Character Names Matter

I splurged recently on a bunch of e-books that were part of a promo. They are a mixture of science fiction and fantasy of various types and I've been really enjoying them. It's always great to find new authors and this is one way I get to read widely and experience other parts of the genre that I might not find otherwise.

Among these books are a lot of fantasy of various types - urban fantasy, steampunk, YA, epic fantasy and much else besides. A lot have crossovers between our present day and the fey world and many are seriously dark. All really good stuff but...

Something has been seriously annoying me and it's the way some authors have named their characters. It can really throw you out of the story to suddenly meet a fairy, fey or what ever you like to call them who has a very modern name. For example in one story there's a character who is an important fey but doesn't know it because she was hidden in the human world as a baby. This makes her a threat to the very traditional fey society with its hatred of pretty much anything human and they are out to get her any way they can. It's a cracking read, too, as she deals with the constant attacks and comes into her fey powers. But her fey name is one which when I researched it - I had to because it was bugging me so much - only appeared as a girl's name in the late sixties or early seventies while her human name is a more traditional Anne. This jarred so much that I struggled to get back into the story for a while.

I'm pretty sure some of you are thinking I'm making a lot of fuss about a name and even I couldn't work out initially why this irritated me so much but then I got it. The fey name wasn't consistent with  the fey society we were being shown. Whoever had named the girl wouldn't have chosen a name popular in the modern human society they despised. Once that was done believability in the world evaporated.

I'm not suggesting that an author should be tied into anyone else's ideas of what to name their characters. My characters are apt to spring into life complete with their names and changing it is fraught with anguish - it's like they won't give up whatever defines who they are - so I get how hard it is to do. At the same time, though, it's important to be consistent with the world of which the character is part.

I'll give you an example from my own writing. I wrote a story about two girls and their relationship with a telepathic herd of one horned creatures. I had no problems with naming the girls but the leader of the herd was a different thing. No matter what I called him it didn't seem to fit. In the end he was given the name of Unicorn and I wrote on not entirely happily but hoping it work. One hundred and thirty thousand words later he was still Unicorn and I knew it didn't fit with the society of the world or that of the herd and my critiquers were all picking up on it. It took a lot of thinking and research but finally he had another name that made sense in the world in which he lived. To my surprise I found that with that new name a number of other niggles could be dealt with, too, because the world itself worked better.

So, although it slightly diminished my enjoyment of the story that started me off on this train of thought, I'm actually grateful to that author. She has given me an important reminder. Names do matter in writing and it's essential to get that right if you want to keep your readers happy.