What's In a Name?

I used several methods to choose the names for the characters in Murphy’s Troubles.  I didn’t want to make Dublin the setting of the novel because it was too common for an Irish story.  The main setting is Cork which is a very international city surrounded both by hills and a port.  County Cork was the home of Michael Collins and the county has a reputation for being rebellious.  I researched the most common surname in County Cork and it was Murphy, so the protagonist is Ian Padraic Murphy.

My son’s best friend is John Doyle so I chose ‘Doyle’ as the surname for Ian’s best friend growing up in Cork.  I read a story about Ray Bradbury when he spent a summer in Ireland working on the screen story for the movie Moby Dick.  He was given a driver, Timolty.  Timolty was such a unique Irish name I thought it was perfect so Timolty Doyle became Ian’s best friend.

For all the other characters I researched Irish male and female first names and surnames.  Many names in Ireland have been Anglicized but I wanted the characters of my book to have original Irish names.  In my travels I’ve learned that names are common to their country of origin and it made the novel more authentic.  I didn’t use the English version of a name.

However, I mixed the spelling of names between Irish and English.  The Irish spelling of ‘Ian’ is ‘Ion’ or ‘Eion’.  I worried that readers wouldn’t understand and settled on using the English spelling.  For some of the minor characters, especially when their setting was in rural Ireland, I used the strictly Irish name with the Irish spelling, again to make the novel more authentic.

I believe names are important and one hint about a character’s traits is found in their name.  For example, “Murphy” means warrior and in his own way Ian Padraic Murphy is a warrior during The Troubles.