Please tell me I’m not the only one who has trouble naming my characters. It’s such a difficult thing for me that I came up with a placeholder name, “Natalie,” and I use it for the main character of every story I write until their real name comes to me. The number of WIPs I have with “Natalie” traipsing through the pages is embarrassing, but it was the only way I could move beyond my hang-up so any story could actually get written.

In “The 7 Rules of Picking Names for Fictional Characters,” mystery writer Elizabeth Sims provides some useful tips for ensuring characters don’t end up as walking anachronisms, unmemorable, unpronounceable, or otherwise burdened by their identities.

One of her suggestions is to say your character’s name out loud. I wouldn’t have thought of this, but in the era of text-to-speech and audiobooks it makes a lot of sense. If my character names look good in writing but no one can say them out loud, I could be turning off an entire segment of potential readers. Lack of accessibility in the arts is already an ongoing struggle; there’s no need to create bumps in the road with something so easily prevented. I will say this might be a bit more of a challenge on my end with my urban fantasy bent (and the fantastical names that sometimes come with it), but anything worth doing is worth doing right for as many people as possible.

Another of Sims’ tips is to make each name distinct enough to easily remember. This is something I learned to do after a few memorable times when I mixed up my own characters because their names had the same initials or sounded very similar without my even realizing it. I think we all have sounds we tend to gravitate towards when it comes to names, pairings of consonants and vowels that we enjoy writing and hearing in our heads. I will usually ban a letter once I use it at the beginning of a character name — for example, if my main character’s name begins with a T, no other character in the story can have a “T” name. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet to start names with, and I’ll use them all if I have to!

Do you have a favorite character name? How do you keep all your players straight?