds and Readers. How much do names matter to you as readers? How hard is it to come up character names as writers?

Keepiing track of characters: A writer's (and reader's) challenge

 HALLIE EPHRON: Earlier this week, we talked about a doctor’s advice for keeping your memory sharp: read fiction!

I happen to be reading Chuck Hogan’s GANGLAND and I’d just been marveling at its intricate plot is and huge number of characters, most of them gangsters, each with two or more names (Nicholas “Nicky Pins” Passero. Anthony “Joe Batters” Accardo, aka Big Tuna.) 

It’s a terrific book, and a nice change for me. The most gruesome parts are left to the imagination.

Hogan he blew me away years ago with PRINCE OF THIEVES (which was made into the movie THE TOWN) and, true to form, the characters in GANGLAND are brilliantly drawn.

I can only imagine what he must have had to do to keep those characters straight when he was writing them.

So that’s my question for today: Do you have a bookkeeping strategy for keeping your characters straight every time you put them on the page? And what about in a series where every book introduces a new character (or five) and reprises many from earlier books. What’s your trick?

LUCY BURDETTE: If I’m reading a book with too many characters, I tend to skim. Especially at night, when I am reading for entertainment, not work. At an event last week, someone asked me if I’d kept a character bible for the Key West mysteries.. Oh how I wish I had!

I envy those writers who keep track of physical and psychological attributes and plot points as they write along in their series. I wasn’t organized enough to do this, so now I rely heavily on the style sheets the publisher supplies along with copyedits. These list the characters, and some of their relationships–this is so helpful when I can’t remember someone’s name etc!

If all else fails, I use the search bar liberally.

RHYS BOWEN: I do not like books with too many characters. All those Russian novels with Alexander Ivanovitch sometimes called Sasha sometimes some other nickname. I confess I give up.

And I’ve had to give feedback on books that introduce a Bob s Bill and. Phil in the first page and expect me to remember them.

With one series of 20 books and one of 18 I should keep perfect bibles. But I don’t. Then I have to delve into back numbers to find out what someone’s maid was called. Oh, and use the style sheets, Lucy I thought of paying a grandchild to read all the books and create bibles for both series

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Well in other people’s books, if I get confused about who is who, I just keep reading and figure it will become clear soon enough. If I start saying, who is that guy? too much, I just stop reading the book. The author has not done their job.

If the names are weird or otherworldly, or impossible to pronounce, I just decide how they sound, and say it mentally that way. And wonder why people just don’t give characters names you can say.

In my own books, gosh, I don’t have to keep track of anyone. I suppose that’s because the past six books I’ve written have been standalones. So I only have to keep track within the book, and I have to say that, so far, that has been no problem.

Sometimes I spell names differently within, Callaway or Calloway, Linney or Lonny, and then change it when I figure out what I’m doing. And in one book, Patience became Patricia in the manuscript, but luckily I caught it.

For my two series, I did not keep a Bible, though I know I should have. I remember Charlaine Harris saying she had hired someone to write her series Bible, and that turned out to be so fascinating that she published it as a book!

Maybe that is an incentive for you series writers!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I wish I had kept a bible from the very first book in my series, but of course it never occurred to me that there would be so many books and that I would have any trouble remembering my characters… Oops.

I do make a list of the characters for each new book, with some description, and usually there is a lot of crossing out and changing. I don’t want names that sound too alike, or are too hard to pronounce, and of course I have to check previous books to see if I’ve used a name before.

When we are• watching TV, especially a series, my husband always asks me how I can possibly remember the names of all the different characters. Practice, I say!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Well, I seem to be the exception to the rule, here, because I keep a name bible, and have since the 3rd book in my series. The hero’s sister was Janet, then Janice, the Janet again, and I decided I really didn’t want to go down that road any further…

I have a list of names used in all the books, divided into sections: In town, From away, Bad Guys, 1920s to 1950s, and The Honored Dead. Any names in use during the current work in progress are bolded. I have birthdates and ages of all my main characters, and a brief line of how they’re connected or what they do, Ex. Barbara LeBlanc, manager at the Algonquin Waters, dating pathologist Dan Scheeler.

I also have a list of street/road names and highways numbers and roughly where they begin and end, or the important places they lead to - I added those when I realized I was making up new state highways in every book and Millers Kill now had more roadways than New York City. I killed off most of them by never using them after the first three books.

I also - and this is important to avoid the Bill, Bob and Phil problem Rhys mentions - have an a-through-z chart for both first and last names. I don’t list the names themselves, but how many times I use a name beginning with that letter.

For some reason, I have a real tendency toward J and K names and I have to rein it back. That way, when considering a new character name, I can see I only have a few O names, for instance, so the heroine’s new dog becomes Oscar and the young former Marine’s friend in ONE WAS A SOLDIER is Olivia.

JENN McKINLAY: I should keep track of my characters' names, but other than my outline, I don't have a method. I remember hearing Barbara Michaels laugh at herself when her readers called her out for making Amelia Peabody tall in one book and less tall in following books. That resonated, especially when I can't remember a character's name from a previous book in a series or their height, hair, or eye color. Probably, I should work on this. LOL.

HALLIE: So what's your take on character names? Are you willing to stick with a book with a lot of characters and what makes you bail?

What's In A Name?

 RHYS BOWEN

My latest Royal Spyness novel (GOD REST YE ROYAL GENTLEMEN) ends after Christmas with happiness and puppies. Georgie and Darcy give each other a Labrador puppy and go to fetch them from Sandringham. But by the end of the book they haven’t named them. Why? Because I couldn’t come up with good names for them. I wanted the names to be clever and funny, but my mind was a blank. So we’ve left that for the next book, which I have now started and need puppy names asap.

                I’m afraid I’m not very good with animal names. Growing up our dogs all had boringly sensible dog names—a black spaniel named Sooty. A spring spaniel named Brownie. You get the trend. The only dog we’ve owned since marriage was an English Setter we called St. John (as pronounced sinjun, the English way). Why that name? I chose it to prevent my husband calling our next child Sinjun. Can you imagine being saddled with St. John (pronounced Sinjun) through school? So I nixed this by naming the dog.

                Names are very important to me in my writing, especially in the Royal Spyness books. I love having my aristocrats with silly nicknames and choosing appropriately funny names for other characters. In the book I’m writing now I have the worst sort of American tourist in Paris called Mrs. Rottenburger. I once had a French detective with big squeaky shoes called Lafite (pronounced La Feet)

                I was asked at a recent interview why British aristocrats had all those silly nicknames—you know: Boy and Binky and Bunty and Froggy.  I assume it was because their names were often long and ponderous. You can’t call a small child Alexandra Constance or Marmaduke Archibald or even Albert. So pet names came about through the child’s personality (Foggy) or appearance (Tubby or Shrimpy) But now I think about it the other reason is more of the Us and Them syndrome. Only the inner circle know and can use the nicknames.  In my books Georgie’s sister in law is Hilda, Duchess of Rannoch. To those who know her she is Fig.

And in case you think this strange custom is a thing of the past. John’s family has cousins called Fig, Dudh, Puff. His brother’s children Were Victoria Alexandra, Jemima Kate and Michael James.  Growing up they were known as Bumpy, Mim and Mini Mike. Now they are Vicki, Mim and MJ.  I remember calling our own girls Tootsie, Podgy and the Basher. Luckily those names didn’t stick.

So I have no problem with silly nicknames, appropriate character names. It’s just those blooming dogs. My granddaughter called her big male cat Cupcake! My brother had a brindle bullterrier called Patch, and later a white bull terrier called Patchless. But me? I got nothing.

Suggestions please. 

ps: I posted this on my Facebook page and got 650 suggestions. Some brilliant. But I'm still not quite sure....

What Hank's Writing: Naming Names!

-->

HANK PHILLIPPPI RYAN: What are the two scariest words in an author’s lexicon? Oh, trust me (those aren’t the ones) there are plenty of scary words. No thanks. Next time. So sorry.

For me right now, the scary words are: Chapter One. Which I typed, four-thousand-one-hundred-fourteen words ago. And yet again, I’m having the moment of feeling what it’s like to write a book. Terrified.

From scratch. Ish. Yes, I’d sent a proposal to my editor, and yes, she loved it, and all good. I just finished the edits of THE MURDER LIST, all good. But now, I actually have to write the new book. I'm so happy about that. Still. Terrified.

So if you ask: what’re you writing, Hank? Who are the main characters? What're their names?  I’d say—that’s what I’m trying to figure out.

There’s a main character: MAYBE her name is Ellie. Maybe.

There’s a love interest. He’s so unformed as yet that honestly, his name is now “Guy.” It’ll be hilarious if it stays that way.

There’s a foil--is she good or bad? Whose name started out as Amy, but because there are too many Amys, changed to Hannah, but turned out she’s not one bit Hannah. As she proved in about one paragraph. So she’s now Andrea.  Andrea Westin. For the time being.

There’s a mystery woman, Nora. Maybe Nora. Nora seems to be working for her, so I’m counting my name blessings.

Doctor Lorcan Elliott became Doctor Elliott Lorcan and then that all had to be scrapped because you can’t have Ellie and Elliott. Now he’s Glenn Something. (He’s in is sixties, so Glenn works.)

I’ve auctioned off naming rights for charity, and I adore doing that. I have four of those for this book, now, from separate places.  However. Three of them have the same initials, first name C, Last name P. Argh. That is not gonna work.  

 Thing is, and it’s kind of magical, you can’t just slap a name on someone and have it work. I am so fascinated by this, and persevere because I know once I get the name, the personality emerges. (Writers, has this happened to you?)

Yes yes. I hear you.  Go to phone books, cemeteries, name generators, yearbooks, you’ll suggest. Done that. I mine the credits in TV shows. One Sunday, I contemplated whether I could make every man in the book have the name of a professional football player. I didn’t do it, but it would have been funny. (Just what I’m goin’ for, funny.)  

Seriously, I went through the entire list of the people owed money in the Mass State Treasurer’s unclaimed money fund, thousands upon thousands of people’s names, and I could not find one name I could use. 

Because the person’s name already exists, you just have to unearth it.

In Trust Me, Ashlyn Bryant began her book-life as Corrinne Briody. Every single time I wrote her name, I spelled it a different way. Big red flag. Plus, she wasn’t “being” anyone. She had no goals, and no attitude, and no personality. Probably because she couldn’t remember how to spell her name.  

I thought and thought, and went through every darn list you can imagine. Crystal, Tiffany—too on the nose for this character. Tasha, no. (But she became someone else.) Nicole? ::Shaking head:: 

But when I typed Ashlyn Bryant? It was—amazing. She sat up and looked at me. Ashlyn she was. I had found her.

And in The Murder List, a main character was law student Gianna Delaney. I loved that name, what a great name! But she apparently, hated it. Hated. It. And sat there, a lump, a limp puppet, a sullen block of wood.

Okay, I said. How about Rachel? Rachel North.

Bingo. Her eyes sparkled and she looked like someone who has a secret or two. Which, as you will soon see, indeed she does.

(The MURDER LIST comes out August 20! And way more to come on that. Trust me.)

 So here I am with all these naming opportunities again. It’s daunting, really, and superly fun, not so much “naming” a character but discovering what their name really is.

But maybe there’s one way you can help me.  Ellie has a cat. I think it’s a female. Calico, because it’s fun to say calico. The cat’s name has been Tinker, Tinka, Blinker, Blinka, Trudy, Scooter, Ibsen, Kafka and Wally. None of those works, exactly. Her person is a reporter, kind of, and has a…past. Which I can’t tell you. 

 So—what would a wholesome fresh-faced determined young woman name a cat these days?

Maybe you’ll be able to discover who this one really is. And if we discover it together right here on Jungle Red? I’ll send you a copy of the absolutely gorgeous new trade paperback of TRUST ME.

It’s an Agatha nominee, did I mention that? I probably did.

So, here, kitty kitty. What’s your name?