What connotations do these character names confer?
I'm currently brooding over good character names for a novel I want to write. I was looking at some of the books I read recently, trying to understand why the authors picked the names they gave their protagonists.
In "Before I die" by Jenny Downham – which is one of the best books of my life, by the way – the two main characters are named Ellie Parker and Mickey McKenzie. Obviously surnames names are not uniformily distributed over the country, and there is a preference for different first names among different classes, so names will not only give you an idea of which region and social context a person might come from, they also trigger prejudices about a person's character. But since English is not my native tongue, and I don't live in the UK, I have no feeling for the connotations that these two names from that novel will evoke in a native English reader from the UK.
What connotations do the names Ellie Parker and Mickey McKenzie carry? What kind of persons do you imagine carry such names?
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I'm a native English reader,though not from the UK. With that caveat, here's my two cents.
What connotations do the names Ellie Parker and Mickey McKenzie carry? What kind of persons do you imagine carry such names?
'Ellie Parker' sounds like an upper-crust dowager, set in her ways, imperiously and unconsciously demanding her own way, but likable all the same. 'Mickey McKenzie' brings to mind a farm laborer, honest, hard-working, but slightly bitter at the lot which fate has handed him. He may be jealous of Parker, but is unlikely to wish her actual harm unless he perceives that she has deliberately harmed him or his.
That is of course very stereotypical, and entirely subjective. I imagine that others may have totally different interpretations of the characters names. Write your story, allow the characters to be what they will be, and the name will come to fit them--as long as the name is true to what you think an 'Ellie Parker' or 'Mickey McKenzie' should be!
Edit
If the characters are teenagers, my mental image changes a little, though not too much. Ellie Parker is snooty, rich, and blase. (Long, straight hair, too, though that shouldn't make a difference!) Mickey McKenzie works a tech job, is smart but unambitious, given to hanging in malls and spending time online. In short, he is a typical 'kid-dult'. Hope this helps!
This depends heavily on when a story is set, if this story was set in the Victorian era, when upper class people had "upper class" names, the names may have implied class.
Sadly, as the story is set in the present day, they don't really imply anything. In fact, as names spread across the country the original locality of the name is meaningless too (my step mother's called McKenzie but she's in no way Scottish.)
It may help to know when and where your story is set. Still, I don't think you need to concern yourself too much with this, let the names come out of the story. Otherwise you're just blocking yourself from starting.
EDIT
This answer is based on names in the UK because the story appears to be set in present day Britain (and because I live here, so it's all I have to go on)
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