“Raina Wolfe,” “Tucker McLeod,” “Mitchell Street,“ and “Stephanie Hart” are the names of the protagonists in my novels. I feel I know these people and the more I write stories featuring them, they become more and more alive and appreciated by me. The work of an author is to make sure that their readers feel the same way: I’m working on that! But people sometimes ask me how I came up with their names, or the names of anyone in my stories. Authors have lots of ways to choose character names.
A Real Reason
Some of my characters have names I chose for a specific purpose. I chose Tucker McLeod’s name because I wanted to play off his first name as “Thunder,” since he was first conceived in the 1990s as a character for Star Trek: The Next Generation. That accounts for the Tucker and the “McLeod” last name sounded strong and fit the first name. That’s what happened with “Stephanie Hart” as well. Does anyone remember the Father Dowling Mysteries featuring Tom Bosley and Tracy Nelson? They often referred Tracy Nelson’s character, Stephanie Oskowski, as “Steve,” and I wanted my character to have that nickname. And since I already had the title Take Hart in my head, “Stephanie Hart” was a natural.
The Devil Made Me Do It
Not literally. I don’t believe in the devil, but I believe in some things just coming to me. That’s the case with Raina Wolfe’s first name. When I was developing the character to be an equal partner with Tucker McLeod, her first name popped into my head. Her last name was different: I used “Olan” for the entire first draft, but wasn’t happy with it. I put together several names, including many represented in Native American tribes, before friends of mine centered on either “Wolfe” or “Novak.” I went against the majority opinion and chose Wolfe, but used Novak as the last name for Danny Novak, another central character in the Stephanie Hart novels.
The process for selecting Mitchell Street’s name was similar. I already had the Mitchell from a short story I wrote in the 1990s, featuring a Dean of Students named Mitchell St. John. But that last name didn’t fit for a former police detective turned PI, but the name Mitchell stuck. At first, I centered on Sloane for the surname, but it sounded too cliché, especially when Dick Van Dyke began playing Dr. Mark Sloane in the Diagnosis: Murder series. I made an extensive list of names, and settled on Street, since it implied a rough exterior or “street-wise.”
Tools
There are many search engines to help authors find names of human versus alien characters, starships and even street or city names. I’ve used many of them to help with the names of minor characters so I didn’t have to spend a lot of time choosing them. These tools include:
Fantasy Name Generators They’ve got several options here, including names for starships, aliens—the works.
Find your own name generators and see how they can help you select just the right names for your writing.
