Names are hard.

That won’t be a revelation to a writer, but the reason they are hard might come as a surprise, at least it did for me.

Have you ever heard of ‘The Tiffany Problem?’  I hadn’t until a few years ago.  It’s the fact that if you were writing a story set in ancient Rome you could name a character ‘Tiffany’ and still be perfectly, historically accurate.  Amongst all those Flavians and Brutuses you would definitely find a few Tiffanys.  Weird?  Yes.  Interesting?  Sure.  A problem?  Absolutely.  But it’s not the biggest problem when coming up with names.

Let me ask you another question?  How many Micheals do you know?  I bet the answer is ‘a lot.’  I could name ten right off the top of my head, easily, and I don’t even know that many people.  Throw in famous and historical people and the number goes off the charts.  The same is true for John (maybe especially for John), Eric, William (I’m looking at all you Bills and Billys too), Elizabeth, Mary, Ann… the list goes on.  Does it seem weird to me that me, one of my oldest friends, and my mother-in-law’s boyfriend all have the same first name?  Sometimes, but when naming characters it’s more than just weird, it’s annoying.

Writers strive for believability, even ones who write fantasy or other kinds of speculative fiction.  But sometimes believability means making a choice that isn’t realistic at all.  You just can’t have eight character’s with the same names in your books, not if those characters are referenced by the other characters or, worse yet, interact with one another.  It just doesn’t work.  Even if a reader could follow along and understand which of the six Michelles you meant, it’s just too clunky to be considered ‘good writing.’  You’ll find yourself going to great pains to give every character a unique name, except for in those rare cases when identical names are the point, but you shouldn’t really do that all the time any more than the butler should always be the killer.  So, it’s not ‘The Tiffany Problem,’ but rather ‘The Michael Problem,’ that becomes such a bother, especially if you write a lot of books or even just one book with a lot of characters.

I’ll leave you with a question: what would you name the guys in the above image? They look like simple, pseudo-Medieval-European adventurer types, real mud and blood, salt of the earth dudes, also known as ‘peasants.’  If you want to be ‘realistic’ you should probably name them both ‘John,’ just like 75% of all your male characters would be named in such a setting, but I bet you won’t.