For trivial characters like murder victims, random neighbours, and people with a line or two who nonetheless get a name, I usually turn to social media. I follow thousands of people on X with both unique and mundane names, but I usually go for the latter. I take the first name from one and the last name from another, and have a suitable random character name that should be as forgettable as the character.
Trivial characters can never have interesting names. Those are reserved for the main ones. I used to have a long list of names I found interesting, some suitable for heroes and others for villains, but after 35 books, I’ve exhausted most of it and need to come up with new ones all the time. Internet with its baby name sites and other helpful lists is invaluable, but the abundance of names also makes it difficult to choose the best ones.
The series that’s been especially annoying in this respect is The Reed Files. Both main characters are criminals who change their names often, and I want all the names to be interesting and suitable for them. I’m particularly fond of the name Eliot Reed, but there will come a time when he’ll have to ditch it for good. But his character is already established, making it even more difficult to choose a good name. Then again, he started his life as Jonathan Moreira in the P.I. Tracy Hayes series, so it’s not like I haven’t changed it before.
Occasionally I choose the name first and make the character to match. Other times, I plan the character first and then choose the name. A working-class detective will have a different name than a centuries old vampire aristocrat, obviously. Age and time matter too. Not all modern names were around a century ago and vice versa. Behind the Name site that I often use has lists of most popular names in each country for each year, going back a few decades, which is usually enough for me. Then it’s the question of whether I want my character to have a popular name or a unique one. Would a unique name change the character?
I’m currently planning another spin-off from the P.I. Tracy Hayes series. It’ll feature her brother Trevor, so his name is set. But the upcoming other MC is giving me a headache.
I came up with the series name first, which features the character’s last name. Choosing the first name that will match it has proven annoying. Even more so, because I don’t exactly know yet what kind of a character I’m dealing with: rich, poor, educated, cool, messy or something else. I came up with a good one, and then I tried to pronounce it and it turned out to be a mouthful, so that had to go. I’m not in a hurry, the series won’t launch until next year, but it’s bugging me.
I have another series in the making on the background where the names give me a bit of a headache too. They didn’t at first and I was really happy with the names of both MCs. Then I changed the ethnicity of one of them, and now I’m not sure if the name should change to match or not. And then I realised I’d used the name of the other MC for a villain in a different book. There probably won’t be people who remember—I didn’t until I reread the book the other day—but it’s started to annoy me as well. So that’ll have to change too. Maybe.
So far, each character has had a name that I like by the time I hit the publish button, but I’ve occasionally wished later that I’d chosen differently. The most obvious annoyance is Alexander Hamilton, the vampire lord in my Two-Natured London series—no relation to the historical person—but I mostly call him Lord Foley anyway. And I’ve only once used the same name for the hero in two different books, that I recall. I have Marcus Hamilton in Beloved Warrior of Two-Natured London series, and Marcus Wright in Which Way to Love?, a stand-alone contemporary romance. In my defence, I originally published the latter under a different pen name, so it didn’t seem to matter at that time.
I plan to write many more books in the future, so the problem of the names will only become worse. But it’s a fun challenge, and I haven’t failed yet.
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