Character names are sometimes a point of contention from my readers. And also a subject that gives rise to a number of questions. Not least: where do they come from?

I often get picked up on my character names. Even before The Berylford Scandals were a thing and the 10-year-old me was writing stories about French vampires… And much as I have visited this subject in a previous post long ago, I thought it worth another look. Especially as people often ask me where I get these, often unusual and ‘complicated’, character names from. This post explores some of the places I’ve found inspiration, and where you can find it too.

FAMILY NAMES

This really ought to be a goes-without-saying go-to for all aspiring writers. I often think that an interest in one’s own family history and the stories there associated is an invaluable asset to authors. If you deal in stories set in real-life settings, and in the past, as I do, then having a knowledge of your roots and what your ancestors got up to can provide a wealth of inspiration. Not least in giving your characters realistic but no less memorable names. Some of the fan favourites (the loves and the love-to-hates) were named after ancestors of mine. The Whitlockes and the Warwicks, just to name a couple.

PLACES

I took a leaf out of the book of everyone’s (or… well… still some people’s) favourite witchcraft and wizardry writer for this one. J.K. Rowling borrowed a number of place names to assign as surnames for her characters in Harry Potter. Snape, Flitwick and Dursley are examples. And you don’t have to use the place name in its exact form either; just use it as a base from which to manipulate. The Lancashire town of Urmston got modified slightly when it came to creating Mrs Urmstone in the Berylford books; the same goes for Hathersage in the Peak District, which was reworked a bit to become Haffisidge.

As a side-piece of advice: don’t just look to villages and towns and other such locations. Even something as simple as road names is just as valuable for inspiration.

MANIPULATING OTHER NAMES

Off the back of that previous point, a number of names that I created had relatively commonplace, or at least less flavourful origins. Take Lady Vyrrington, my chief Berylford anti-heroine, for example. She began literary life with a name at which I can barely write without cringing — Lady Selina Goodsby — before I decided that was hardly becoming of such a character. It needed gravitas and memorability. I settled on the final surname far quicker, beginning with Barrington, a fairly commonplace “posh” surname. It just took a bit of letter play. Barrington became Berrington, then Berrington to Verrington, and finally Verrington to Vyrrington. It’s original, memorable, and, if people actually take the time to read it properly, not actually difficult to pronounce.

RESEARCHING REAL-LIFE FIGURES

The former three suggestions work perfectly fine when you’re writing a story set in your home country. There’s no language or culture barrier to fight against; you know that these names will belong with such characters. So, when it comes to my current work-in-progress, You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic, set in Germany, I have no such luxury. I have had to do a bit more research to ensure the correct style and flavour get captured. Where better to find genuine German names? By looking into real-life German people from the period. Names such as Upfauer (manipulated from Hupfauer), Verschuer, and Seyß came to me this way.

BE OBSERVANT

As should be the case with everything you do as a writer: pay attention to things and people around you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a full-time author or working an office job for 40 hours a week — inspiration for characters, events, stories… it’s everywhere. I keep a list of interesting and/or unusual names that I intend to use for future stories. For instance, just the other day at work, I came upon the name Argyrides. Something that I would never have dreamt up myself. But already I can envision it belonging to some antagonist… of Greek extraction… for a new story that may come to pass. And now that I have it, I’m damn well keeping it!

FINAL NOTES ON CHARACTER NAMES

Just a last bit of passing advice when it comes to naming your characters. Be mindful of period, style, flavour, and setting. This is where your all-important research skills will come in useful. Reading other works set in that time, with that setting, will give you more knowledge in terms of what names were fashionable at the time. Or the naming conventions observed by certain cultures. For example, you couldn’t have a story set in 19th Century Russia wherein the main character’s name was Alice. Alice becomes Alisa in Russian. Furthermore, the Russians observe a patronymic naming system, and so, at least at points during your story, for increased authenticity if nothing else, you or your characters would refer to Alisa as Alisa Mikhailovna (or whatever you choose to designate).

Like a lot of writing, it isn’t a simple matter of chucking any old shit on the page and thinking it works. There is so much more to it than that.

Got any other ideas? Let me know in the comments section. For more author news and views, my Facebook and Instagram pages are here. And drop a subscription to my YouTube channel to remain informed of the latest, plus some exclusives. Furthermore, my fortnightly podcast, The Dale Hurst Writing Show, is available to listen to here on Spotify.

We’re all animals when it comes down to it. But is the use of animal comparisons in description and character development useful and effective? Or just lazy and unimaginative?

One of my absolute favourite parties that I went to was animal-themed, which I attended as a flamingo, as the photo above evidences. Since then, I adopted the animal as part of my persona – flamboyant and decidedly elegant when it suits. One thing I have never done in any of my work (so far) is compare a character to a flamingo. A wealth of other animals do feature, however.

Animals are great descriptive devices. Not just for the looks and movements of a character, but also for their thought processes and to an extent, even their overall personalities and the reasons why they interact with other characters a certain way. A lot of what I call “Literary Snobs” deem this as lazy and unimaginative, but I think it works beautifully if used creatively, rather than the same old clichés that you come to learn at school.

A few of my favourite authors use it to varying degrees. Victor Hugo has a lovely, considerably-sized passage in Les Misérables that muses on how everyone has some form of animal in their nature. It comes as he introduces the novel’s primary (misguided) antagonist, Inspector Javert.

Granted the supposition that in every man there is contained a species of the animal kingdom, we may at once place Inspector Javert. The Asturian peasants believe that in every wolf-litter there is a dog-whelp which the mother kills, because otherwise when it grows larger it will devour the rest of her young. Endow this dog with a human face, and you have Javert.

Les Misérables, Part 1, Book Five, Chapter IV

Jean Valjean, the protagonist of the novel, is likened to a wolf, on a number of occasions throughout the story, primarily to symbolise the criminal (and you can read more about that in this article).

The wolf is a pretty easy one to go to – you hear of lone wolves all the time in real life. But what about other mammals? Or birds? Or shellfish? J.K. Rowling memorably compares Severus Snape (my favourite character) to an overgrown bat more than once, while her librarian Irma Pince is likened to “an underfed vulture.” It works superbly, especially when used so creatively. You can immediately picture what these characters are supposed to look like.

Philip Pullman takes the use of animalistic imagery to the next level in the His Dark Materials books, wherein every human (or witch) is partnered with a daemon – an animal familiar that embodies their personality. I expect the flamingo would come into play again for me here if we started assigning daemons to our own friends and family…

Animals are also prevalent in Dickens’ work, which is, as you may know, one of the key inspirations to my own novels. In Little Dorrit, fearsome antagonist Jeremiah Flintwinch is referred to more than once as “crab-like”. More specifically, “…the little keen-eyed crablike old man.”

The main anti-hero for the upcoming The Berylford Scandals: Sin & Secrecy – Abel Stirkwhistle – is partly inspired by Flintwinch. In this novel, we find Abel approaching his sixties and still suffering the disastrous effects of a stroke, including an awkward and jagged way of movement. So, as a partial homage to Dickens and Flintwinch, I decided to really play up the crab comparison. As time goes on, you may see this description evolve, and he becomes less of your beach variety of crab and more of a sea monster.

Abel isn’t the only character to get the animal treatment in some form. When we first get re-introduced to Lady Vyrrington, she is compared to a slightly rheumatic swan, while Mrs Haffisidge retains her mouse-like qualities from the first book.

There is also a degree of “hunter and hunted” about this story, so I have used a lot of predator and prey-based imagery. Mice and cats or hawks, rabbits and foxes, flies and spiders.

What do you think? Are spirit animals a great way to envisage a character? Or is it unimaginitive? What animal would you liken yourself to? Let me know in the comments below. And for more news and content or to get in touch, please follow my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages.