I just finished copyediting a wonderful manuscript. Written by a first-time author, it had a great theme, a page-turning plot, and characters that made me laugh, cheer, boo, and cry as I added the occasional comma to their dialogue. It also had a ton of characters with similar names. That wasn’t wonderful.
I’ve been editing a lot of novels lately. I love it. After many years of specializing in health, spending day after day reading about cancer and Alzheimer’s and all manner of infectious diseases, novels have been just the change I needed. I feel rejuvenated. Rather than dreading the next chapter of the manuscript on my desk, I look forward to it. But while novel manuscripts don’t require as much fact checking and quote double-checking as nonfiction, and absolutely no reworking of citations and bibliographies (hallelujah!), they each still have their bugaboos. Confusing character names is a common one.
The manuscript I just finished had 42 named characters. Of those, nine had first names beginning with J and another nine had first names beginning with S. Five had first names beginning with C and four with D. In other words, 27 characters had first names beginning with one of just four letters. Altogether, all the first names began with one of 12 letters, leaving 14 letters unused. That’s not good planning.
While authors spend anywhere from a quick two months to as many as 10 years or more working on a book, most readers finish the average-sized novel in roughly two weeks. Some people even finish a whole book in one day! This means that authors spend a lot of time getting to know their characters, but readers generally don’t. Therefore, to help readers follow a story better—and thereby enjoy it more—writers should make every effort to keep character confusion to a minimum. Giving nine characters first names that begin with the same letter doesn’t accomplish this.
Keeping track of what names you’ve given your characters isn’t difficult. Using a piece of paper, a word-processing document, or a spreadsheet, just create a table with three columns and 26 rows. Label the rows with the letters of the alphabet, and label the columns “Last Names,” “First Names, Males,” and “First Names, Females.” Then, whenever you give a character a name, jot it down on the table. (Note that a last name shared by two or more related characters needs to be listed just once.)
With your table in front of you, when it comes time to name a new character, you can see at a glance which letters of the alphabet you’ve already used and which ones you still have available. You can also see if the names you’re choosing are too similar in other ways—for example, if most of the women’s names end in y or i, if the men tend to have nicknames held over from childhood, or if too many names sound alike (Pam, Sam, Tom). You can also use the chart to keep track of other name-related factors, such as ethnicity.
Naming characters should be fun, not a chore. With a little bit of organization, it can also be simple, plus help you make following your story much easier for your readers.
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4 comments:
Oh, Elaine, this is one of my bugaboos as a reader and writer! I do have a list of all my characters together, especially since I've assembled a team of 10-ish fictional folks, and I'm using some real historic characters as well, whose names can't be changed, no matter their inconvenient similarities to my inventions. Confronted by increasing confusion and repetition, in self-defense, I had to do exactly what you propose and list them all together and hunt for the similarities.
I not only checked for beginning letters and ending ones (I was a sucker for ending Ys), but I also checked for name lengths. I created some short firsts with long lasts, some both short and both long, because visually that helps me differentiate as a reader, too.
I also found that, without examination, far too many folks would have ended up with bird-related names, or ones with a vaguely Anglo Saxon feel, so I had to review for conceptual and ethnic repetition, too. I ended up broadening the geographic/ethnic roots to add interest to the names and built-in background variety I can use, a much more accurate scenario anyway because I'm writing about the crazy-quilt New York metro area.
I had to stop and become very conscious and calculating about it, so as not to end up with a roster like your client's. I'm glad to know someone else notices, and glad to know it's the kind of thing you'd point out, because, as a reader with a sieve-like memory, I can use all the help I can get.
Elaine - terrific post. As a voracious reader (of the book-in-a-day variety), the Bag Lady tends to get confused if the characters have similar sounding names, even though she most likely has only put the book down for a matter of minutes...okay, maybe that says more about the Bag Lady's attention span than the author's culpability...but, especially if the book gets set aside for any length of time, it's annoying to have to go back and re-read a portion to figure out whether Joe or Jim is who you think he is. Holy crap, even I don't know what the hell that sentence said...guess my skills as an author could use some polishing, too.
42 characters? Holy moly! Sounds like a lot. Couldn't all be significant characters could they? Wonder what the outer limit on significant characters would be.
I've made lists and - when they got too long (!) - ignored them. But I love the table suggestion.... Word table columns can be sorted, so repeats of any letter would be easy to check out.
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