Tool Box: Top Ten Character Name Sources

Sometimes a character's name is the first thing I know about him or her. Some names are powerful enough to suggest an entire journey with their distinct melody, ethnicity, colloquial flavor, or historic connotations. Other times I end up changing names two or three or more times until the chemistry comes together. When I need a bit of help pondering, here's where I turn most often.

1) Junior League. Southern fiction begs for beautimous southern names, and signing books at a Junior League event a few years ago, I knew I'd hit the mother lode. Now when I speak at a JL function or fundraiser, I save the program, buy their cookbooks, collect their directories, and mix and match. (Denny and Woolrich Butterfield, India Fast-Langhouse, Sipsy MacKeever.)

2) Civil War archives. A wealth of rich southern grits 'n' gravy names. (Matthias Ayers, Thomas Arble, Boone Goodsell.)

3) Maps. Streets, cities, states, provinces. (Stella Link, Aldine Westfield, Dallas Brown.)

4) US presidents. Mix and match first, middle, and last names. (Ford Adams, Herbert Coolidge, Abe Hoover.)

5) Bartleby. Plug virtually any keyword into the search engine and stand back for a barrage of poets, politicians, authors, and historical figures. (Frank Acosta, Winston Foley, Jenny Rhodale.)

6) Google "surname". Under French, there's Aston and Pomeroy. Dutch offers Barculo and Vedder. Albanian, you say? How 'bout Petrela or Zogjani?

7) Cemetery directories. Hey, it worked for Spoon River Anthology, right?

8) Internet baby namers.

9) Rivers. I actually knew a guy named Zumbro, and I loved that. Niles, Tyne, and Platte work for me as well.

10) The good ol' phone book. In my previous incarnation as a disc jockey, Gary was helping me brainstorm an airname. Unable to come up with one I liked, he convinced me at the eleventh hour to open the phone book, point, and promise to use whatever name I landed on. I accidentally opened to the yellow pages, stuck my finger on "Veterans Administration Loans" -- and VA Lones was born.