Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "names"

What’s in a name? A baby has been born and the parents cannot decide upon a name. Neither can the author. Choosing a name for a new baby is often difficult and the considerations to be taken into account are often as unique as the tiny new person. Family tradition or outrageously original, which names will go with the surname, what will the resulting initials spell?
Will the name suit them when they are adults? Dante Gabriel Rossetti swapped around his Christian names, but either way his name sounds more romantic for an artist than if he had been called Fred Brown. Would the music of Monteverdi or Palestrina (taking his name from the town of his birth) sound as sweet if we knew them as Smith or Jones? Mass murderer or leading statesman, who can predict what their child will be and choose an appropriate name?
Novelists are advised never to give their characters names that are similar, lest the readers get confused; each name to start with a different letter of the alphabet, so no more than 26 characters, 24 if Xanthe and Zachariah don’t suit the story. Even with very different names, too many can confuse the reader, so lesser characters remain anonymous; John’s father, the vicar, the doctor, the police sergeant.
Pity the leading character in a novel.
‘We wanted to have more children, but the readers would have been confused.’
‘I hardly know the neighbours, there wasn’t room for them in the plot.’
Whatever names an author chooses, statistically there will surely be a real person somewhere in the world called the same, though you can Google to check the name that popped into your head is not the celebrity of the moment, Prime Minister of New Zealand or a television detective.
Rules are made to be broken and I have broken some in my novels, so in ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind’ and ‘Three Ages of Man’ you will find a list of characters before the story starts. In the meantime I must think of a name for the new baby in ‘Lives of Anna Alsop,’ third in the ‘Brief Encounters Trilogy’.

When we stayed for a week in a cottage in a secluded cove, I was glad to discover there was no reception for mobile phones, nor was there a land line in the cottage. At the very top of the cliff, if you held your phone high in the air, you could be lucky and get reception. A peaceful place for a holiday and proof for writers that there are still settings where mobile phones cannot be used; where characters can escape without being traced or where persons in peril cannot call for help.
The plots of crime fiction, spy thrillers and romances changed for ever when mobile phones became ubiquitous. No running along dark lonely roads or knocking on strange doors to fetch help, a quick call on your mobile and an air ambulance or armed response unit could be with you in minutes. No wonder authors enjoy putting their heroes and villains in spots where there is no mobile reception.
But you can’t always trust your characters. Reading through the third draft of the third novel in my trilogy, I realised several of my leading characters, in several scenes, had casually used their mobile phones when they knew perfectly well there has never been any mobile phone reception at Holly Tree Farm. Some minor plot changes were needed for the fourth draft.
Proof reading and editing the manuscript of one’s novel is not just about lost commas, the wrong ‘their, there and they’re’ and ‘from’ turning to ‘form’ when you’re not looking. Whether you work on the computer or from a paper manuscript, continuity is just as important as on a film set. Robertson or Robinson, Thomas or Thompson, Sean or Shaun? Minor characters have no regard for accuracy and frequently change their Christian and surnames from chapter to chapter. On to the fifth draft….
But ‘Lives of Anna Alsop’ will be on Amazon Kindle soon and in the meantime you can catch up with the first two of the trilogy ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind’ and ‘Three Ages of Man.’