Character Names: Real vs. Fantastic

Besides being a Sci-Fi nerd, I'm also a name nerd. It's an interest that I think lots of writers, what with having boatloads of characters to find names for, also share. This interest became especially poignant in the past few months, after I learned I was pregnant. Instead of my monthly trek over to Babynames.com, I started seeking out and reading as many name-advice blogs as I could find.

The best site I found was The Baby Name Wizard, which not only allows users to search for names and meanings, but uses the Social Security Statistics on births to chart which names were popular in any given year since the 1880's, and in which state! And even better, the author keeps a rather scholarly blog about naming trends and statistics.

This week she made two interesting posts called "The Women of Fantasy Part One and Part Two." Since the novel I'm working on right now is a fantasy novel, and I'm familiar with a good third of the names on her female fantasy names list, of course I was interested.

I was especially interested after someone at my writing group today commented on my naming conventions in the novel. She prefers that characters in a fantasy world have entirely made up names, and for people in the real world to have entirely conventional names, and objected to my use of ancient latin names for some of my fantasy characters. At first I was in total agreement with her, and started to mourn the loss of my carefully chosen character names. But then I started thinking about why I chose those names to begin with, and I realized that I actually do have a rhyme and reason for using "real world" names in my fantasy setting.

The reason is this: to differentiate the cultures within the fantasy world. It's a technique that I definitley picked up from reading Tamora Pierce a lot a teenager. Though her entire world is fantasy, many of the countries within that world are fantastical representations of real places. I attempted to do the same thing when I first set out and began building my fantasy world, though many of the similarities between my countries and their places of inspiration end with the naming conventions.

One country in my world uses mostly Slavic inspired names, accents, and culture. The merfolk have generally more Germanic sounding names. The fairies have names derived from Latin and Greek, and the regular people have simple names which are often twists on common names, or hey, even names of family members and friends of mine. Liedre is totally named after my cousin Dierdre, even though she's just a maid in the palace. My feeling was that as long as it sounded and felt fantastical, and was generally unfamiliar to the reader, then it was okay to use in a fantasy setting.

My main character is a fairy, and his name is Pax. It's Latin for peace, and his mother named him that for several specific reasons--his birth was preceded by a century of peace, and his father was a diplomat. I also liked the incongruence of a boy named Peace being thrown into very un-peaceful situations. He's a character who doesn't like to fight and who isn't very good at it--in the very beginning of the book he pukes at his first confrontation and is persuaded to run away from his second big skirmish.

Pax's brothers, also fairy princes, are Lucian, Demetrius, and Genevio. Of those, Lucian was picked primarily for it's link with Lucifer in order to foreshadow Lucian's darker side, and Demetrius was picked in order to tie back into my Midsummer Night's Dream allusion later in the book. None of the names are too similar to another character's, and they are all relatively pronounceable.I think that stylistically they still work as brothers, and since they are the only male fairies in the book, they fit into their own little naming convention.

Overall, I'm comfortable with my reasons for picking most of my character's names, and I think that enough other authors have done the same thing within the genre (Tamora Pierce for example) to make it an acceptable way of naming fantasy characters. As with baby names, character names are certainly a matter of personal taste!