The F Words: Naming Treva

My first thought in naming the third character in The F Words was this: should her name end in a? That may strike you as a weird thought, but it’s one that always crosses my mind when naming a female character.

Fully one-third of all girls’ names in English end with the letter a. Of the current top ten girls’ names (Emma, Olivia, Ava, Isabella, Sophia, Charlotte, Mia, Amelia, Harper, Evelyn), seven end with a. This propensity of names to end in a is true in most Indo-European languages, partly because a was the ending of female Roman names, partly because adding a became the way a  male name was changed into a female name, as in Oliver/Olivia or Henry/Henrietta, Lauren or Lawrence/Laura.

Names from the Romance languages and Slavic languages are particularly high in female names ending in a. And, maybe because my own name ends in a, I gravitate toward such names. In She’s on First the hero is named Linda. (Though in Dirty Proof the protagonist is named Suzanne — so I’m not wedded to the a ending.)

Once I knew the character’s name would end in a, I proceeded to think about what it would be. Because Cole and Felipe’s names start with letters in the first-half of the alphabet, I wanted a name that started with a letter from the second-half of the alphabet. (Believe me, these considerations and decisions do help readers differentiate characters and recognize them as soon as they appear in another scene.)

Okay, then —  the third character would have a name that started with a letter from N-Z, and end in A. I had a gut feeling that the name should start with a blend, probably because neither Cole nor Felipe’s name starts with a blend. 

This feeling that the name should have a blend led me to consider the initial letters P (Pl, Pr), S (Sl, Sm, Sp, St), and T (Tr). I immediately seized on Tr and came up with the name Treva. As you can infer, it’s Trevor/Treva. The name satisfied me, and it’s a two-syllable name (though I wasn’t consciously trying for that), so there’s a nice balance in the syllable-count of Cole, Treva, Felipe.

I think it could become very boring if I discussed how and why I named each of the minor and not-so-minor characters in The F Words, so I won’t do that. But I do want to say something about naming one other character, and that is Cole’s ex-girlfriend, whom I first named Sydnye. I don’t remember why. But I do remember that everybody in my writing group objected to the name and to the spelling of the name. Every time they read a section of the book that contained Sydnye, they felt they were reading a typo. And they couldn’t remember who she was. (Maybe because of my exaggerated spelling of the name.)

Okay. I had to get rid of not only the weird spelling, but the name itself. But I couldn’t figure out what to replace it with. For weeks and weeks I went through baby-naming books and websites, skimming the names, hoping that a name would grab me as just-right for the character.

Nada.

And then one day I was reading about a current-day girls’ baseball team on which one of the players was named Paloma. Hmmm. Paloma. That was different. Contemporary. So in the second and third drafts of the The F Words, I named the character Paloma.

This time it was me, not my writing group, who couldn’t remember the name. As I was writing the drafts and came to a scene with Cole and . . . Cole and . . . what’s her name again? I kept having to look it up!

Obviously, no matter how lovely a name Paloma is, it wasn’t working for my character.

Back to the drawing board. Which meant back to the baby-naming books. This time I settled down into an easy chair with a pen and paper in hand and a cup of coffee by my side. I s-l-o-w-l-y went through the names again.

And when I got to the J’s — I found it! Jillian. Don’t know how or why I missed it the first time around. But it sounded right and felt right. And, as it turns out, the name works very well in one of the campaign-for-class-president scenes in which Jillian and Felipe are both running for the same office.

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The F Words is now available for Pre-Order on Amazon.