Fantastic naming cliches and how to avoid them

With apologies to J.K. Rowling. ;)

Here’s a proposed topic that came at me when I put out a call about what to post about for my turn on the blog today: how do you make names in fantasy novels not sound silly?

And, as a writer of epic fantasy and urban fantasy, this question is highly relevant to my interests. So let me talk a bit about what I try to do when I come up with names. (As always with writing advice, though, this is what’s worked for me so far, and it may or may not work for you.)

Apostrophes

Apostrophes in names are of course a huge fantasy cliche. I am not immune to them. If you’ve read Faerie Blood and/or Bone Walker, you’ll probably have observed that my Sidhe do have apostrophes in their surnames. The three examples I have so far on record are Elessir a’Natharion, Melisanda ana’Sharran, and my heroine Kendis’s mother, Elanna ana’Kirlath.

In my defense, I will note that my intention here was to have the “a” and “ana” prefixes function similarly to “O” and “Mac” in Irish and Scottish names—i.e., they’re designators for what family or House the Sidhe in question belongs to. “A” as a prefix is for males, “ana” is for females. The apostrophes are silent, and are indicators that the “ana” and “a” prefixes are meant to be considered as a single unit with the House names. This is similar to my understanding of how Irish names evolved in real life.

And because I do in fact have a point to those apostrophes, I embrace using them. ;D

I do not have apostrophes on the names of elves in my Rebels of Adalonia trilogy, but this is because my editor (justifiably) intercepted them before they made it into the final draft of Valor of the Healer. I was okay with that for two reasons: one, apostrophes are more cliched in epic fantasy than they are in urban, at least in my personal experience, and two, I’ve already got them in one series and it’s good to avoid repeating myself.

Eight million diacritics all over your names

Anybody who grew up reading Tolkien like I did, and who then turned to writing fantasy, will understand this one: the urge to slap diacritics all over your names to emphasize how they aren’t English.

Boy howdy am I not immune to this one. But again, I tried to dial it down to moderate levels when making up my language for my elves in the Rebels of Adalonia books. The only accent I’ve deployed in my Elvish language in that trilogy is a grave, and the intention for those is to serve as indicators that any vowel with one is in fact supposed to be sounded in speech. I generally only drop them on second vowels in a word—there are no such things as dipthongs in my Elvish—or on vowels at the end of words that follow consonants.

As with apostrophes, I do try to employ at least some form of basic linguistic consistency here. I am so very much not an actual linguist, but I’m enough of a language nerd to try to pay at least a little attention here and to balance out “it just looks cool” with “but let’s give it an actual purpose in the language, mmkay?”

Long multi-syllabic names

Yep, this is another one I’m not entirely immune to. Amelialoren, Queen of the Seelie Court, and Luciriel, Queen of the Unseelie Court, I am looking straight at you.

Yet again, though, this is one I try to keep down to a reasonable moderate level. Complex names like that are ones I usually drop only on major power figures—like, say, the Queens of the Courts. My Seelie warrior Melisanda is about the only other notable exception to this, since her name has four syllables. But she’s also directly named for a character I used to see played on Two Moons MUSH.

(Fun side trivia fact: I have named multiple characters after people I used to play with on various MUSHes!)

Mostly, though, I try to keep names down to two or three syllables at most. And in the Rebels of Adalonia books in particular, this rule is in play. Most of the elves in that story have two or three syllables in their names, and the human characters likewise.

Among the humans in particular, I have a mix of names that are in use in real life (e.g., Julian) and names that clearly aren’t (e.g., Kestar). But there’s a linguistic rule here, too. Names with obvious real life analogs are intended to be derived from one language, while names that are clearly made up are derived from another. (Specifically, for names derived from the Adalonian language, I used either names that appear in real life, or else grabbed names from Irish or Scots sources, sometimes anglicizing the spelling. E.g., turning Séamus into Shaymis. Names derived from the language of the people of Nirrivy were based on Norwegian sources.)

In general

I do try to keep my names short and punchy: Kendis, Faanshi, Kestar, Julian, Jude, etc. It fits my writing style, and I hope that it makes life a little easier for my readers. As you’ve probably seen, I do like to indulge myself with classic naming cliches, and I cheerfully blame a lot of that on Tolkien! But I do also try to rein it in and use just enough to add a little bit of flair to my naming schemes without going overboard.

(‘Cause I do love me some Tolkien, but wow, is it hard to slog through any of his works that use a lot of Quenya names. Like most of The Silmarillion!)

So talk to me, fellow writers and readers: what are your favorite fantasy naming cliches? Which ones have a way of showing up in your writing?

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Angela writes as both Angela Highland and Angela Korra'ti, but either way, you can find out all about her books at angelahighland.com. Come geek out with her about languages on her site, on Facebook, or on Twitter!

On languages and character development

If you follow me on my blog or on the social networks, you’ll figure out pretty fast that one of my big passions right now, outside of writing, is language study. For the past many months, I’ve been putting a little bit of daily effort into studying both French and German, using an app called SuperMemo on my iPhone.

So because I post about language geekery a lot (especially on my Facebook wall, where a few actual Francophones follow me and periodically even let me make words at them in French, which is awesome), I got asked to post about how languages affect the shaping of an author’s characters. This could mean, either languages the author knows in real life, or languages they’re making up!

This, then, is a followup to my last post about reading fantasy in other languages. I’ll break the question down into two posts, actually. This one will talk about real-life languages influencing character development, and for my next Here Be Magic post, I’ll geek out about made-up languages.

I’m not a linguist by any stretch of the imagination. I’m simply a language hobbyist! I’ve always had fun playing with languages, dating clear back to when I heard an Elvis Presley song, “Wooden Heart”, and realized he was singing in German in the bridge. This in no small part influenced my decision to take German in high school, and in college, I took a year of French as well. I tried to take Russian, though to my eternal sadness I had to drop the class due to an overloaded schedule. I’ve toyed with learning Norwegian, Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Japanese as well, though to date I have very little practical vocabulary in any of those languages.

French and German, though, those are sticking with me. Quebecois French in particular is important to me, not only because of my rampaging affection for Quebecois traditional music, but also because there will be a French-speaking Warder character from Quebec eventually showing up in the Faerie Blood series.

Which means that I’ll have a non-native-English speaker in my cast, who’ll be interacting with characters who are native English speakers—because, well, I’ll be writing in English. So I’ll need to think about the character’s comfort level with English, and, if he’s not entirely fluent, how to believably and smoothly portray that in his dialogue.

Over the years I’ve seen varying reader reactions to characters who aren’t native English speakers. Two big complaints I’ve seen are:

1) Overdoing the accent

I’ve seen this often in the context of, say, Scottish historical romances, where a Scottish hero can’t make it out of a sentence without leaving dropped g’s in his wake, where every ‘you’ comes out as ‘ye’, and where it takes you twice as long to read anything the character says just because you have to spend time parsing every word.

Needless to say, I’m not a fan of that approach. Instead I try to be subtler, and reflect the cadence of an accent in word choices and occasional bits of description. I’ve been working on building a sense of how a Francophone Quebecer would speak in English courtesy of meeting several Quebecois musicians, and I’ll need to augment that sense eventually, via movies, podcasts, or whatever other recordings I might find.

Along with actual study of French, I’ve begun to develop an idea of differences a French speaker might have to deal with when he’s speaking in English. Which brings me to point #2!

2) Resorting to cliches

The second big complaint I’ve seen periodically on the Net is the frequency with which non-native-English speakers are portrayed in cliched ways. Things like, say, never speaking with contractions, or peppering dialogue with simple words in the character’s native language, by way of shorthand to show the reader that ‘hey, this character’s a Francophone’!

But the thing is, simple words like ‘yes’ or ‘no’? Those are going to be among the very first words that a newcomer to English will learn. Particularly if they are likely to have had English classes in school—like, say, a Francophone would in Canada.

Where a Francophone might have trouble—ah, now that’s the fun part. Only by putting some effort into understanding your character’s native language will you be able to discover things like how if an English speaker says “next Saturday”, what they mean is “not this coming Saturday, but the one after”. But if a Francophone says that, they mean “this coming Saturday”.

Or, nuances in verb translation—like how the verb “regarder” has a built-in connotation of “at”. If you want to say “look at the hat”, the translation is “regarder le chapeau”. There’s no equivalent of “at” in the phrase, because it’s built right into the verb. Which is a sneaky little detail that’d be entirely plausible for a Francophone to miss, when he’s trying to point out a particular interesting nearby hat!

Long story short, it boils down to the same thing any writer worth her keyboard needs to do if she wants to include anything realistically in a story: i.e., research.

In my case, that means language study, and it’ll eventually also mean seeing if any of my online Francophone friends are willing to chat with me about details of learning English that were difficult for them. Plus, since this Warder boy will be a Quebecer, it means I get to learn about Quebecois profanity, too! (Which is acres of fun all by itself. Seriously, it has its very own Wikipedia page! And a friend of mine in Montreal pointed me at a movie I'll need to hunt down, in which the main characters are cops and the Quebecer gives his Anglophone parter a lesson in how Quebec profanity works—while they're interrogating a suspect.)

How about you, readers? What drives you spare when you’re reading a character who’s not a native English speaker? Especially if you yourself are not a native English speaker? What do Anglophone authors get wrong that you’d really, really like to see us get right? Sound off in the comments!

Angela Highland may not be a linguist, but boy howdy she thinks words are awesome, because hello, writer. Keep an eye out for language geekery sneaking into her forthcoming book, Vengeance of the Hunter, next month! Come find out more about her work at angelahighland.com, or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.