It’s one of those things you may not consider all that carefully when you start writing a novel. I remember thinking my character names were just fine when I started workshopping my novel over at AllWriters Workplace & Workshop.
I was quickly disabused of that notion.
It all started with the secondary character who is now named Felerin. Initially, her name was Elerin. This created a lot of confusion as one of my primary characters is Eliana. Evidently, that’s something to be avoided. Having point-of-view characters with the same first letter tends to confuse readers.
Alright… I’ll just rename her. Simple, right? The character is pretty athletic, and I know a world-class athlete named Lauren, so I changed her name from Elerin to Lauren. Well, that didn’t work out either. One of the people in my workshop had a pretty funny, but decidedly negative reaction to the name
Lauren, so, back to the drawing board.
The next choice was Felerin, and that name ended up being perfect for her.
But that wasn’t the only naming problem. Cinderhorn was originally Ciderhelm, but that ended up being too similar to Arronhelm. People kept looking for some relationship or kinship between the two. I liked the idea of Cinder instead of Cider for the first part of his name, but that wouldn’t fix the problem. ‘Helm’ was the problem. I thought about using just ‘Cinder’ for his name, but a simple web search killed that idea. And that’s how he wound up with the name ‘Cinderhorn’.
Simple, non-fantasy names also became an issue. A number of critiques called those characters out for breaking immersion. I argued that having standard names on a few briefly appearing characters shouldn’t be a big deal. I was defeated by the rather obvious counter argument… if those characters only show up for a few pages, what better place to stretch your language with a fantastical name or two to help build your world.
So, Eleanor become Selandra. John (if I recall correctly) became Jehlin. Frederick became Darach, and so on and so forth.
I kept a Wayne, but that’s an inside joke.