What’s In a Name?
Names are a plague upon my existence as a writer. They strangle me and hold me down under the waters of all my flourishing work. Not just names for characters, but places and titles for books as well. When it comes to creativity as a whole that is still a largely ungotten fruit that I can’t seem to get past. Oh sure, my characters could have the most brilliant back story, and simply draw you in with their magnetic personality… until you discover they are named Lucy or Gertrude or Jocelyn or Glitch. I’m not sure what it is, but there is just a gene I don’t possess when it comes to naming things, anything at all.
Recently I got around to naming my wireless connection so it wasn’t just linksys1675 or something like that. The best thing I could come up with was ‘Red Riding Hood’ in honor of all my crazy faerie tale stuff. Luckily I didn’t go with the first choice of using my main character’s name rather than Red Riding Hood, because everyone’s first guess was ‘Gnidori’. I feel so predictable, despite supposedly being quite random. And worst of all was that everyone was coming up with so much cooler names for it when they were trying to guess what mine was! I mean how awesome is the ‘impernet’ when you understand that my partner calls me an imp?
That’s probably why I had gone the route of using song title variations as my method for naming each one of my books in my Beyond Ever After series. But still, it was because of trying to figure out names for some titles and characters that I finally decided to look into what made a brilliant name in fiction.
It’s not just a matter of how believable it is, or how it comes off the tongue. It is all a matter of it fitting! A character could have the most bizarrely long and complicated name ever and yet because it fit so well with the character it was perfectly appropriate! Like Radical Ed or as she goes by: ‘Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky the Fourth’. She comes from the Cowboy bebop franchise and has one seriously ridiculous name that only she ever remembers, but I can absolutely see how she is just fitting to that name. It flows into her character so fluidly that it’s just accepted.
At the very least I’m glad I managed to avoid the Mary Sue mentality with my characters by essentially using really exotic and hippie names like Sunflower Tapioca. But still I can’t say my names are perfect, half the time for my series I just use the character’s titles to refer to them rather than their names or nicknames they have been using. Like Gnidori is Red Riding Hood half the time. The only character from my stories I really call by the name is Reynard the fox and that is because it also is his title!
It gets worse when I factor in that I largely take names I’ve used previously and rehash them to use again with new characters or with multiple different versions of the same character. This is because names tend to have a significance to me when I pick them up; like Lucy. I didn’t just pick the most generic protagonist name that means ‘light’. Lucy actually has a deeper meaning for me that goes back to the first girl I ever kissed, when I was six. The name always stuck with me after that to the point that I even use it as an alter-ego at times.
This isn’t always the case though, in fact for the most part, many of my character’s names are completely randomly chosen within the drop of a moment (and then often changed). This is because naming a character has always been a forethought for me. I build the character completely and the last thing I always do is actually name them, whether they are for an RPG campaign or for a novel, the name they earn comes after their personality and history. You would think this would make it easier, and in a way it does, it helps me narrow down a good name that might fit for them, but for the most part, I end up with names that I change frequently because I just can’t feel the name well.
But then what do I do about a series I started when I wanted to change the character’s names?
