crafting-unforgettable-characters

character without a name—or, worse, acharacter with the wrong name—rankles inmy brain like a mosquito bite I’ve sworn notto itch. As Mary O’Hara puts it in her TheMaking of a Novel:I work at their names awake andasleep, driving, resting, eating, visiting.For days or weeks I would strugglewith one single character rightly toname him, actually a sort of madseizure, shaking him by the throat—“Tell me! Tell me! What is your name?Your real name?” ... For me, at least,the naming—right naming—is partof the very structure of the character.With the wrong name, the characterlooks wrong, talks wrong, does thewrong things.I wish very much I had a magic equation togive you, to help you instantly find the perfectname for every character every time. But, inlieu of that, I offer a handful of the pointersI’ve always found helpful.“A well-chosen namecan evoke imagesand feelings inreaders’ mindsbefore thecharacter evenwalks on stage.Tolkien knew this.Doesn’t ‘Sauron’sound a bit like‘Satan’? Anddoesn’t ‘Frodo’remind us of thatrotund, slowmoving,extinctbird, the dodo?”—J.V. JonesAvoid names that begin with thesame letter. It’s been my policy (althoughadmittedly not always strictly observed) toavoid using two names starting with the sameletter in the same story. After beingintroduced to a character, most readers stopreading his name and simply recognize thecharacter by the shape of the letters as theireyes skim over the page. If two charactersshare names that begin with the same letter—and particularly if the names are similar in21