Just working on upcoming developments in my series and realized I'd changed the name of a character. Liked the new name better and realized the one I'd begun with had become uncomfortable for me. That character has taken on more depth and a bigger role in future stories recently, so maybe that was part of it.
Has that happened to others? Do character names have to "feel" a certain way to you?
Ugh. Yes. I had two different characters named Mike and had them working together. For some damned reason, I never changed that, even though I saw it happening. While the story continued, they became more notable characters, but I never even thought about changing until I had scenes with both talking, and I almost confused myself! If I wanted to go in and change it, it's going to take a lot of work to check the chapters, and I'd rather spend my time continuing the story instead of fixing something that at the most irks me.
Maybe once the story is complete...
A hell, I just figured out how to fix it and continue the story... maybe. Tee Hee.
I wrote a story and the MC's first name was James. I wrote a second story and it's MC's name was James. Then I decided to merge the two storylines. I resolved the problem by calling them James C and James S.
It has been several years since I posted the two stories. A while back I decided to merge the two stories into one story and rename one of the James.
Lesson learned. I now have a list of over a thousand unique first and last character names. I can continue to use this list for future stories until I run out of names.
Do character names have to "feel" a certain way to you?
When I started writing, I thought I would use very short names, like Joe and Sue, to reduce keystrokes and then, when done with the first draft, do a global find/replace with the "real" names of the characters.
The problem was, after writing the story with the names Joe and Sue, the characters WERE Joe and Sue and I couldn't change the names.
I intentionally changed the name of a minor character because it collided with the name of an incoming middle-to-major character. Pretty much no one cared, as far as I can tell.
In terms of major characters: yes, absolutely, some characters 'feel' like they have a certain name.
For various reasons, I attempted to change my main character's name about a third of the way through writing Book 1 and failed miserably. Find and Replace worked just fine, but I found my fingers typing the original name again, and again, and again. After a few chapters of that I gave up and decided that he'd picked his name and there was no changing it.
On the other hand, Steve and Angie's mother's name changed fairly late in the development of Book 1 due to collisions with a middle-tier character. On the other hand, her name being shared with their aunt is a plot point, not an accident.
Names are very important to me, in particular as a Writer (and also as a Game Master or player in Role Playing Games: RPGs). I have extensive lists of names in a multitude of languages to use in stories and games.
Names have MEANINGS, and I often hint at aspects of a character with their name. "First" name in particular, but often the Patronymic (Family) name too. (I put first name in parentheses because in some cultures the patronymic is first.)
I also usually have a list of names for minor characters. For them I don't mind using common names such as Joe, Jim, Jose, Tom, Richard, and Hector; or Smith, Schmidt, Sanchez, Fernandez, Diaz, Davis, or Deitrich. Partially because many of my characters are military and also have a Rank. Also, "Nicknames" are typical, in the military (and elsewhere).
I did have an issue that when I originally began writing I had the ability to add accent marks to names (and some other words) most commonly in some foreign languages, such as Spanish. My computer crashed, I kept backups, but for some months I was not able to add accent marks. I had several comments (oddly more about names of new characters appearing in those chapters. After I again upgraded my software, I soon went back and edited all chapters.
I had to be careful using the Replace function because some characters born in the USA did not use accent marks; but characters with the same name from Mexico did use them.
Richard is not a common name. Dick may be common. Rich is maybe the top 10%, combined with hard is even more rare.