Candice: People keep asking me where the name Erin came from for my daughter. Well, it took months of web searching and conversations going ‘so and so, nope, what about this one, nope’. But as we looking through the names we realised we didn’t want something that was ‘Top Ten’. What do I mean by this, well a name that was in the top ten of popular names in the UK for the last few years. Having a different name has helped (and hindered me) over the years and I wanted her to also have something different.
Searching for a character name is very similar to looking for one for your child. It has to suit their personality and reflect their approach. I always knew our protagonist was Kate but some of the other characters were harder to define. In this case, you could change them later on (as we did when we realised we had Olive and Olivia) but with a child, once they are registered you are a bit stuck.
I think I felt as much pressure getting Erin’s name right as I did the characters in our book, and it our other stories. Some times they just came to me, e.g. a story which we have yet to publish about an office worker was based on the lady I sat next to at the time, Lindsay, but others have struggled to find a voice, the story might come but the character name does not. But it has to be right, else people will read the book or story and go ‘hum, I like this book but they just don’t feel like a John to me’. It also depends on your own experience of that name, alot of the names we rejected for both book and daughter were because we’d gone to school, worked or otherwise met someone with that name and therefore it has a bad association. I went to school with a lad called Dominic and he used to get teased terribly and they would pronounce his name as if he had a speech problem, something that I can still hear now. So I’d never call a child Dominic.
Have you changed your name? Do you have any examples of names you would avoid for the same reason?
And why an image of Kylie? Well, when Kylie and Jason were big in the mid 80’s suddenly we had a lot of Kylie’s around. I think the same might have happened with my name after the character in Coronation street 😦
nolanparker 