Why I spend too much time on character names

Happy August! I love summer, so this month is always bittersweet for me. I like fall too, but you can’t do as many outdoor things in the fall; the mountains in my neck of the woods become too snowy for hiking, for example.

Halloween is the best holiday, though.

I don’t have any announcements this time (other than the Map of the Otherlands paperback, out in September!) so I’m just going to dive right into the topic I’ve chosen for this month. This is drawn from a reader question about how I came up with the idea for the Emily Wilde series, including characters and their names. I thought I’d choose the most straightforward part of the question this month, but I’ll talk more generally about the process of creating the Emily Wilde series in future newsletters.

Why I care so much (too much?) about names

Character names have always reminded me of the space under a bed. Yes, I can leave that space empty, and many people do, or I can use it to store things. I can pick a name simply because I like it, essentially leaving that space in the semantic landscape of the book empty, or I can choose a name that imparts meaning to the reader, either consciously or subconsciously.

Sometimes, my character names are that empty space under the bed; a name will simply feel right, I’ll like the way it sounds, and I’ll have no justification for it beyond that. This is usually, but not always, the case for minor characters. But other times, I have a larger reason for the names I choose, perhaps because they help me achieve a certain tone or effect, or because they act as a shorthand for providing a character insight via association.

The latter can be a bit tricky, because of course, not everyone has the same associations with a particular name! But as someone writing mostly (though not exclusively) for a western audience, I hope that a sizeable portion of my readers will share my associations.

The most obvious example is Ember from Ember and the Ice Dragons, who is literally a dragon disguised as a human girl. Of course, “Ember” just sounds like a dragon’s name, but an ember isn’t fire; it needs fuel and air to burn, which speaks to Ember’s journey. Another is Julian from The Language of Ghosts. Given that he’s attempting to establish himself as king, I was hoping some (likely mostly adult?) readers would think of Julius Caesar, whose power and arrogance eventually led to his downfall—a foreshadowing of Julian’s potential arc.

Emily is another example of this insight-by-association. Maybe this is just the English Lit major in me, but when I hear “Emily” I think Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte. Famous, intellectual Emilys. Emily Dickinson in particular seems to have lived a life of the mind, and was largely a recluse in her later years (you can see some parallels developing). But! Both also had rich emotional lives, driven by wonder and inspiration, which describes Emily better than she might think.

I pay even more attention to names when I know they’ll be in the book’s title. I’ve talked about this before, but the novel that the Emily Wilde series was inspired by more than any other is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. What I love about Strange’s name in the title is that it automatically piques your interest; I wanted to do something similar with “Wilde.”

The added bonus is that Jane Wilde (AKA Lady Wilde) was a well-known folklorist of the mid-late 1800s, not long before Emily’s era, which I hoped some readers would also recognize. (This isn’t so much an insight as a fun little connection.)

What about Wendell?

I don’t often get asked about Wendell’s name (poor Wendell) but I actually chose it as carefully as I did Emily’s, though through a very different process. Essentially, Wendell’s name is supposed to sound a bit silly. There’s something about the bouncy metre of “Wendell Bambleby” that I find inherently amusing; it makes me picture a bumbling older gentleman, possibly the kind who wears colourful elbow patches and is always harrumphing. Someone more like Farris Rose, actually.

The reason I chose this name for Wendell was because I wanted his first appearance to be surprising. Wendell is introduced before he actually appears, in the form of the letter he writes to Emily in Hrafnsvik. My hope was that readers would form a certain image of him based on his name, which would be dashed when he actually shows up. Given that fairies are always surprising us mortals, often through disguise, this device seemed a good fit, and maybe a bit of subtle foreshadowing.

Q&A

I answer reader-submitted questions at the end of each newsletter; you can email yours to heather@heatherfawcettbooks.com or leave it in the comments. I may answer it in the Q&A or, if I have too many thoughts to be concise, use it for the main topic of a newsletter.

I see you will have a new adult book coming out! Can you tell us anything more about Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter? Maybe the inspiration for it?

I do! Agnes Aubert should be out in 2026, which sounds like aeons away, until I remember that we’re already over halfway through 2024. It’s set in an alternative, magical-world version of 1920s Montreal, about a French-speaking owner of a cat shelter. It has a large cast of characters, but over half of them are cats, which I had a delightful time creating arcs for. There is a romance subplot, because why not, involving a disreputable dark lord/big bad, who uses Agnes’s shelter as a front for his magic shop, and who throws her well-ordered life into chaos.

Agnes is a very Type-A, highly compassionate sort of character who is not directly inspired by anyone I know, but more generally by many of the charity organizers and longtime volunteers for different causes I’ve met over the course of my life. I’ve never created a character like her before, so it was a good challenge, and so far I’m very happy with the result (the draft is done, but it will go through several rounds of revision and editing).

Other than that, I’ve just always wanted to write a book that centres cats, who deserve nothing less, for people who love cats.

The book is a standalone, which I know a subset of readers prefer. I had a lot of fun writing it, and overall it’s been a nice palette cleanser to work on in the midst of a longer series.

What does “DDe” stand for?

This is a bit embarrassing, but I used “DDe” as a placeholder in the first draft of Emily Wilde 1, and I never ended up changing it. I just wanted to have more letters after Emily’s name, because why wouldn’t she have every degree under the sun? And at the time, I didn’t know if the book would see the light of day, so I just didn’t worry too much about it.

I’ve since had to come up with an explanation for it, because people keep asking, so I now say that it stands for Diploma in Dendrochronology. I studied dendrochronology a bit during my archaeology degree, and it seems a useful accreditation for a dryadologist to have, given that their work routinely takes them into woodlands and forests, and many faeries use trees for habitation.

What I’m reading

Currently I’m enjoying Where the Dark Stands Still by A.B. Poranek. I recently finished a nonfiction/memoir about van life, not a subculture I know much about but one which I find fascinating, Nowhere for Very Long by Brianna Madia. I also read—and loved—an old classic when it comes to fairy folklore, The Little Grey Men.

I also want to make sure I put in a plug for Practical Rules for Cursed Witches by Kayla Cottingham, which I loved so much I wrote a blurb for it, and is out in two weeks!