You seriously worry about it between different stories? I mean, I can appreciate that you are working with uncommon (in our world) names but still... If they aren't connected then I wouldn't even notice.
I seem to recall a long-running rumble of discontent about Tolkien's characters called Sauron and Saruman, which readers found confusing. There's also the point that as people age, their short term memory tends to become less effective, although those writing YA need to worry little about that, I guess.
Oh, I'm glad this thread popped back up. Could I get opinions on whether Amir and Asher/Ash are too similar for a pair of leads? They're not close enough to trip me up, but it's still early enough that changing them wouldn't make me grouchy.
The answer is 100% yes. But its not necessarily a bad thing if you can roll it somehow into a key plot point ive done that a few times. I.e named someone greogry and george, made them to find out they were brothers. Otherwise, its really your choice, but it always pays to be creative vs generic.
Amir and Ash might not trip me up, but I think Amir and Asher would. I get stuck sometimes in stories set in cultures where a lot of the names end with the same sound, and I think that's what would catch me here. In general, I try to give my main characters names that start with different letters. It helps ME not get confused when I write, too!
Difficult to say, but I'd err on the side of caution and change one. Change Amir because I knew a man called Amar who I hated with my very soul.
Asher and Amir wouldn't trip me up at all (but I would likely shorten it to 'Ash' in my mind even if you didn't).
Yeah, from the responses I think I'm probably going to just refer to him mostly as Ash to be safe. Unless the Pokémon association gets to be too much for me
I think as long as you leave Pikachu out of it, you'll probably be okay. My son loved Pokemon when he was little, so I saw a lot of it, and that never even occurred to me.
I was the kid who loved Pokémon, so I think the association might be a little stronger for me Goddammit. Now I have to fend off two very different associations.
Excellent point. I do think it's a bit like how I know all the words to the My Little Pony songs because my daughter was obsessed. It just sticks in your brain.
Hope you don't mine me hijacking this a bit for some names of my own I got an old man named Elijah and a teen girl named Eliza, similar names but very different personalities. Would the names be conflicting?
I think maybe, yes. I would shorten his to Eli in my head, and hers to Liz, but I read fast and I could see myself doing a lot of re-reading when my brain assigned the wrong one. They're not only similar, there's only one different sound, and it's in the middle. I hardly ever say this, but, yeah - I think they're too close.
I think the gender difference would be enough to keep me from getting confused in that case, but in general, anything that close would be a no-no.
They wouldn't bother me, though I'm not a great one to offer opinion because these things rarely do. But in this case I think it works because Z is an uncommon letter, so it makes Eliza stick out much more than Elijah.
In answer to the OP, I have two characters in my WiP - one called Kellerman and the other Geller. I think the rhyming of the opening two syllables of each name is enough to warrant dropping one of them for something else. As it happens I'm glad I read this thread because it hadn't occurred to me until now.
I would notice it, and speaking as a dyslexic reader, when it happens in something I'm reading I abandon it. The frustration level is too high to deal with for pleasure reading.
I don't tend to have too much of a problem with it as long as there's strong associations in my minds with the name and the character. I have more problem getting background characters confused whether they have similar names or not. Similar to what @Wreybies said, there are books where characters have the same name, such as in Dracula having Jonathan Harker and John Seward, I don't think most people mix them up.
One of the previous posters identified the source of the risk: it's not what they sound like audibly, but what they scan for visually. I remember Siskel and Ebert talking about a movie they reviewed, they kept getting two characters confused because they looked so similar all the time. They blamed casting and wardrobe. On the page, the visual of the word can create the same conflation of characters and frustrate readers. I recently beta read a colleague's novel where the characters were: Jean, Juan, John, José (with an inflection on the e), Jan, Josie, Jesus, Jesu, and Joseph, whose nickname was Jose (long o sound, no inflection on the e, therefore a totally different person than José). I don't even remember the story; all I remember was that I couldn't figure out which character was doing what most of the time. The author's defense was that this all takes place in Mexico, where these names predominate. I believe her, but this is a fiction story, not a history book; it needs to be readable, it doesn't have to be culturally perfect at the cost of reader experience.
This is actually on my checklist for every short story I right, keeping a good variety in names with not many (even initials) being too similar. Like in a recent romance scene I wrote, there were two lovers named Myranda and Nicole (not too much similarity), Nicole's slightly older sister is Natalie (I use the common starting letter to establish a memorable relation for any future mention of the sister character), Natalie's husband is Sam (a contrast to the M and N names) etc. I use names, name structures and origins, and initials to establish relations and connections that my readers will subconsciously associate with positive feelings and events, negative, or neutral.
Off topic, but that just tripped me out because when I was a kid I knew these sisters named Miranda and Nicole. What are the odds of those same two names coming up in (admittedly different) conjunction? I'm easily amused.
