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Pork Chop won't get skimmed
Names readers keep straight
A reader moving quickly confuses similar names, so the fix is to vary them. Usually one character in a book goes by initials alone.
Pork Chop
In the novel Harlan Coben wrote with Reese Witherspoon, one lead character is a biker named Pork Chop. It is a name readers are not going to forget or skim over and mistake for somebody else, and the biker image arrives right away.
Picking names by feel
Other names come down to feel. In one book the lead character began as Jeff, until Coben decided he was not a Jeff but a Will or a Matt, and he changed it. He also runs a charity offer in which a donation of around $5,000 gets your name or a loved one's into a book. Requests are not taken, so a donor could end up as a killer or a dead body.
Why do distinctive names stick in memory?
Psychologist Hedwig von Restorff reported in 1933 that an item that stands out from its surroundings is remembered better than the items around it. The finding is known as the von Restorff effect or the isolation effect. In lists of similar words, the one that differs in shape or meaning is the one most often recalled.
Why does War and Peace repeat so many names?
Russian naming uses a first name, a patronymic, and diminutives, so one character can appear under several forms. The novel also repeats names across families: Nikolai Rostov and Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky are different men. Tolstoy published War and Peace in the 1860s. Many English editions open with a list of characters.
How did Dickens choose his characters' names?
Charles Dickens kept lists of candidate names in his working notes and tried out several before settling on one. Names like Scrooge, Pecksniff, and Micawber carry a sound that suggests the character. Critics call such names aptronyms or charactonyms.
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