Episode #184: Why This Name For What You Write?

Welp, that certainly ain't Donald, Daffy, Huey, Dewey or Louie. Or even Mallard Fillmore. It's just a local duck chilling on a rock above the waterfall on a sunny afternoon back sometime in the early '10s.

I've always had a few problems in choosing names for my characters, in that trying to find the right one that actually fits the characters, has more often than not, eluded me. And when I do find one, I have a tendency to work it to death {ex: Nikia. Used it in what should be, when all is said and done, 6 books}.

And, what makes it even more adventurous, I have developed a strong affinity for names based in Europe (East & West) and Russia. Not so much as exotic, but simply more of a variety to choose from. 

To expand even further, I have dipped into mythology, mostly European, and European translations of American English names, and for ha-ha's, the occasional tweaked spellings of traditional English names.

A good example of this would be the names used in my Hot Mess trilogy: Myla (Greek/Roman mythology); Jhon (variation of John); Nyx (again, Greek/Roman mythology); Mateo (Italian for Matthew I believe); Bella (short for Belladonna); Ilka (cool name, Hispanic I believe); Adeola (no idea as to why I chose it); Thanatos (Greek/Roman mythology); Lady Nordic (generic Scandinavian) and Macha (Incan), to name just a few. But with those, names don't necessarily point directly to each person's ethnicity.

Anyways, the names I chose for my Average American Novella, fall along similar lines, and I would like to elaborate on my reasoning behind my choices.

Note: I like to point out one salient point about my stories: I enjoy writing stories that feature a diverse group of people. Always have and always will. It has nothing to do with appropriation, and everything to do with appreciation. I appreciate all the cultures that I come across and respectfully use. I try to do as much research as possible in order to present well-rounded characters/scenarios. That includes using names that can closely match up with a particular character.

Now, to elaborate on my name choices for the three MC's and two SC's, which are as follows:

1} Dmitri: I needed a good muscular name to hang on my 1st male character, who happens to be Black. I didn't want to give him a wimpy name because that would just make him into someone that you couldn't take seriously. Also, I really like male Russian names.

2} Kaitlyn: I needed a good name to hang on my 1st female character, who also happens to be Black. I wanted to give her a name that would make people think twice about not treating her with respect. Also, I really needed to use another name beside Nikia, which I spent the better part of a decade continuously using, for my badass female character.

3} Charles: This was an interesting selection, because I always thought it was a name that one needed to respect, whether you wanted to or not. I first heard of the name while watching "Little House On The Prairie". I liked it and filed it away for future use. It's the kind of name that when you speak it, it leaves a bitter taste of annoyance for an aftertaste. A great name for a villain, no matter what the ethnicity of the person is.

4} Andrik: Andrik is Kaitlyn's father. Again, it was an issue of coming up with a good muscular name for a Black man. So I went tip-toeing through some Eastern European names, and came up with this Slavic name.

5} Amaliya: She is Dmitri's sister. Not sure how I came up with her name, but perhaps it was a spelling tweak on a plain name. I was always partial to tweaking the spellings of traditional names, because I often found traditional spellings of first names to be rather bland. But because I don't like far out names, whether in the real world or in fiction, this was my happy compromise.

I do have two others that were chosen, but because those characters were basically fulfilling a need to move key parts of the story along (one for about four chapters in total and the other for one), there's really no need to delve into the reasons for choosing them. 

I hope you like my mini-dive into the reasoning used for choosing the names that I did. Tune in next week when I do a mini-dive into reasoning behind the ethnicities/cultures that I chose to use for my trilogy.

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