Naming Names

One of the most important aspects of writing is the names a writer gives to characters. There are character names that stand out throughout literature — Atticus Finch, Scarlet O’Hara, Holden Caulfield, Hester Pryne — and come to embody connotations all their own. Some great novels feature unnamed narrators. Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca and Melville’s Moby Dick come to mind. That is a rather daring move that I have occasionally managed for a short story but can’t quite imagine undertaking for an entire book.

I’ve been thinking about this because of my blog a couple days ago about my short story “Killing Julie Morris”. The name of the title character just came to me as I was writing the first draft and, since it fit, I never messed with it. Actually, in retrospect, I realize I used both of those names before — Julie is the name of the protagonist’s wife in my current w-i-p, Triad and Morris is the name of a character who doesn’t actually appear until the end of the book but, since names tend to float around in the writer’s sub-conscious, it’s not surprising that they tumbled out together.

Much to my amazement, though not surprise, someone I don’t know but who seems to be fairly obsessed with this blog, has decided that I chose the name Julie out of “wrath” at her. I’m starting to find the self-absorption of a couple of my regular readers to be a fairly fascinating phenomenon. However, choosing the name for my short story had much more to do with Triad than anything else.

Character names are important. Sometimes the name you give a character shapes their personality and their behavior in ways you hadn’t anticipated. When I picked the name Morris for the character in Triad I chose it because of that old cat food commercial because the character reminded me of that pompous, pedantic old cat. But, now in re-write, I have been changing his name to something less stuff. I need to loosen him up a bit. I really like almost all of the names in my work. Sometimes the name just comes immediately with the character — other times I struggle for a long time. The character Rosie in The Old Mermaid’s Tale was originally named Darlene but in my final round of edits I wanted a name that was cuter and happier and somehow Darlene turned into Rosie. In Triad I had a scene where Maggie’s Aunt Fanny is talking about her deceased husband and she called him Asa. I was blithely unaware of that until my friend Trudi pointed it out to me. “Don’t you have a short story by that name?” Oh crap, yeah. So Asa became Ephram.

Recently Mark decided to change the names of a couple of characters in his book which, hopefully, will be to press in 2 weeks. We were having an awful time coming up with a appropriate names that wouldn’t alter the personalities of the characters and we finally had to dig out my Writer’s Digest Character Naming Sourcebook to help us out. Ethnic names in particular are problematic — you want them to be believable but not too quaint. Of all the male characters I have ever created, my favorites are Baptiste, the Breton mariner in Old Mermaid, Silvio, the Italian musician in “My Last Romance”, and Father Pete, the Jesuit priest in Triad. The names for all of them just grew with the character. My female names are less exotic — Clair in Mermaid and Maggie in Triad pretty much named themselves.

I’ve found an interesting new source for colorful names recently thanks to my Spam mail folder. Some of the Spam that has come in have amazing names on them — Garibaldi Druid, Dubious Tredmill, Kerstin Wildrick and Fester Shelhammer. How can you beat those? So I have started a file of really great Spammer names. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually use them and, if I do, you can bet they’ll show up to post a comment demanding I pay attention to them and insisting that I am only using that name to spite them.

Maybe it's a Spammer thing....