by Patricia Bradley, @PTBradley1

I don’t know about you, but I can’t start writing my story until I have a name for my main characters. Although I have thought about using numbers when just the right name doesn’t appear. Once I had the perfect name and wrote the book only to discover an actress had the same name. Thank goodness for project replace! So once you settle on a name, be sure to google it and make sure it doesn’t belong to a famous person or an adult movie star…

Someone once asked me how I named my characters, and I really didn’t know how to answer. Naming characters is very personal, and while I may not know what that character’s name is right off, I usually know what it isn’t. The name has to fit the personality. 

For me, creating a character involves knowing many things about them, like what’s the heroine’s goal for the story? What drives them? What makes them who they are when they walk on the page? Once I know those things, I’ll start looking at websites that suggest baby names. As I look at names, I visualize my character and I get one of three answers: Not the right name, maybe the right name, and sometimes I get lucky and it’s Yes! That’s it.

Some of the places I find names are:

• the Social Security Baby Names page. This site has the most popular names in the US by decades going back to the 1880s. 
• The Character Naming Sourcebook by Sherrilyn Kenyon with Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet. This book has more than 20,000 first and last names and their meaning from around the world. 
• If you write in Scrivener, it has a Name Generator that is great. You can ask it to generate names from different nationalities.
• Or, if you’re looking for a particular ethnicity, google baby names + the ethnicity you want.

There are a few things you want to remember.

• Don’t have similar names for your characters. Readers, especially your older readers, have trouble remembering names whether in real life or fiction, so don’t make it hard for them. It’s easy to mix up Chelsea and Kelsey.
• Don’t start your names with the same letter, and vary the syllables. Ron and Don are easy to confuse. If you must have two similar names, call one Ron and the other Donald.
• Be careful about having too many of your names ending with “y” or “ie” or “I”. Misty…Millie, Rusty, Kathy, Susie…these are all easy to confuse.
• Be careful about ending a name in an “s”…you’ll have to deal with whether or not to just put an apostrophe or add an “s” after the apostrophe…
• Pick a name appropriate for the time period you’re writing about. You don’t want a 2020’s name in an 1800 story.

I hope these few tips will help you when it comes time to pick a name for your character. Do you have any further suggestions? If so, leave them in the comments.

Crosshairs (Natchez Trace Park Rangers Book #3)

 

Investigative Services Branch (ISB) ranger Ainsley Beaumont arrives in her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, to investigate the murder of a three-month-pregnant teenager. While she wishes the visit was under better circumstances, she never imagined that she would become the killer’s next target–nor that she’d have to work alongside an old flame.

 

After he almost killed a child, former FBI sniper Lincoln Steele couldn’t bring himself to fire a gun, which had deadly and unforeseen consequences for his best friend. Crushed beneath a load of guilt, Linc is working at Melrose Estate as an interpretive ranger. But as danger closes in on Ainsley during her murder investigation, Linc will have to find the courage to protect her. The only question is, will it be too little, too late?

Patricia Bradley is a Carol finalist and winner of an Inspirational Readers’ Choice Award in Suspense, and three anthologies that included her stories debuted on the USA Today Best Seller List. She and her two cats call Northeast Mississippi home–the South is also where she sets most of her books. Her romantic suspense novels include the Logan Point series and the Memphis Cold Case Novels. Obsession, the second book in the Natchez Trace Park Rangers series, released Februrary 2, 2021. She is now hard at work on the third book, Crosshairs.

Writing workshops include American Christian Fiction Writers online courses, workshops at the Mid-South Christian Writer’s Conference, the KenTen Retreat where she was also the keynote, Memphis American Christian Fiction Writer group, and the Bartlett Christian Writers group. When she has time, she likes to throw mud on a wheel and see what happens.