How do you pick a character’s name? With difficulty in my case. The first book I ever finished — happily never published — was written on a typewriter. Halfway through I realised I desperately wanted to change the name of a character. How do you do that with a typewritten manuscript? Not easily without retyping the whole thing. Just to change a name. Thank heaven for computers.
Mostly my books are set in foreign countries too, which complicates things even further. My first published book, Semana Santa, is set in southern Spain. But when I started it I didn’t have the time or money to go there to research the thing, or any inkling it would be finished, let alone published. So I worked from my memory or writing travels books in Andalucia several years earlier.
One character was called Caterina, which sounded a pretty decent Mediterranean name. And in Italy it is. But I now know that in Spain the equivalent of Caterina is Catalina, which is a flying boat to most people in the UK, not a woman’s name at all. I got it wrong, and if I’d got it right it would have sounded weird. So in the rewrite of that book out next November, Death in Seville, she’s called something else altogether.
For me the key point about character names is that they should sound right. If you’re dealing with a foreign language you need to be accurate too and avoid anything that readers struggle to read or pronounce themselves. There are names in Italian I’d never use. There are others — Quattrochi, for example, literally ‘four eyes’ — that I would reserve for minor characters who are, perhaps, a figure of fun.
Nic Costa got his name because I wanted something short and simple, and a little unusual too, to mark out the fact that he’s a little different to his peers. Nic, by the way, is not the normal Italian short version of the male first name Nicola. I wanted something that sounded English, international, and reasoned that his father, an international man, would have been happy with that.
People sometimes say to me, ‘But isn’t Costa Spanish?’ Yes, there are plenty of people called Costa in Spain. But there are lots in Italy too, and I can even tell you roughly where they live. Just click on the image on the right and you’ll see. You can check out the geographical distribution of any surname in Italy using this useful site here. None of this existed sixteen years ago when I was writing Semana Santa of course, otherwise I would never have made that mistake about Caterina.
When I start a book I have a rough list of the main characters in my book diary. Obviously the regulars never change. But the names of the ‘guest stars’ do as I work on the book. I’ll often just try changing a name to see if it fits the character better as he or she develops. I don’t like names that ‘mean’ something. On the other hand I do like ones that reflect the background of the person involved. The next Costa book, The Fallen Angel, features an aristocratic English family who come from a very posh Anglo-Scottish background but have fallen on hard times. After much casting around I came up with the last name Gabriel for them. The father, a very patriarchal figure, came to own the first name ‘Malise’. This is an old Scottish Christian name, used by the gentry mainly. I found it by looking up some of the family histories of Scottish aristos on the web.
Peroni, of course, came from the beer, which was largely unknown in England when I invented him and is now actually brewed here. Nor did I ever see the link that people would make between Costa coffee and my young Roman cop because that coffee chain was a lot smaller ten years ago too.
There’s no way one can pick a series character name and hope to avoid such coincidences years down the line. If I were starting a new series now — which I’m not — I’d try to stick to some basic rules though.
- Make it simple.
- Make it memorable and easy to pronounce.
- Under absolutely no circumstances make a name indicative of some character trait.
Oh — and one final thing. Whatever you call someone you will, before long, get an email from a real person with the same name asking, ‘Why did you steal me for your book?’ And here let me close with a curious true story.
In 1957 the actor Lex Barker starred as a character called David Hewson in a very noir movie called The Girl in Black Stockings.
I was four years old at the time. How on earth did someone come up with that name for a character? Well actually I know. The movie was based on a story by a South African writer called Peter Godfrey. In the early 1980s when I was a reporter on The Times a very interesting and knowledgeable old sub-editor introduced himself to me there. None other than the same Peter Godfrey, now doing a bit of subbing on the side.
‘I used your name in a movie once,’ Peter told me one day when we were talking about books (I was already itching to become a writer at the time and he had lots of useful advice on the subject).
‘Where did it come from?’ I asked.
Peter thought for a moment and said, ‘Made it up, of course.’
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Do you know the (perhaps apocryphal) story about the guy who wrote a book with a main character called ‘David’? When he finished the first draft, he decided ‘David’ didn’t really suit his hero, and called him ‘Jeff’ instead. A quick find and replace, and off it went to the editor. Editor loved it, but was slightly bemused by the reference on p174 to Michelangelo’s ‘Jeff’….
Been there, done that. Search and replace can be VERY dangerous. The trick is always to tick the box ‘Whole words only’ so that the same characters aren’t replaced mid-word. Not that this would have helped in the instance above…