I'm writing a story and having trouble choosing a name for the male lead.
Context: The hero does not start off as the obvious love interest. He comes off as a passive, boring throwaway character when he meets the leading lady, it's very uninspired and mundane. He soon later proves himself in a life or death situation and it is discovered along the way that he and the main girl are actually compatible and they begin to develop a connection after subsequent events, they just both made bad first impressions on each other.
I want to choose a more unconventional hero name that is still considered normal but isn't seen too often in modern literature or even pulp romance novels. Not one that's currently out-of-fashion, out-dated, or considered stuffy (
Larry,
Dennis,
Stanley,
Ralph,
Ernest) but neither the trendy, cool, fanciful, or supremely handsome names that a large amount of the dashing heroes in modern literature have (such as
Logan,
Jake,
Reese,
Liam,
Remington,
Jack,
Gavin, or heaven forbid, any name ending in -son or -den.)
I'm looking for more ho-hum everyman, middle-ground names. Could be any guy just walking the street.
My current front-runners are
Joseph and
Adam, but if anyone else would like to give suggestions, or even better, explanations to their suggestions, I'd love to hear it.