Similar Sounding Names in Stories

I don't know about others but personally when I read a novel that has characters with similar names I will without fail confuse them at some point. Because of this, I try to make all of the characters in my stories have dissimilar names.

extortionist said:

I don't know about others but personally when I read a novel that has characters with similar names I will without fail confuse them at some point. Because of this, I try to make all of the characters in my stories have dissimilar names.

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+1.

Personally, I tend to confuse major characters whose names start with the same letter.

Quip said:

Personally, I tend to confuse major characters whose names start with the same letter.

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Ditto. My mc's name is Sophie and her best friend's name is Sarah, and even I get them mixed up. Sarah's due for a name-change sometime soon...

I think for the sake of clarity/audience sanity, it's best to stay away from similar-sounding and same-letter names for major characters.

Tolkien is a bad example. His work was originally published half a century ago. Look for examples in books published in the last five years or so.

Avoiding character names that are too similar is a good guideline, but it's okay to cross it once in a while, as long as your characters are unique enough that you won't confuse the reader. If your heroine's name is Jane and she has a strong voice and personality, it really won't matter a great deal if Chapter Seventeen introduces a minor character named Jen. I don't recommend it, since there are eleventy-billion names to choose from that are a far cry from Jane, but it isn't a disaster.

Characters are more than just their names on a page. Make them stand apart from each other by more things than just calling them Jane and Molly.

I don't know. As a reader I wouldn't have a problem with most of the examples you used in your post. Except for Laura/Lauren, perhaps. And if there's a reason in the plot for them to all have similar names I'd be fine with it.

It's actually in fantasy novels that I start getting the characters confused. I have difficulty remembering made up names from chapter to chapter and will normally identify characters in my head as 'the blond girl with the name that starts with A'.

I struggled with Tolkien's names but forgave him because he had a good reason for doing it.

I wrote a fairly long novel in which three characters were originally named Anton, Andrew, and Andre. That was okay until I reached a scene in which all three characters were together. I don't know if it would have bothered readers, but it sounded silly to me so I changed two of the names so they didn't begin with A.

Of course, everyone writes in their own way, but considering the millions of names one could use in a story I'd think one could easily avoid names that were too similar. After all, any time one confuses a reader it takes them out of the story.

On the other hand, one might have a reason for using similar sounding names, such as naming twins Larry and Jerry.

I'm told that in screenwriting it's usually considered a no-no to use character names that sound similar or even begin with the same letter... if that's any help.

I agree with Sage, it's more about how they look than how they sound. I'd much rather have rhyming names with very different spellings than names with similar spellings that sound very different.
The biggest thing is the first letter.
I could see Gerry and Jerry and easily tell them apart, though I'd be a little annoyed about it, it wouldn't hinder my reading and I'd get over it.

Cyia said:

I wonder if writers who adhere to this strictly aren't selling their readers short. Writers like Tolkein had names that were (almost painfully) similar within family groupings: Eowyn and Eomer, for example. In his case, it fit the culture and the verbal structure of his language(s).

Do you really think it bothers readers as much as it does writers?

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Well, in my novella, several people in the tribe share a name. One of them has a speaking part. But (a) none of them are major characters, and (b) the people who know them generally add their patronymic or some other adjective to tell them apart.

My editor didn't seem to have a problem with it. Maybe it was obvious that the whole thing was a conscious world-building decision on my part. It was about making the tribe feel like a large family complete with inherited names. If I found out that I had a Shane and a Sean in a story by accident, I would probably change it.

If I had two main characters who had to have similar names for some reason, I think I might give one of them a nickname. Clarence and Terrence are twins, but Clarence thinks his name is too prissy and asks everyone to call him CJ. That kind of thing.

Izunya

What matters most is that readers can tell them apart. If the characters are different in personality, voice, location, attitude, whatever, and it's clear which one is which even without being named, then you're probably fine. If you could use a different character's name and the character would still say and do the same thing, you probably need to work on the character a bit so they're unique. It's the interchangeable ones that trip readers up the most. Because the name is all they have to differentiate the characters from each other.

I personally find it annoying when I can't remember which character is which, so I try hard not to do that to my readers. But I've read books with two A names that I had no trouble with, and then a G and K name and I couldn't keep track of who was who because of how they were written.

I thought I should read a Nobel Prize winner; although, I've been disappointed by most of those writers. So I picked up "One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The multitude of characters' names were Spanish of course and to a gringo hopelessly alike. I got completely confused as to who was who about half-way through and gave up.

In Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed, most of the females in his backstory had "L" names, Lauren, Lolly, Lydia, Lillian. It drove me nuts.

I was bugged by two of the main characters in The Outsiders having similar names: Darry and Dally. I loved that book but I kept having to go back to the beginning to remind myself of which was which. Arrggh!

In my work I have two characters with similar names (one of them it's his first name, the other it's his surname) and my beta reader told me it was too confusing, but since one is a last name, I can use his full name to refer to him, so it's not so bad. He also has a title, so sometimes he's addressed by that.

The basic rule of thumb is: don't confuse the reader. Everything else follows.

I try to stay mindful of the inattentive reader, the kind I sometimes am, when I bestow names.

If I'm reading a novel while stirring my soup every five minutes, overseeing the making of a diorama on the Iroquois, stopping sibling bickering every five minutes, or in earshot of the TV in the other room, I'm not going to be paying the close attention a more devoted reader, or the author, will. Only the luckiest of readers can enjoy relative quiet free of distractions.

For the rest, it's terribly easy to forget or confuse who's who. I don't know about other readers, but once that happens, I don't go back and read more closely. Oh, no. I stop reading your novel and start something else.

Similar names just make it more likely that I'll get mixed up, whether they're too similar to the eye or only to the mental 'ear.' I can separate characters whose first names begin with the same letter or consonant sound, so long as they're different genders. Go ahead, have a Kirk and a Carolyn--but don't add a Ken, Carl, Karen, or Kitty. Same deal with rhymes. You can have a Larry and a Mary, but don't throw in a Barry, Gary, or Carrie, or Sherry. I'm also going to screw up names with other similarities, like Eileen, Helen, Ellen, Elaine, and Hannah. (Dally and Darry threw me, too!)

While I'm ranting, I'll also get frustrated and confused if Detective Robert J. Smith is sometimes Chief, Bobby, RJ, Smitty, and Sweet Babboo, depending on who's talking to or about him.

I consider it my obligation as a writer to do my damnedest to make it easy for the distracted reader to continue to follow my characters and story. I want the reader to finish my book, not start somebody else's.

Maryn, /rant

I think Perle Rare said it best. What it all comes down to in the end is whether or not your READER enjoys your story... not to mention an editor who might buy it. Even if a reader pauses to think about how well you've written a passage or described a scene, or how clever/significant/symbolic/etc. your character's names are, they are still out of the story.

While one shouldn't try to second-guess their readers, I think one SHOULD try to avoid anything that might confuse, annoy, or take them out of a story.

I want my readers to think -- and after they've finished a book -- "hey, this is a pretty good story," not "hey, this is a pretty good writer."

Paul/Paula/Paulie/Pauline

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I think names like this in the story would annoy me. Because when I remember a character I'll probably be double checking myself so I hadn't confused Paulie and Pauline. That's too close of a similarity... Unless they were similar because they were twins and it was obvious the parents named them similarly.

I didn't have a problem with Evan or Devon.

:editor's hat on:

I need to point out that Tolkien wrote those books a long time ago, and what worked back then does not work now.

If your MS lands on my desk and I'm on the ball, I will ask you to change up similar sounding/reading names.

Do you really think it bothers readers as much as it does writers?

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Yes. It annoys the heck out of me and I generally cross that writer off my reading list and continue with the really good writers who know better than to do that.

It can jar readers out of the narrative if they have to stop a second and remember that Lindsey is the sibling with a limp and Linden the one with a lisp.

You don't ever want to jar the reader from your story.

You want them turning pages all night and cursing your name because they couldn't put the book down.

Another nudge for Perle, Gil, Maryn, and the others. We write for the readers. Choosing names, places, descriptions and other things to avoid reader confusion is not in any way condescending or dumbing down the writing. We should want the readers to be focused on what is important in the story, and in the vast majority of cases, what we call the characters isn't as important as what the characters are doing or what is being done to them. If readers can't tell the characters apart without a scorecard, something is way wrong.

What I like to think about when selecting names is this--what if a reader has to put the book down for a few days or a week or so when he/she is right in the middle of the story (it happens). How will I lessen the chance of any confusion when that reader returns to the book?

Cyia said:

Do you really think it bothers readers as much as it does writers?

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A couple of years ago, I picked up a historical military thriller pre-Seals. It had three characters, two of whom had names that started with the same letter. The writer did such an extremely poor job of characterization (Name? Check. Flaw? Check. Characterization done) that every time I hit one of those names I had to physically stop and think about which character it was. So yes, it sure bothered me.

Cyia said:

Is there more leeway with such things in fantasy do you think? Or it is all just another case of: If it works, fine, if not, change it?

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I tend to have large casts, so I always run into trouble with the names. I apparently tend to like certain sounds, so I invariably end up with things like James, Jerry, Jack, and Gene. Trying to change one of them, I ended up with two characters named Barry (which meant I started out with Jerry and Barry. Yikes!).

The one hard rule I stick by is that no other name in the story will even start in the same letter family as the main character's. I might have same letter family as some of the other characters, but I try to keep those character's separate. Particularly troublesome when several of the characters have weird first names and go by middle names!

I went through my wip and changed the majority of my characters' names because they were all Hispanic men with names that started with A or M. Of course, that meant I needed a cheat sheet stuck to my monitor so I could keep track of them, but several drafts later I know who everyone is again.

Arkie said:

I thought I should read a Nobel Prize winner; although, I've been disappointed by most of those writers. So I picked up "One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The multitude of characters' names were Spanish of course and to a gringo hopelessly alike. I got completely confused as to who was who about half-way through and gave up.

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And this is exactly why I changed them. I still have a couple names I might change because the MC Claudia hangs out with her friend Olivia and Olivia's daughter Mia. I didn't mean to have names that all ended with -ia, but it just happened.

*sigh*

In my WIP it feels like all the girls have an L or an A in their names and it's bothering the hell of me...