On Writing: When You Can't Call Everyone "Darling"

I hate naming my characters. There. I said it. For many years, I refused to name them, and I stuck with the pronouns only. Then I started writing homoerotica, and names became necessary because more than one "he" and if you're not careful, you have one guy doing all sorts of dirty things to himself. Some of those things are physically impossible.

But I digress.

Now that I name my characters regularly, I still hate it, but I have a few ways of going about it that make the process easier. I believe you should give thought to your character names, but I also believe--especially in fiction based in the real world--that the names should make sense. Conservative, wealthy parents from New England aren't going to name their daughter Rainbow Moonbeam, and die-hard Secessionists from the South aren't going to name their oldest son after the bastard who burned Atlanta to the ground. There are, of course, always exceptions to the rule, and true life is much stranger than fiction, but I think you get my point.

So here's what I do.

Visit the Social Security Administration website.
The SSA has a site dedicated to baby names. What I do is determine the year my character was born, and then I search "popular names by birth year." I try to pick a name from the top 1000. By doing this, I give my character an extra dimension of realism. Her parents were fully grounded in reality. Plus, it makes naming characters so much easier.

Let the characters name themselves.
It's a bit like letting a child name itself, but sometimes, it works. In Strawberry Moon, the main characters were originally named Lydia and Elaine, but it just wasn't working. When I sort of gave over to the muse and just started typing, they named themselves Jessica and Amy. I wouldn't have chosen these names on my own because of real-world connections to a Jessica and an Amy, but the names work, it's unlikely the women my husband knows will ever read the book, and so I'm going with it.

Consider the character's parents.
I mentioned the conservative New England parents and the die-hard Southern parents. Think about the character's origins, where she came from, who would have named her. What were her parents thinking? What did they hope to accomplish with her name? Parents generally put a lot of thought into their child's name. And some don't, which says something about their character.

Use what sounds good.
I confess: Cass got her name because it sounded good. It's a good sex name: one syllable, easy to say in the heat of passion. It sort of embodies the character and her story. Her name is short, it sounds like "sassy," it even has the vulgar word for buttocks in it, and if you've read the book, you know that kind of figures into her thinking. The current character I'm writing, Lilah, got her name in a similar fashion. It just sounds good. I like the way it rises and falls, I like that it flows nicely with her middle name and her last name, and I like that her parents chose an old-fashioned, Biblical name for her but shortened it to something more modern and flower-like.