I recently read Lynn Flewelling’s Tamir Triad (The Bone Doll’s Twin, Hidden Warrior and The Oracle’s Queen).
My absolute favourite character was Tharin, the protagonist’s (Tamir’s) father’s best friend. The man who looked after Tamir when she was a child, and stayed with her as she grew into adulthood.
Now, here is the silly thing. Even though I adored Tharin as a character, I couldn’t get his name straight for the first two and a half books.
Even as I sat down to write this blog I still had to stop and think. “Is it Tamil? No. Damir? No. Thamir? No, not that either. Damn, I have to go back to the book again to get his name. Tharin. That’s right, it was Tharin.”
This is my favourite character in a series I liked enough to read in one sitting.
He wasn’t a point-of-view character, but he was a major minor character. I should have been able to remember his name. Unfortunately, I got bogged down with all the names in the book with combinations of T, M, N and R in them (Tamir, Tobin, Tharin). They all blended together.
Fantasy and science fiction writers often come up with weird names to make the characters sound more exotic, but there are a lot of other things we do to names that confuse the reader too.
One thing you are often taught in the ‘how to write fantasy’ courses is to make names of people of the same race or tribe similar, to give a sense of history and place. Thus in Lord of the Rings you have Elrond, Glorfindel, Arwen and Galadriel, all elves, all with L, N and D sounds in their names.
Lynn Flewelling had a lot of characters whose name started with T or A.
In her defence, Ms Flewelling could well argue that Tharin wasn’t a major character. That the main characters were clearly delineated —Tamir/Tobin, Ki and Arkoniel. Can’t complain about names there.
Now, I don’t say that you should deliberately go out of your way to give your characters wildly different names just so the readers can tell them apart. There does have to be resonance with names, and a language and a people. And even though it does make the story more confusing to the reader, it’s not the worst naming sin of all.
One of the worst, in my opinion, is the word you use as a name that has a totally unrelated meaning, particularly when you know what that meaning is.