Character names are important for me, both as a writer and a reader. As a reader, when I crack open a potboiler called Wretched Murder, My Sweet Tender Darling, I expect the detective to be named “Jock Fist,” the murdered octagenarian millionaire to be “Reginald Goldknickers,” his mildly-wholesome daughter to be called “Kitty” and her gold-digger twenty-something femme fatale ex-lounge-singer stepmother “Viper Nutcracker-Goldknickers” to have a secret lover named “Cracky Sims.” In fact, I feel slightly cheated otherwise.
Fantasy is where things get complicated. I could go on for hours about how much I love the reported fact that Tolkien started writing fiction for the sole purpose of having people to speak his made-up languages. I could also relate Old English scholar Michael D.C. Drout’s hilarious comments on the various national origins suggested by the place names in the Sword of Shannara series, but there’s bigger fish to fry; I have dangerous gangsters to invent and space aliens to take pot-shots at.
If there’s one thing that will slow me up during a writing spree, it’s not having a name to hang on a character. Yes, it has to be the right name. But it’s far more important that I have a name, whether or not it’s the right one.
The big problem is that if I just grab names out of my mind, every action hero will be named “Jack,” “Jake,” “Mike,” or “Mack,” just like half the action heroes out there. The women will have even weirder names, because female names tend to be less conservative to begin with, at least in the U.S. Therefore, if I don’t take some action to prevent the kind of catastrophic decay of my mental faculties that often happens to me when writing fiction, my female characters will end up named things like “Perssandra” or “Kerstephanie,” or “Miffin” or things that don’t even make any sense. (more…)
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There’s nothing like a good name to really help accentuate a character. And I do mean accentuate. I’m not a fan of anthropomorphizing the names of characters to a heavy or even moderate degree. I recently went to see the Smurfs movie with my five-year-old. The viewing was saved from complete failure by reasonably good performances from Neil Patrick Harris and Hank Azaria. (No Oscar nominations coming here, but as an actor you can only work with what you’re given.) The Smurfs, if you remember anything at all about the animated show, have names that, well, tell you exactly what they’re like. Brainy Smurf is smart, Papa Smurf is patronly and protecting, etc., etc. The movie even pokes fun at it, Harris’s character asking the Smurfs whether they’re given the names at birth or after exhibiting their trademark behavior. I remember even as a young boy wondering why they would name them that way. Like no one else can be smart after Brainy Smurf? Or is it just nuance? Clever Smurf is clever but no brainy, and so on?
When I was in college the 2nd time around* I had a room-mate who decided to adopt a homeless tomcat and keep him indoors 24/7. She meant well, but that was one unhappy beast. He was huge, black, and surly. She made the mistake of naming him Houdini and then couldn’t figure out how the little bastard managed to teleport out of the apartment every few days. I knew long before then that you have to be careful what names you bestow on others — not just because I’d read A Wizard of Earthsea. It’s because one tends to grow into one’s name.
As a fantasy author, a common question I get from non-writer friends is “How do you come up with all those names?” Not just for characters, but places, cultures, bits of invented language, etc.
Believe it or not, I can’t really start a project until I’m clear on everybody’s names. Oh, sure, I’ll maybe write some opening paragraphs and just plonk something in, but the moment I plonk something in that’s wrong, I’ll become immediately stuck and just… can’t go on. I don’t know how many folks write with placeholder names until they come up with something – I’ve heard it can be done – but just… not by me.