Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Unfantasy names

I just realized how mean I am to my female characters. I give them horrible names. Witness these names taken from recent stories--and these are all central characters:

Grace
Dottie
Hilda
Rose
Ellen
Helen
Madeline
Emily
Liza
Sasha

Now a similar list of male names, all of them taken from the same stories as the names above:

William
Dominick
Fin
Maxwell
Harris
Jack
James
Zack
Kristof
Gabe

While I do like some of the women's names in the list above, I like all of the men's names, with the possible exception of Harris. I don't know what this says about me, but here's something else: most of the women's names were chosen because they sounded flat-footed. And I write fantasy. I wonder if I might be trying too hard to avoid allegations of Mary Sueing.

2 comments:

Carrie Harris said...

Hey! What do you have against the name Harris?!?!

LOL

K.C. Shaw said...

Uh, um, oops! I mean, Harris is my FAVORITE name from that list!