Paul Whybrow
Full Member
I previously touched on the naming of characters, and I remain convinced that giving your protagonist and antagonist memorable names is crucial to any success your story may have.
Clickbait is a modern term to describe a headline link to internet content that's often not quite what you thought it would be. It exploits what is known as the curiosity gap, an aspect of marketing that we should bear in mind when working on titles and character names.
With a book, the title is the first piece of bait to tempt a reader to bite. I'd suggest that having a memorable name for your hero and your villain is the second hook. It would certainly help, if your name as an author is unforgettable, but I bet that more readers recall Harry Potter than his creator's name J. K. Rowling.
I'm currently having fun creating a new baddy in my WIP The Dead Need Nobody, a cold, manipulative misogynist art dealer who uses female art students to create forgeries, before killing them. He's the most covert murderer I've written about, as he's a wealthy member of the establishment in Saint Ives and is highly respected on the international art scene.
I thought to make him even more sneaky via his name, which is Tobias Taube. Tobias derives from a Greek version of a Hebrew biblical name, that means 'Goodness of God', while Taube means 'Dove' in German and is sometimes applied as a nickname to a meek and mild person. As the dove is a universally recognised symbol of peace, my homicidal art gallery owner trades on it, by using a dove colophon on his business cards and having carved dove heads on his gallery's door posts.
In the strange way that a writer's mind works, I first came across the word Taube 50 years ago, when I was avidly interested in WW1 fighter aircraft. The Rumpler Taube had wings shaped like a dove's. I thought, at the time, that it would make a great name for a character in a book, and now it is!
The master of memorable names for characters is Charles Dickens, several of whom entered the language as symbolic of certain behaviour, such as Scrooge, Miss Havisham and Fagin. Dickens' propensity for creating daft names, such as Uncle Pumblechook, Charity Pecksniff and Reverend Melchisedech Howler does leave him open to parody. Astonishingly enough, in The Old Curiosity Shop there's a character called Dick Swiveller, who in Chapter 7 'with difficulty ejaculated.'
Have you come up with any intriguing character names, that may, one day, enter the minds of millions of readers?
Clickbait is a modern term to describe a headline link to internet content that's often not quite what you thought it would be. It exploits what is known as the curiosity gap, an aspect of marketing that we should bear in mind when working on titles and character names.
With a book, the title is the first piece of bait to tempt a reader to bite. I'd suggest that having a memorable name for your hero and your villain is the second hook. It would certainly help, if your name as an author is unforgettable, but I bet that more readers recall Harry Potter than his creator's name J. K. Rowling.
I'm currently having fun creating a new baddy in my WIP The Dead Need Nobody, a cold, manipulative misogynist art dealer who uses female art students to create forgeries, before killing them. He's the most covert murderer I've written about, as he's a wealthy member of the establishment in Saint Ives and is highly respected on the international art scene.
I thought to make him even more sneaky via his name, which is Tobias Taube. Tobias derives from a Greek version of a Hebrew biblical name, that means 'Goodness of God', while Taube means 'Dove' in German and is sometimes applied as a nickname to a meek and mild person. As the dove is a universally recognised symbol of peace, my homicidal art gallery owner trades on it, by using a dove colophon on his business cards and having carved dove heads on his gallery's door posts.
In the strange way that a writer's mind works, I first came across the word Taube 50 years ago, when I was avidly interested in WW1 fighter aircraft. The Rumpler Taube had wings shaped like a dove's. I thought, at the time, that it would make a great name for a character in a book, and now it is!
The master of memorable names for characters is Charles Dickens, several of whom entered the language as symbolic of certain behaviour, such as Scrooge, Miss Havisham and Fagin. Dickens' propensity for creating daft names, such as Uncle Pumblechook, Charity Pecksniff and Reverend Melchisedech Howler does leave him open to parody. Astonishingly enough, in The Old Curiosity Shop there's a character called Dick Swiveller, who in Chapter 7 'with difficulty ejaculated.'
Have you come up with any intriguing character names, that may, one day, enter the minds of millions of readers?
