Six tips for finding character names that really work

Shakespeare famously asked, “What’s in a name?” But there’s a reason you never heard of Romeo and Rhonda. A couple of reasons, actually.

Whether choosing names for your characters is one of your favorite — or least favorite — parts of writing, it’s a bear we all have to cross. To keep you on the trail and out of the scat, it helps to have some rules — or, shall we say, friendly suggestions — to live by.

I asked four published authors just how they go about it. From their advice, I’ve distilled “Six Tips for Finding Character Names That Really Work.”

1) Check the meaning.

This is what Jared Garrett, best-selling author of science-fiction thrillers such as the “Beat” series, calls the “coolness factor.”

“Sometimes, you just need a cool name,” Garrett said, “so I figure out a core attribute of the character and take that to Google Translate and punch it in.”

Garrett will translate the word for that attribute into various languages until he finds a translation with “a tasty feel to it.”

Tasha Hackett, author of the inspirational historical romance “Bluebird on the Prairie,” said she looks up name meanings for her main characters.

“It lends itself to personalities and strengths that make a character much more interesting without being cliché,” she said.

2) Consider the time.

Heather B. Moore’s best-selling novels run the gamut from romance to thrillers, fantasy to historical. She also publishes under the name H.B. Moore.

“If it's historical, then I'll look up the names that fit with the era,” Moore said. “I feel like I have more leeway with contemporary, but I still choose names that are a middle ground between the very common and the very unusual.”

“Writing historical fiction is tricky because you want to get it as right as possible,” Hackett said. “For minor characters, I might pull something common out of a hat and make sure it's still appropriate for the time period and location.

“I spend far too much time looking through census records,” she said.

If you’re writing “in this world,” Garrett said, make sure your characters’ names are in line with naming trends for the time they were born.

For instance, if your setting is contemporary and the character is middle-aged, think about which baby names were popular in the 1970s. The Social Security Administration keeps a handy-dandy list for this sort of thing.

3) Consider the place.

“If I’ve got a speculative world going, I’ll use names to build that world and expand on it,” Garrett said. He advised settling on some language conventions and sticking to them.

“For my science fiction series,” he said, “since it was a fairly artificial world 100 years in the future, I speculated how language might have changed and become more efficient, so that influenced names.”

You also must consider the place when writing historical fiction.

“You can’t go naming a character Kjell unless he lives in a Swedish town,” Hackett said.

You might turn to some nearby places in your search for character names.

Karen Harrington, author of YA books such as “Courage for Beginners” and “Mayday,” sometimes looks at street signs for last names.

“I collect names all the time,” Harrington said. “Sometimes you hear a name and instantly think, ‘That’s a character!’”

Another helpful location might be the cemetery, especially if you’re writing historical fiction. I read this tip online and haven’t actually tried it, but I grew up a block from a cemetery, so I know there’s a lot of history there.

4) Consider the sound.

There may have been two brothers in your high school named Corey and Calvin or sisters named Tami and Pami. That can be charming in real life, but not so much in fiction.

“I try to avoid similar names or names that start with the same letter,” Moore said. “So I wouldn't have an Oliver and Olivia in the same story.

Similar-sounding names, whether first or last, can be confusing to readers.

“I find, for last names, I was leaning towards similar endings — Anderson, Jefferson, Peterson, Fredrickson, Franklin, Wilkin, etc.," Hackett said. “I had to change a bunch of those.”

Like similar names, names that are difficult to pronounce are like tacks in front of the reader’s bicycle. They interrupt the flow of your narrative and give the reader a reason to stop — maybe never to resume reading.

5) Honor thy friends (or dis thy enemies).

“I like to use friends' names as an homage to them,” Harrington said.

Garrett will also give shout-outs to family, friends and co-workers by naming characters after them, but the opposite is also true.

“Villains are named after jerks, and they (the characters) ultimately die unpleasantly,” he said. “What could be better?”

6) Ask the readers!

“Since I have a fairly active social media following, I'll sometimes do a request for name recommendations, and people are always excited to throw out suggestions,” Hackett said.

She’ll pick up the ones that work best and save the others for a rainy day.

In my own writing, I sometimes use tag names, like Miss Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play “The Rivals.” For instance, in my short story “The Safe List” from "Lion Taming, Dating and Other Dangerous Endeavors," Summer has boyfriends named Trig (a competitive shooter), Flex (an amateur bodybuilder) and Biff (an indoor football player).

In “Mystery Girl,” I chose Missy Toussaint’s name partly because Missy T sounds like “mystery.” I wanted Gordon to be more down-to-earth compared to the exotic Missy, so I chose the last name Sands for him.

I searched out lists of old guy’s names to find Fitzwilliam in “For the Love of Fitz” and hipster names for Maisie and Gulliver in “When the Calliope Music Fades.”

Reggie, in “Reggie and the Rail Splitter,” is a shortened form of Reginald, a moniker old friend and colleague Tim Unruh hung on me years ago.

A special thank-you goes out to the authors who took time out of their busy schedules to share their character-naming advice with me!