Be Your Own Editor

I have an indecisive streak, directly related to my perfectionist streak, that causes me to spend hours on end agonizing over such seemingly insignificant decisions as what to name a character who appears on one page of a story. Such agonizing is a handy form of procrastination, but naming characters is also an interesting wordsmith’s exercise and one no writer should take lightly.

Many unpublished novels I see contain main characters named John or David or Stephen. Or Laura or Karen. Zzzzzzz. But lots of people in the world have those names, and fiction should reflect the world’s truth, right? Sure, but truths about human behavior, social injustice, etc., are probably a higher priority for you than truths about the most common baby names. So instead of lazily using only those, why not use more care and find names that subtly contribute to the tone or themes of your writing?

I say “subtly” because, unless you’re writing an over-the-top satire, you shouldn’t name your greedy Wall Street tycoon Mr. H. Fundmaster. Let’s leave that sort of behavior to Dickens, who for some reason gets away with it.

But naming your greedy Wall Street tycoon Jim Miller isn’t going to add much to your story, either. Especially with central characters whose names appear frequently, why waste any opportunity to affect the way readers see them? Consider Gordon Gekko, from the film Wall Street. Not exactly subtle, granted. (He’s a reptile! Get it?) Oliver Stone isn’t known for understatement. Still, the character isn’t called Larry Lizard—his first name is common, though the alliteration makes it more memorable, and “Gekko” is just obscure enough to evoke something in us without our thinking, “God, how obvious.”

With less important characters who appear in only one or a few scenes, names can serve as useful shortcuts when you have little time for character development. If you want a minor character in your Wall Street thriller to appear sleazy, “Gordon Gekko” would do the trick (if it weren’t already taken).

You don’t have to use names that double as words in order to use names effectively. Consider the harshness or softness of the sounds in a name, or other connotations you may not even understand (ever meet someone and say, “Yup, looks like an Ashley”?). You can either reflect a character’s personality that way or use sound ironically by giving an evil character a name that slides off the tongue.

I’m always struck by those annual lists of the most common baby names: The boys’ list doesn’t change much from year to year, but the girls’ list today is probably completely different from the list compiled in, say, 1985. Perhaps because parents are more wary of giving boys unusual names, you can probably think of many more, and more interesting, female names. So you have no excuse for not giving your heroine a moniker that’s carefully thought out. With men, if he’s not the kind of character whose parents would have dubbed him Ezekiel, perhaps he has a unique last name or a nickname.

If you find yourself stuck, look at a baby name book. Revisit some of your favorite novels and think about how characters’ names affect your reaction to them. With the classics, a chicken-and-egg problem arises: Does “Holden” sound like a young rebel because of The Catcher in the Rye, or did Salinger choose the name because it evoked those qualities? My grade school class contained about fourteen girls named Jenny due in large part to Erich Segal’s Love Story and its film adaptation. Imagine a time when “Jennifer” sounded even a little exotic!

The popularity of names changes over time; take that into account. Naming a young character Mildred instantly tells us a few things about Mildred’s parents. (They’re either very nonconformist or very old-fashioned.) A man named Adolf has a whole set of emotional issues before your story even begins.

Names can become cliche, too—please, I implore you, do not name your cop/action hero Jack. If I see one more character in a movie or book named Jack I’m going to have to find a real person named Jack and do something violent. Then we’ll see how heroic Jacks are. Speaking of Titanic, its popularity caused a huge boom in the baby “Rose” market, so while naming a character Rose may have meant something fifteen years ago, today it’s not much more unusual than “Mary.” (It’s okay; you have a lot of flowers to choose from.)

Don’t go overboard and name every single character in your story something wildly unusual. That won’t ring true. But do take care to make the most out of names, just as you do every other word. You wouldn’t name your baby something you picked out of the phone book, so why name your characters that way?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Writing/Editing Tips: Nuts and Bolts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.