I’ve been working on a few new projects lately, including many short stories for a linked collection as well as two independent novellas (or what I think will be novellas, which is maybe a discussion for a different post) and that means coming up with lots of character names. This is something of a problem for me because I’m historically quite bad at it.

Character names are one of those details that feel incredibly loaded and important and can utterly derail me from making progress on a new draft, no matter how much I tell myself I can always go back and change them later. Hell, even real humans have that option down the line, and it’s much more complicated to alter a real-world personal identity than to simply Find/Replace in a Word document.

But all of this new character naming has gotten me thinking: why do I feel like names are so important—and what do they really say about a character? So, like any good blogger, I decided to write a post about it.

Do characters always need names?

This is something else that I’ve been asking myself lately—and, actually, have apparently answered for myself, because I’ve written quite a few projects where they don’t have them.

One of these projects is the linked story collection I mentioned in the intro. This particular project was inspired by The Canterbury Tales, Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted, and similar works. The individual stories within the collection are “told” by the characters from the frame between them. The characters in many of the individual stories are named, but the characters in the frame intentionally aren’t. Instead, like Chaucer and Palahniuk, I’ve given them a designation that describes their profession or a key aspect of their identity: the McEmployee, the Skater, the Private, and so on.

I sort of started off doing this just because of the source of inspiration, but as I’ve been working on it I realized there are two main advantages to this approach:

1. It keeps the character list from being overwhelming for the reader right off the bat. The group of storytellers numbers nearly as many as Chaucer’s (around 30) which is just an absurd number of names to expect a reader to recognize from the start—especially considering each individual story often features its own cast of characters. Using their title, profession, etc. instead gives the reader something a bit easier to latch onto while still differentiating each character as an individual.

2. It makes the characters feel more archetypical. This is useful for me in this particular project because of its form—I’m not necessarily concerned with the characters from the frame feeling like defined individuals so much as a representation of different groups, classes, or types of people, and keeping them as archetypes helps to maintain this.

…there are some other potential advantages to using unnamed characters, too. It can invite the reader to identify with the character more strongly if they don’t have their own name and are only vaguely described, especially when you’re using a 1st or 2nd person narration. In a more obvious vein, leaving characters unnamed keeps them more anonymous, useful when you’re playing with concepts of identity—or a lack of it, or a stripping of it, or a time/place/world where personal identity isn’t important.

If you’re curious to read how other writers have dealt with unnamed protagonists, here’s a partial list of stories that use them:

• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Everyman by Philip Roth
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Of course, there are loads of other books that use unnamed characters in secondary or background roles. This is useful when you don’t want to draw too much attention to a character—say someone who’s just there to serve a plot function like a waiter, cashier, etc. the main players interact with.

Omitting names can also give you insights into how the narrator or protagonist views the world. For example, if they refer to people relative to other characters (think Offred in Handmaid’s Tale) or only as their function, this shows that narrator doesn’t view that character as having their own distinct identity.

What does a character name tell you about them?

Unfortunately (in my view, at least), it doesn’t always work to just leave characters unnamed—and that means you need to decide what to call the people in their stories. On the plus side, a name can do a lot of heavy lifting for shaping a character in the reader’s mind.

Some of the things the character’s name can tell readers include:

• The story’s time and place setting – some names are broadly used while others are linked to a particular time period or region. This is particularly true for SFF/speculative stories—you’re not likely to see many fairies named Joe or Susan, for example, and using invented names that the reader’s never seen before can help to flag the alienness of your world.
• The character’s formailty or social status – A character who is always referred to as Jonathan Clinton III has a very different feel than if people call them Johnny, or by their last name, or something like Tre. This can give the reader a quick insight into the kind of economic, social, and political landscape the character inhbaits.
• Symbolic meaning – Deriving character names from meaningful roots, or naming them after particular people, places, or things, can give the reader a field of reference for their personality and identity without the writer needing to over-explain what they’re all about. This can be a way to foreshadow or hint at the character’s personality traits or where the plot is going (and what role the character will play in it).

…something else to remember is that, when it comes to the character’s given name, the vast majority of the time they didn’t choose it for themselves. In a realistic story, the character’s name was likely given to them by their parents, so this gives the reader more info about their family background and heritage than it does about the character themselves.

Conversely, if you do make a point of the fact that the character goes by a nickname, or has chosen their own name, this can represent a break from or rejection of their past. It says something about both the character and their upbringing that they’ve taken the agency to select their own nomiker rather than sticking with the one they got at birth.

What makes a good character name?

So, with all that being said—how the hell do you pick what you should call your characters? I’m definitely not an expert on this, as you’ve probably gathered from my anxiety over picking character names. I have come up with a list of rules for myself, though, and these might be helpful for you, too.

#1: Make the names of characters within your story distinctive from each other.

Now, there’s an exception to every rule—sometimes it serves the story to have two characters with similar names, especially in genres like satire or humor. Unless you’re doing it for a reason, though, you’ll make it easier for readers to differentiate the characters if their names both look and sound different.

#2: Choose names that make sense for the story, genre, and character.

A name should be consistent with the story’s world as well as with the character they’re attached to. Shakespeare was a master of this—if a character is called something like Bottom or Feste they’re probably a jester or there for comic relief. Again, you can break this rule on purpose, say if you want to show a contrast between the character’s personal identity and their role in society, but most of the time it’s a smart one to follow.

Similarly, the names of characters should make sense for the setting and genre of your story. This goes back to what I said about a fairy named Joe—that’s going to strike the reader as funny and out of place, so likely isn’t the best choice if that’s not the effect you’re going for.

#3: Pick names that are relatively easy to recognize, pronounce, and remember.

This doesn’t mean it needs to be 100% clear how you think the name is pronounced, especially if it’s an invented name—but you want the reader to have an idea in their head of how to say that name consistently. If a name is complicated or phonetically challenging, keep it short—don’t make the reader work too hard for a detail this small.

#4: Once you’ve picked the name, be consistent with it.

This is especially true in a short story—if you call the person Pat at the beginning, don’t change it to Patricia later on then use the character’s last name in another instance. Different versions of the name will often flag as different characters for a reader, which can be confusing. Again, there are times that it makes sense for a character to go by different versions of their name, or different names entirely, in different situations—but in this case, clearly establish the who and why each time you vary it to avoid confusion. This is more likely to be useful in a longer work like a novella or novel, where the reader spends more time with characters and can get to know them in enough depth that the name change won’t throw them off.

#5: If you’re really stuck, use a placeholder and pick the final name later.

This is a rule I constnatly need to remind myself of. A character’s name is a key aspect of their identity—that much is true. However, character identities are never set in stone until the story is fully finished, and especially on the first draft they’re likely to be in a bit of flux. If choosing the right name is keeping you from moving forward, just pick something to identify them and come back to finalize it later. This doesn’t even have to be a name. It can be a letter, a title, a description, etc.—anything that you can use to refer to the character until you’ve decided what you really want to call them. The right name may come to you while you’re writing, and will be easier to select when you’ve finished crafting the character and their arc than when you’re still building everything around them, too.

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