Charts for Female Character Names

Just as a sidenote, I can't type female without a mistake. I always, always, type femail. And then I have to go back and fix it. Just so you all know.

Anyway, I went searching for the article I was talking about when I said agents (and obviously not ALL agents, there's like a million of them) were pontificating about the usage of the letter A in novels. I couldn't find it, and my brain broek with all the searching. So, yeah. I know I read it, I just don't...know...where. (Then Heather taught me a cool way to search in my google reader. She's kewl like that.)

I didn't find exactly what I was looking for, but I found some good stuff. Kristin Nelson weighs in on The Power of Names. And Jessica Faust posted on Alliterative Characters, which is sort of what we've been talking about.

*Snarf* That's a big sort of.

I just like to have a discussion about where we get our names and it's interesting to me to see where they all fall in the alphabet. I'm also going to really try to choose future names from the less-used letters of the alphabet.

But I'm a stat geek like that.

Anyway, here's the chart for the names you all submitted last week.


So interesting. "A" totally wins, hands down. And I only contributed one of those. Makes you go hmmm....Where was that article ElanaJ read? If you find it, let me know.

What's With the Letter A?

So, onward and upward to female main character names. I read somewhere, and I can't remember where, that agents were sick of seeing female protags with a name that started with A. Yeah, in the one book I had written at the time, my MC was named Annie.

Le sigh.

I actually don't mind this. But since my post on male names with the letter K, I've been paying more attention to names in everything I read. Queries, synop's, books, manuscripts, whatev. I read a lot of stuff. And you know what? I've noticed a lot of Seth's. As the bad boy. One of my friends (Christine Fonseca) has a Seth in her WiP. I think she told me his name means something about darkness or choas or something. I'm sure she'll set me straight, and I'm too lazy to research it myself. I shudder just typing that R-word. *shudder*

But I haven't noticed that many A-names for girls. Maybe I'm just reading the wrong books, I don't know. One of my pals, Jessica Verday, author of The Hollow (which I get to read soon! Woot!) has named her MC Abbey. So there's an A. Oh, and Jenn, a real-life gal in my crit group just wrote a synop about a girl named Ava. There's two.

For me? I seem to choose pretty popular names. I wrote a book last winter with a Claire. That seemed to be a pretty popular name at the time. Lots of authors had Claire's. Sidenote: I need an eclair to get me through this week.

And of course, I have Vi, my Rule-breaking Good girl in Control Issues. And Gabby, my heroine-who-sometimes-pretends-to-be-the-hero.

Who have you got? There's major chartage in my future.