About Character Naming

Hi have you had the awkward problem of having a character with the same name as someone you know in real life? Just say you give a character a certain name without such an intention at first. But then your sister gets a boyfriend who shares the same name and it just becomes really awkward and you feel the need to hide your story even more.

So how do you deal with it? Do you end up having to change the character's name?

That one feature on Facebook which suggests people to friend-request recently turned up someone with the exact same name as my novel's protagonist. It was definitely enough to get me thinking about changing the name...

I've had a lot of Micheals down the years, most of which don't get published, but they mostly predate the one I knew IRL. Beyond that, no.

It works both ways. My hero is named Alex, with no surname. The only male Alex I know IRL is a... umm... lets say our values differ.

edited 11th Nov '12 4:17:26 AM by Frogger5

Generally I don't run into this issue because my characters' names tend to be... rather different. Caraway, Felix, Ireta, Iris, Eliza, Lestron, Hugol... If I met someone named Lestron in real life I would probably throw myself off of the nearest high-up object. Perhaps a table. Or a mailbox.

I know an Iris!

Yeah, this is rather awkward, but if you want to get published, it's unavoidable unless you make up every name.

^ Well you could always use The Google Rule. Google a name and see if anything matches a real person (living or dead).

Unfortunately 90% of all plausible names will likely generate at least one person with the same name.

Well in any case, you can always give them just a very weird and unique name name like "Balog Mehskforth" or something.

Granted it gets hard when you have a horde of characters.

I don't really see how it matters?

Well the thread is about your characters accidentally having the same names as real people, if you give them a off-the-wall and bizarre name that doesn't existr, you avoid that problem.

How is it even a 'problem', though?

It'll be awkward if it turns out that the one you want to marry has the same name than a Complete Monster in one of your stories.

To a lesser degree, a friend picks up your story, sees a character that shares the same name than them, and asks you about it.

edited 11th Nov '12 1:18:31 PM by chihuahua0

Generally, I don't show people in real life my stories.

But what if you get published and they buy one of your stories/check it out from a library/snatch an advance copy from you?

Which is actually easy to deal with if you handle it right.

"Hey, dude, why is this character named after me?"

"It's not, I picked the name out before I met you."

"Oh. Cool."

or even...

"Hey, dude, why is this character named after me?"

"Because it's a nice name."

"Oh. Cool."

Some of my stories actually have characters intentionally named after my friends, though. But that's different because they know about it and think it's cool.

edited 11th Nov '12 1:32:18 PM by resetlocksley

I just tell them it was a coincidence. This doesn't really seem like all that big of a deal.

And... I suspect that they'd have bigger questions about the book than names. My real-life friends and I disagree on several things.

Since I use fairly common names, there's always going to be a likelihood of someone having the same name. It's no big deal.

I'll often give characters the same first names as friends or people I went to school with but never to a character that's based, in whole or in part, on the person with that name.

That's only the first name.

If by chance I subsequently met a person with the same full name as one of my characters, "I named him/her before I met you" is quite sufficient.

Since I don't write Complete Monster characters, I don't see any problem (and if I did, I'd give them names made up from those of politicians, anyway.)