Do you find this confusing?

I wouldn't be confused, but if you made the heroine and her supporting character (say best friend) have the same letter (Jennifer and Jessica), then I'd be likely to forget who was who early on. After a while I would get it straight, but then I'd wonder if the confusion at first caused me to miss anything.
Hope this helps!
Christy

I don't find it confusing, but I know that a lot of people do -- it's occasionally discussed on the sf writers' usenet group I hang out in, and there are quite a few people there who would not be able to keep track of those names as separate characters.

I don't find it confusing at all... especially since my husband and I are both J names, and we got even more cutesy by name our kids J names as well.


Jen

Do try to avoid alliteration unless there's a really good reason for it, and if you need the alliteration, try to make the names look different otherwise. For example: Jeff and Jabberwocky would be okay, b/c at a glance, it's obvious that they're different, whereas, two single-syllable alliterative names (e.g., Jeff and John) would be harder to differentiate. It's a visual thing, rather than a sound thing. Imagine looking at the names through a squint, when you can barely focus on them. If they look sort of the same, a slow reader isn't going to have trouble, but anyone who zips through the pages, speed-reading, doesn't stop on individual words, so the alliteration can be confusing in print, where it might not be in speech.

JD

In my novel, I have 5 brothers and there names all start with the letter "D".
Dan, Dale, Derrick, Dean, and David. I worried about it at first but all my betas assured me they had no problems keeping them straight because they all had very distinct personalities.

I don't find it a problem if they're well-written enough.

I don't find it confusing at all... My cousin, his wife and two children's names all start with "J"...

Just go with what you want...it's your story whether anyone likes it or not.. If we all did what other people wanted, well you know.

Best of luck.

I don't find it confusing so long as the names being used are reasonably "normal." To assume that it is confusing is like worrying that people are going to confuse Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson.

Where I think it gets unacceptably confusing is when there are a whole lot of complex, made-up names (as often happens in fantasy).

Grumpy editor here.

This is one of my pet peeves, and I have it in common with other editors.

The first thing I do on any MS with this glitch is tell the writer to change the names.

I don't care if the characters never appear together in the same scene, are opposite genders, or have wholly different personalities.

I don't care if all the best beta-readers say different; they're not editors who have to deal with this all the time with a dozen other writers who really should know better.

It's not a deal killer, but it is sloppy writing.

Even if you did it on purpose and are not a sloppy writer, it looks like you are.

Please don't send me sloppy writing.

It's more work for me. You don't want to give me more work. You want me to smile and ask for more of your wonderful words and to send you lots and lots of lovely checks!

It's an easy fix that makes me much less grumpy.

There are 25 other letters in the alphabet to use. Have some fun with them!



Tech trick: Divide a page into 26 squares and a single alphabet letter to each square.

As you name a character--the main name you will use throughout the story--put the name in its square. Then never use that letter again.

This is a very easy way to avoid the problem AND helps you keep track of the correct spelling of each!

One of my series characters has an oddly spelled name and this is the only way I can remember to get it right!

The more letters, the worse it is. Try keeping Jan, Jane, and Jamie straight.

It's REALLY bad with uncommon or made up names, so if your characters are not blessed with vanilla names, then PLEASE make them distinct.

And it is also hard with secondary characters. I once went through a whole book thinking that Dan and Dave were the same person because they never appeared in the same scene, and only appeared at all every few chapters. I forget how I figured out they were different, but I was confused for the whole book because of a couple small contradictions (if they were the same person).

thedrafthorse said:

Where I think it gets unacceptably confusing is when there are a whole lot of complex, made-up names (as often happens in fantasy).

Click to expand...

I've thrown books against the wall and never opened them again for just this reason.

What about a Quantum Leap type situation?

Say you have a character who gets zapped through time or to a different world and ends up in the body of a parallel them?

John may think of himself as John here in the USA in 2007 but to the other characters in the "new world" he'd be Jeff or Bob or whoever he was "replacing".

In re similar names ...
There are so many ways to confuse a reader, why not pick a more interesting one?

The problem, ISTM, is less a matter of a chiming first letter, than the attention needed to disentangle and remember a cast of names. We want names to be distinctive.

So one would obviously avoid ... Joyce/Jocelyn/Janet/James, Tom/Tim/Tony, Burton/ Beauton, Duval/Doyle, Bridget/Brandon.
But one would also avoid names that do not begin with the same letter, but which are similar in appearance.
A chapter of Bab/Tad/Sid/Rob/Don would doubtless work better as the adventures of
Babs/Theo/Sid/Robinson/Donnie.

Even simple length and shape is enough to make a list of names blah and interchangeable. The characters Duval/Ravat/Boyaf/Cuvet/Gevel are going to be difficult to remember and keep straight. Not so Messieurs Tuys/Ringdorf/Messerkin/Su/LePlace

Name endings are especially telling. Even where there is no problem distinguishing one from the other -- they 'chime' and it is distracting. Adrian/Marian/Sebastian, Babette/Colette/Jeanette, Tammy/Ginny/Manny.

So it seems to me there is nothing wrong per se with names that start with the same letter. Many such name pairs do not chime or distract and are perfectly distinguishable visually. It'd take a purist, I think, to see as interchangeable and confusing Sid/Summerfield, Brandon/Babs, Chris/Capistrano, Tammy/Theo.