Names

Choosing names for characters in my book was an interesting experience because all of them seemed to come about differently. Long before I had a finished manuscript or even a chapter one, I had the first sentence of the book. And I wanted to fit that in with the main character's name, so that's how I got her name. I had a certain idea of what the dad would be like, so I picked a name that seemed to fit. The mother's name was a little more elusive. I tried out a few different names, but none of them seemed right. They sounded fake, which indeed they were, but I wanted them to sound real. Oh, the irony... After a while, I happened upon the right one (after searching popular girls' names from the 1960s when she would have been born, had she been real), and I knew it instantly.

It was an involved process to name the main characters, but sometimes I only needed to come up with a throwaway name for another student we'd never see in the book again. And I wanted those to sound real too. I tried to pick middle-of-the-road names—names that were a little unique, something unlike Bob Johnson, perhaps, but not too unique so that the name detracted from the story, like Petal Kazowsky, for example. Although the more I look at Petal Kazowsky, the more I like it. Maybe I'll use it in another book someday . . .

It was this way with place names too. Sometimes I used combinations of names and places that were familiar to me, and sometimes I dreamed something up in my head, only to look it up and see that it was an actual place and the name of several cities across the U.S.—and none of them near me. True story.

Anyway, this is all to say that it was sometimes hard to come up with the right names, names that felt right. For characters, I tried to use different kinds of names: modern, classic, ethnically diverse. And while I was in the thick of writing, I was absolutely fascinated when I came across this supercool map of surnames in an issue of National Geographic.

Here's a link to the NGM blog post about it, where you can also enlarge the map in case you don't have superhuman vision.

Anyway, it's incredibly interesting to me to see how common last names are distributed in the U.S. It shows the countries of origin for the surnames, and you can see patterns of where immigrants from certain countries settled. The article also listed a website that lets you find hot spots for last names around the world: http://worldnames.publicprofiler.org/ You can look up your own, and it's very, very interesting. Frankly, I didn't know Scoresby was of Celtic origin.

So I tore out the map, and now I keep it in my writing stuff because I love it and it's useful to look at if I can't think of last names for my characters. Besides Smith, Johnson, and Miller, there are plenty to choose from.

QUESTIONS: What are some of the best names in literature? What would you say makes a good name? Any names that have bothered you?