Free advice to authors

[Sermil]

Free advice to any authors out there:

Please don't name all your characters which names that look pretty much alike. Ideally, have a different first letter for each name.

I've been reading Peter Watts' Blindsight, and it's great and all, but did he have to name his characters Sarasti, Szpindel, Sascha, and Susan? I was halfway though the book before I stopped having to go "wait, is this the commander or the biologist talking?" every time there was a briefing. Takes you out of the flow of the story.

Also, unless there's a strong reason, don't use last names that look like first names. One of the characters is Susan James, and when people refer to her by her last name (which they do frequently), I keep stopping and thinking, "Wait, who is James? Where did he come from?" It's just distracting.

Yes, such last names exist in real life, and yes a random group of people may have people with similar last names, but you're the author, you get to choose, and it's easier to read if I'm not having to stop and figure out who you are talking about all the time.

OK, rant over

[Keltest]

Oh dear. Never try to read the Silmarillion. There are more Fin-names than in a school of fish. And thats just one generation of one family of elves.

[Ajustusdaniel]

As a follow-up, if you're writing a baseball novel, and it's important for the reader to be able to keep track of the player holding each position, you're probably better off not giving them names like "Who," "What," and "I Don't Know."

[Lethologica]

As a follow-up, if you're writing a baseball novel, and it's important for the reader to be able to keep track of the player holding each position, you're probably better off not giving them names like "Who," "What," and "I Don't Know."

I don't know what you're talking about. Hu's on first. Watt's on second. Idaho's on third. Morrow is in his catcher's squat tossing the ball to Dave on the mound. If all goes well, the batter will hit it right to Aiden Carre at shortstop for the 6-4-3 double play.

[Berserk Mecha]

This is partially why I'm trepidatious about HBO's House of the Dragon. A lot of those Targaryen names all look and sound similar to me and I had some difficulty remembering who is who when reading the World of Ice and Fire and the other faux-history texts that GRRM has published. The fact that they're all royalty and are almost all princes and princesses doesn't help much, either.

[Xyril]

Also, unless there's a strong reason, don't use last names that look like first names. One of the characters is Susan James, and when people refer to her by her last name (which they do frequently), I keep stopping and thinking, "Wait, who is James? Where did he come from?" It's just distracting.

I agree with everything else you've said, but somehow this practice has never bothered or confused me. Maybe because I grew up on a lot of quasi-military fiction or biculturally (specifically, in terms of etiquette, how to address someone in terms of which name(s) to use changed situationally in a different way than it did in American culture) if I see or hear a name mentioned, my brain pretty much reflexively considers whether than name is an iteration of a name I've heard before.

[Tarmor]

I agree completely!

In real life: my main group of friends included two Peter's (and I knew a third in a different social group), my mates and I often refer to each other using our family names as often as we use our personal names, and my wife, her two sisters and her 3 cousins all have a two part personal name where the first part is identical.

There's plenty of name confusion in real life! Why make names complicated in fiction, unless there's actually a particular purpose to do so?

[Sermil]

Oh dear. Never try to read the Silmarillion. There are more Fin-names than in a school of fish. And thats just one generation of one family of elves.

Oh, I've read the Silmarillion. And the Vorkosigan saga, where every other person is Vor-this and Vor-that. (Of course, Bujold mostly sticks to first names or titles, which helps -- "Professor Vorthys" is going to look very different from "Lieutenant Vorberg" on the page, even if the last names are similar.

[Anonymouswizard]

I never had this problem with Blindsight. More confusing was keeping track of Erich personality was controlling Susan's body.

[Sermil]

I never had this problem with Blindsight. More confusing was keeping track of Erich personality was controlling Susan's body.

I think that may be an artifact of the way I read. I tend to read pretty fast, especially if I get into a novel. I tend to skim slightly, missing more noticing the first letter+shape of the word. I think of Aragorn as about the same as Axxxx -- A and a flat shape after it. G and a short word is the dwarf. L plus a lot of ups and downs is the elf. The evil wizard and the main villain are both S's but the wizard is a little longer, and so on.

That's why this thread was titled "advice to authors". If an author doesn't read the way I (and others) do, they might not realize that other people who read differently are finding their names confusing.

[Tarmor]

I think that may be an artifact of the way I read. I tend to read pretty fast, especially if I get into a novel. I tend to skim slightly, missing more noticing the first letter+shape of the word. I think of Aragorn as about the same as Axxxx -- A and a flat shape after it. G and a short word is the dwarf. L plus a lot of ups and downs is the elf. The evil wizard and the main villain are both S's but the wizard is a little longer, and so on.

I'm also a fast reader, though I don't normally skim. You've just reminded me that the first time I read Lord of the Rings (as a teenager, prob 12-14), I was getting Sauron and Saruman confused. I'm sure I had it worked out by Return of the King. :)

[Vahnavoi]

I agree there's a reason to stick to One Steve Limit in fiction, though ironically, none of the example names in the first post are at all confusing to me. It's not like a movie where there are fifteen men all named Frank.

[False God]

I agree unless the author intends to make something of it. Which then could be interesting and creative. Perhaps the only survivors of the starship crash are from the same section of stasis pods, and the ship had people alphabetized by 1st name. Or ya know, imply there's a name conspiracy going on here.

I think ultimately the names should be distinct. So "Steve" and "Suzanna" shouldn't be confusing. But "Jake" and "Jack" may be. However, I suspect its also an issue of how distinct the characters are. If you've got a team of meathead soldiers their names could be Kevin and Phillip for all it matters if they're all just "Meathead #3" personality.

[Khedrac]

Oh, I've read the Silmarillion. And the Vorkosigan saga, where every other person is Vor-this and Vor-that. (Of course, Bujold mostly sticks to first names or titles, which helps -- "Professor Vorthys" is going to look very different from "Lieutenant Vorberg" on the page, even if the last names are similar.

At least "Vor" is really a title so you can just look at the rest of the surname.

Another example of what not to do comes up in David Weber's more recent Honorverse novels. He has obviously done a lot of research into how Czech and and other Balkan countries' names and alphabet extensions work (by which I mean all the extra marks applied to the roman alphabet rather than cyrillic or similar). He has then made a whole load of worlds where these cultures originate from this area (or their naming structures) with the result that suddenly there are loads and loads of characters whose names the reader has no idea how to pronouce (which makes them hard to tell apart).
He then makes it worse by introducing a lot of these side-plot settings most of which die out to demonstrate what was going on (only a few get to connect with the main story at all).
Result - books inflated with padding chapters full of incomprehensibly named characters who don't matter to the overal story at all and should have been left on the editing room's floor.
Sadly it comes across looking like an exercise in "see how clever I am" which I don't think it is intended to be.

[Anonymouswizard]

I agree there's a reason to stick to One Steve Limit in fiction, though ironically, none of the example names in the first post are at all confusing to me. It's not like a movie where there are fifteen men all named Frank.

And there are also good reasons to break it. I tend to call minor characters who won't appear again something very mundane if it would break the flow to not give a name, and John is my default. But in that case the characters are literally interchangeable.

On Calamari Union's case I'd argue it's intentionally confusing.

If you're trying to do meaningful names you can also end up with several variants on the same name (if not the same name outright). Or even a handful of different names all with the same derivative. If writtem correctly most readers won't find it too confusing (if you have multiple Benjamins you'll probably have them use different derivatives, for example).

[Vahnavoi]

On Calamari Union's case I'd argue it's intentionally confusing.

Oh, it's definitely intentional. The reason I remember this movie at all is because of a scene where you have all the Franks around a table and they start having a conversation like "Hello, Frank", "You too, Frank", "So, Frank..." etc. and it's always a different Frank spoken to. I'm brought it up as mere contrast for degree of name similarity: it'd be very hard for me to confuse Sarasti with Susan or or Sascha or Szpindel, all different names with different constructions and different implied cultures, as opposed to just having a dozen of Steves or Franks.

[Algeh]

Oh, I've read the Silmarillion. And the Vorkosigan saga, where every other person is Vor-this and Vor-that. (Of course, Bujold mostly sticks to first names or titles, which helps -- "Professor Vorthys" is going to look very different from "Lieutenant Vorberg" on the page, even if the last names are similar.

I'm someone who often has trouble with similar names but didn't with the various "Vor" names. I think it helps that (a) it's a consistent 3 letter prefix, so my brain learned to throw it out for name-distinguishing purposes, (b) the common characters have names that end in different letters, and (c) important characters almost always have first names that they're mostly referred to by other main characters, so the various Vor-x last names become more about matching people into families than about the only way to remember who did what.

At least "Vor" is really a title so you can just look at the rest of the surname.

Another example of what not to do comes up in David Weber's more recent Honorverse novels. He has obviously done a lot of research into how Czech and and other Balkan countries' names and alphabet extensions work (by which I mean all the extra marks applied to the roman alphabet rather than cyrillic or similar). He has then made a whole load of worlds where these cultures originate from this area (or their naming structures) with the result that suddenly there are loads and loads of characters whose names the reader has no idea how to pronouce (which makes them hard to tell apart).
He then makes it worse by introducing a lot of these side-plot settings most of which die out to demonstrate what was going on (only a few get to connect with the main story at all).
Result - books inflated with padding chapters full of incomprehensibly named characters who don't matter to the overal story at all and should have been left on the editing room's floor.
Sadly it comes across looking like an exercise in "see how clever I am" which I don't think it is intended to be.

My biggest David Weber name problem is with his Safehold novels, but mostly because I lost persistence to keep up with the Honorverse when it forked into multiple sub-series that needed to be read in an interleaving fashion since I could never remember what to read next and felt lost a lot of the time, and that mostly happened the same time as the Great Czech Influx so it all came out in the wash for me.

Anyway, his Safehold books include names that were clearly supposed to show regional drifts in pronunciation/spelling over a long period, so you'll get people with "normal" names that have been respelled/pronunciation-drifted differently in different areas, and you'll be multiple people with different names descended from that same name in ways that probably say interesting things about the linguistic history of country they're from to someone else but mostly mean that I (a) have to sound out every name and (b) will not be able to tell those characters apart since my brain then files their name under "variant spelling of x name" and they're both in that bucket. It both makes sense for the setting and makes them hard to follow.

[Prime32]

The evil wizard and the main villain are both S's but the wizard is a little longer, and so on.

The partial animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings renamed Saruman to Aruman because they thought audiences would get confused.

[Rynjin]

I think that may be an artifact of the way I read. I tend to read pretty fast, especially if I get into a novel. I tend to skim slightly, missing more noticing the first letter+shape of the word. I think of Aragorn as about the same as Axxxx -- A and a flat shape after it. G and a short word is the dwarf. L plus a lot of ups and downs is the elf. The evil wizard and the main villain are both S's but the wizard is a little longer, and so on.

That's why this thread was titled "advice to authors". If an author doesn't read the way I (and others) do, they might not realize that other people who read differently are finding their names confusing.

I don't think authors should write books for people who skim instead of read any more than film writers and directors should make movies for the people who watch everything on fast forward.

[Khedrac]

Anyway, his Safehold books include names that were clearly supposed to show regional drifts in pronunciation/spelling over a long period, so you'll get people with "normal" names that have been respelled/pronunciation-drifted differently in different areas, and you'll be multiple people with different names descended from that same name in ways that probably say interesting things about the linguistic history of country they're from to someone else but mostly mean that I (a) have to sound out every name and (b) will not be able to tell those characters apart since my brain then files their name under "variant spelling of x name" and they're both in that bucket. It both makes sense for the setting and makes them hard to follow.

What gets me about the Safehold names is that to me they don't show regional drifts in pronunciation at all - that would result in standard spelling but different pronunciations.
Instead they are clearly designed to be said normally, just written weirdly. This could be used to make new names for gaming purposes, but the standard pronunciation is an issue.
(I did try this once and the GM spent years mocking me for having a conventional name for my elf Zhames and completely missed the spelling despite multiple emails referring to the character.)

[InvisibleBison]

What gets me about the Safehold names is that to me they don't show regional drifts in pronunciation at all - that would result in standard spelling but different pronunciations.
Instead they are clearly designed to be said normally, just written weirdly. This could be used to make new names for gaming purposes, but the standard pronunciation is an issue.
(I did try this once and the GM spent years mocking me for having a conventional name for my elf Zhames and completely missed the spelling despite multiple emails referring to the character.)

I always assumed that the names were still spelled the same, but the book was writing them phonetically to show how pronunciation had shifted.

[Khedrac]

I always assumed that the names were still spelled the same, but the book was writing them phonetically to show how pronunciation had shifted.

Perhaps, but for me the "obvious" way to pronounce them is pretty much the same was we woud the root name, rather than with much of a shift. Add in the way the rest of the book is in standard US English and, for me, the names may be interesting but hey fail to show linguisticc shift (expect perhaps in spelling).

Come to think of it - another lesson for new authors - be very careful making up a dialect and putting large sections of a book into it.
I don't mind small bits to show character - Mercedes Lackey does this well to show the lack of education of the main character in her Collegoum Chronicles series - it's still completely understandable - but I found parts of David Feinturch's Seafort Saga nearly unreadable due to being written in dialect. Yes, it can impress the critics, but it can really annoy your readers.

It is the same reason I never bought the Planescape books for AD&D when they came out - I am bad at learning languages so having to learn a new one just to understand the books was a hard "no" for me. It came across as horribly elitist - if you don't know the jargon (we have made up) then you are not a real planescape player. Seeing as I played then (and still do) with a mixture of players, some who have time and desire to learn the lore of the campaign worlds and others who do not having something that requires one to do this (or appears to) to make full use of the products made it unusable.

[Brother Oni]

Yes, such last names exist in real life, and yes a random group of people may have people with similar last names, but you're the author, you get to choose, and it's easier to read if I'm not having to stop and figure out who you are talking about all the time.

Sometimes you don't have a choice - see Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is a novelisation of the The Three Kingdoms era of China.

When you have Zhang Fei (張飛), Zhang Liang (张良) and Zhang He (張郃) all as important characters (sworn brother of Liu Bei, leader of the Yellow Turban rebellion, officer in the alliance and soon to be major character serving under Cao Cao), it can be hard to keep track.
Things get worse later on in the novel, when Zhang Liao (張遼) also joins Cao Cao's side and both he and Zhang He are named one of the Five Elite Generals of the time.

Despite them all having the same family name, none of them are related, which makes it confusing when you run into characters who do have the same name and are actually related, eg. Liu Bei and Liu Biao who both could trace their respective lineages back to the Emperor Jing of Han, or the three leaders of the Wu Kingdom, Sun Jian, Sun Ce and Sun Quan (father and his two sons).

The annoying thing is, the version of Romance I read, had all the names in Pinyin - I had to re-learn all the names again as my dialect of Chinese pronounces them differently (e.g. Liu Bei = Lau Pei, Han Dynasty = Hon Dynasty).
At least they weren't in Wade Giles, although the translator did go through a discussion of them in the foreword which had me worried (Cao Cao in Pinyin is Ts'ao Ts'ao in Wade Giles).

[Sermil]

I don't think authors should write books for people who skim instead of read any more than film writers and directors should make movies for the people who watch everything on fast forward.

That's a very insulting thing to say. I read the way I learned to read, the way my 1st-grade brain happened to settle on. Announcing "You aren't allowed to read books because you didn't learn to read the way I did" is pretty exclusionary.

[Xyril]

{Scrubbed}

[Algeh]

What gets me about the Safehold names is that to me they don't show regional drifts in pronunciation at all - that would result in standard spelling but different pronunciations.
Instead they are clearly designed to be said normally, just written weirdly. This could be used to make new names for gaming purposes, but the standard pronunciation is an issue.
(I did try this once and the GM spent years mocking me for having a conventional name for my elf Zhames and completely missed the spelling despite multiple emails referring to the character.)

I always assumed that the names were still spelled the same, but the book was writing them phonetically to show how pronunciation had shifted.

I think he was going for something like how most languages/regions that share a holy book or other cultural stories will have a regional/language-based variant of the names from that holy book that they use for naming their kids. Like John/Jean/Ian/Sean/Johan/Ivan/etc., all being drawn from the same source name. Whether that makes actual sense in his setting and would be reflected in variant spellings is a different question, but that's what I assumed he was going for.

I suppose he could also be going for the kinds of naming convention changes that we see in American names where you'll get families changing around spellings for aesthetic reasons that shift over decades without a shift in pronunciation. (Parents who decide to name their kid Lyndsie rather than Lindsey probably aren't doing it to make a distinction about how to say the name.)

I don't think authors should write books for people who skim instead of read any more than film writers and directors should make movies for the people who watch everything on fast forward.

Directors make movies for people who won't be paying full attention all the time, though. I don't find that fully engaging with the world and lore, and concentrating on nuances of the dialog choices make, say, the Transformers movies more enjoyable than paying half attention during the "plot bits" and paying more attention during the explosions. Some movies are designed to be dissected in detail and carefully savored, and others are designed to go boom while people eat popcorn and teenagers try to neck in the back rows. Books are the same.

I certainly have some books that I think of as "popcorn books" and others that I only read if I can fully concentrate. If a book isn't expectionally interesting to me and requires me to keep track of a bunch of what I think of as "elf-names", then I stop reading it (or at least don't buy the sequels), since there are other books competing for my focus-time that I'll like more. If those same characters are named in ways that I can keep straight, it'll require less focus and so I can more likely read it during those times when I'll get interrupted or otherwise can't give a book my sole focus, and I'm more likely to stick with the series. With some exceptions, I'm willing to keep track of 10 distinct names or maybe three "elves" before it becomes actively obnoxious.

[Tyndmyr]

This is partially why I'm trepidatious about HBO's House of the Dragon. A lot of those Targaryen names all look and sound similar to me and I had some difficulty remembering who is who when reading the World of Ice and Fire and the other faux-history texts that GRRM has published. The fact that they're all royalty and are almost all princes and princesses doesn't help much, either.

ASOIAF definitely saw me getting confused over names at least a few times. There are a LOT of names, some of which are similar, and it's not helped by the delay between the books coming out, yknow?

Overall, I'd say this is a really sound rule. Not sure I've ever enunciated it, but definitely something I've thought before.

[Sermil]

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

But that's not what Rynjin said. Rynjin said that authors should not write books that I (and others who read like I do) can read easily. Not that some authors might not want to write such books. Rynjin said no author should write such a book.

I have no problem with some authors might have reasons to write in a particular style that I find hard. I have no problem with the fact that a story with authentic Chinese names is going to be hard for me to read; I would be surprised if I didn't struggle with those a bit. I struggle a bit reading Huck Finn, too, but Twain had good reasons for writing the dialect that way. I fully agree with you that "it's unreasonable to expect every author to completely change how they write their works in order to accommodate every reader."

But, again, that's not what Rynjin said. Rynjin said authors should not write such books. No author should write such a book.

[Rynjin]

And I'll stand by it. That's the kind of trend that changes a medium, and for the worse. The "movies made for people who watch on fast forward" example wasn't pulled from nowhere either, and is an equally silly idea.

[Lethologica]

There is practically no writing advice that I would ever be comfortable pronouncing in general. There are always a thousand good reasons to ignore the advice and it inevitably comes down to just knowing what you're doing and why.

Conversely, reading is such a fragmented market that saying some authors following such and such advice would be "bad for the medium" is basically meaningless. It's not like movies where Disney can account for 40% of box office and so one trend can actually wag the whole medium if the right people adopt it. For books, whatever the trend is, 99% of "the medium" won't even notice it.