Names. Pick 'em or just label 'em?

gauchecritic

When there are grey skies
Joined
Jul 25, 2002
Posts
7,076
I was talking to someone the other day about this and thought I'd start a thread to hear what others think or do.

I seem to recall in English Lit. lessons, there was a fair amount of emphasis put on the choice of character's names.

Names like Victor, Angela, Ernest or a bit furter back in Lit history Mrs Malaprop or Mr Fezziwhig, Wackford Squeers, Flashman.

Appropriate names, befitting of character's character.

In my latest story Hunting Dawn, [Earth Day entry so vote early vote often] there's a girl named Hannah. To my mind it's an old persons name but she is 18 (minimum) and has Eastern European parents. Her sister is called Magda (sounds like Magyar) The father is Stanislaw, foreign name but Stan for short because he's a down to earth father.

The story before that is based entirely on the eponymous title: Abigail Slaughter. Her company is called 'Slaughterhouse VI'. To show her secretly humorous side she always signs her name Abigail'S laughter.

So what do you do? Pick a name out of the air? Have the character named just so? Or do their names have specific meaning for you, bringing to mind particluar people?

Gauche
 
I usually give the names of my characters quite a lot of thought. I build up a picture of them in my mind; their appearance, personality, attitude and so on, and then try to come up with a name that would suit them. So far I've always gone for "normal" sounding names, I guess because on the whole I write about "normal", down to earth people. The only exception will be when I'm writing about aliens, vampires or the like.

The lead alien in my novel is called "Selko" and his 2nd in command is "Roarke". The vampiric mistress in my latest erotic horror short at Lit (The Letting) is called "Quintana". I love inventing names, and a lot of thought went into hers. She is the "Mistress of Ceremonies" and the "ceremony" involves five men. "Quintana" means "Queen of the Five" in Latin. I also had to make up the name for the ceremony, and called it the "Quinque Sanguis", Latin for "blood of five".

So, yes, I put quite a bit of thought into my character's names, and always try to find one to suit.

Lou
 
Mucked up

I have a collection of baby name books that I scan for ideas for character names.

I made a major error in Jeanne's current epic. In part 2 the two characters discuss the rest whom they will meet in part 3 and name them.

I broke from the epic to write Earth Day stories and forgot that I had named the new characters in part 2. So I gave them different names when I wrote part 3, and 4.

AFTER I had submitted those parts but before they had been posted I realised my error. I went through both parts 3 and 4 editing the names. Now I have submitted part 5 I checked again to find that one of the characters has no part to play at all.

So I revise again to give that character some point in the story.

One of my stories has a character 'Simon'. That story has been posted in Lit for over a year. I put it on a Yahoo Group last week and the moderator pointed out that in one part the heroine calls Simon by the name 'Paul' twice in one paragraph when they are in bed together indulging in sex. Simon doesn't even notice the error. Nor had I. 'Paul' had been the working name in the first draft. I'd searched and replaced 'Paul' with 'Simon' but then amended that paragraph and slipped back to using 'Paul'.

It is easy to miss such things.

Og
 
Most of my stories are written about specific readers, including two women on Lit. I use their names. For other women and the men in the stories I use generic names.
 
It's nothing novel, I assure you, but my longest work paralleled the Bible, so naturally I plucked the names right out of there (with some delighted feedback, I must add).

Otherwise, I've been going with names I know. I used to have a Baby-name book that detailed what each listed name meant (origins, whatnot), but no longer have that at my disposal. My litmus test is if it sounds right, I'll go with it.

FWIW, Hannah is a very eartly name to me (I think Daryl Hannah for some reason, and she always seemed down to Earth to me), so I smiled a bit reading that.
 
I just drop the phone book on the floor making sure my feet are out of the way. I made that mistake once.

I then drop a penny on the book and use the name showing under the penny.

This works best if you live in a large city. The obverse problem is if you live in a city with a large ethnic population, your characters may end up more likely being named Chin, or something like that.

I tend to agree with Shakespeare, "A rose by any other name…"

:confused:

Ah what did Billy know? If a rose was called a shitflower we wouldn't be nearly as fond of it.

This silly mood doesn't seem to want to go away.
 
In my Lit story I intentionally didn't name the characters. In my novel, I was very selective about the names. I realized that the names would have a lot to do with how the readers reacted to them. My villains, the Resident Council who goes after my hero, were all named after intersections near my house. Each name sounds like a last name. Webster Courtland, Harrison Armstrong, etc. I think that kind of thing adds a sense of pretension to a character almost automatically.

My protagonist is named Lenny Kapowski. A nice, every man's name. I wanted the name Lenny from the start, but I had to come up with a good last name. Later that day I was watching the 60's Batman on the Sci Fi Channel and when Batman punched one of the Penguin's goons, the explosion bubble said "KAPOW!" I immediately added -ski and had a name for my guy.

Lenny's best friend, Norm Grubnik, came from the same approach. I wanted it to be Norm from the start, too. That night at work I looked down at my Burger King bag while I was on lunch break. The logo from the bag was wrapped around the corner of it and all I could see was Burg Kin. I just reversed the syllables and made them a word.

The obnoxious lesbian punk band Rugmuncher have cool names, too. Truck, Pinky, Betty Crash, and Susie Ten Inch. Those names pretty much tell you who they are. I wrote their personailities according to their names.

The love interest/bitch on wheels I named Katie. The name, to me, sounds innocent and girlish. I picked it in counterpoint to the character's demeanor toward Lenny. To everyone else she acts like a Katie, but to Lenny she is Kate, at best. It's more a degree of severity than a personality change, I guess.

In the novel I am working on now I have a retarded main character. I thought on his name for a long time. I didn't want a name that could be cute-sied up by adding a y or ie. It was harder to come up with than I thought it would be. Almost every name can be mutated into something cuter. I went with Ethan. I think it has a certain nobility to it and it would be hard to come up with anything else to call him that was derivative of that name.
 
gauchecritic said:
So what do you do? Pick a name out of the air? Have the character named just so? Or do their names have specific meaning for you, bringing to mind particluar people?
As you know, Yorkshire, many of Shakespeare's characters had very appropriate names, in meaning or sound; e.g., in 12th Night: Sirs Toby Belch (drunkard) and Andrew Aguecheek (pale, skinny fop), Malvolio (bad will), and Feste (the fool/clown). Names even lead to tragedy in R&J. Then think on Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov; what could sound more like the character. Or Beckett's elusive Godot, not even a character.

Yes, names mean a lot to me in my writing, even in my erotica. My elevator girl is Lola, a favourite name which gets played with in two stories. For my novel I took care to choose Spanish and Aztec names befitting the characters in meaning and sound.

Names have had great meaning (personally, not merely their translation) for me all my life, as my own names (first and middle) were accorded family or public use. My real first and last name translates to a lovely phrase in Latin. In the past year I was given a new name, used by only one person. It's me in that relationship. I only hope to keep it alive, but it is mine now, whatever happens.

Thanks for making me think on this.

Perdita :rose:
 
Names are very important to me.

I usually start with the name of the story first.

After that I draw up a mental picture of the characters and then I go name hunting on the internet till I find a name that feels right.
I try to use names that have a meaning to them.

In my latest story for instance the leading lady (Irish) is called Deirdre after the ancient heroine of the tale of the Sons of Uisneach. Her male counterpart comes from Germany or the Lowlands and is called Andreas, which means courageous and manly.
 
Boota wrote

The love interest/bitch on wheels I named Katie. The name, to me, sounds innocent and girlish. I picked it in counterpoint to the character's demeanor toward Lenny. To everyone else she acts like a Katie, but to Lenny she is Kate, at best. It's more a degree of severity than a personality change, I guess.

I'm reviewing/rewriting a piece in which the female lead is Katherine. There's a bit of power play in the story and I needed a name that not only suited the character but one that could be played around with to reflect the power play. She becomes the diminutive "Katie" in her more submissive moments and acts the firm, in control Katherine for the rest of the time with the occasional lapses into just being straightforward, easy going upfront Kate.

In "An Artist and Her Muse" I used "Ella" for the lead female, a derivation and play on my own name and one that I thought suited the softness and strength of the female character. The male "Nick" was suggested by the muse who inspired the story. I think it suits the character perfectly, then again I'm biased!;)

perdita wrote
In the past year I was given a new name, used by only one person. It's me in that relationship. I only hope to keep it alive, but it is mine now, whatever happens.

perdita, this comment made me do a little double take...there's something very intimate and precious about the exclusive use of a name or pet name in a relationship, for me it has an almost foolish, childlike quality that at the same time has a deliciously illicit feel about it...thanks for making me think about it too.;)
 
...I then drop a penny on the book and use the name showing under the penny.

I've looked for names in the phone book myself, and most of the time it works pretty well, but I don't agree with either you nor Shakespeare about the rose. Rose, of course, is a lovely name, and I like roses, at least the homegrown kind that still smell like roses, not the bred-for-the-florist kind that hardly smell like anything. However, every time I talk about planting any rosebushes, my husband says "No stickerbushes!" To him a rose is not a rose, but something that's liable to scratch him when he tries to mow around it. Just as well, though; the soil around our house is good for growing aloe and weeds, and by all accounts, roses are very high-maintenance.

Some of the characters in my stories are people I developed years and years and years ago--in fact, when I was still in school; I hadn't given myself permission (nor did I know enough to) write all that erotic stuff about them.

The last name of one of my favorite characters, Sidonie, used to be Walsh. Then I found out that there actually exists an actress named Sydney Walsh; and though I think it's a perfectly lovely name, I naturally had to give Sidonie a different last name. But the real clincher was that her dad's name happens to be Adam, and that was the name of John Walsh's son who was so tragically murdered way back (I forget what year). It was of paramount importance to give the family a whole 'nother name. I still wanted it to begin with a W and be somewhat picturesque and a little unusual; at the same time I did not want Adam to have a last name that sounded like a romance novel; hence names like Winter and its derivatives or Wilde were out.

I dropped the penny on a W page in the phone book and it dropped on Wanzack, which I started using. At this time, none of these stories had been published anywhere. I'd always thought of the name as being a "working" last name, the same way that a book can have a "working" title until either the author or the editor or the publisher decides to call it something different. Then itstarted to grow on me, I started to perceive the family itself differently. They began to acquire a sort of Eastern Europeanness, and I began to wonder about their past--when their ancestors had come to America, and stuff like that, and ended up researching the name (it's Ruthenian). The family seemed entirely different to me than if they'd been Williamses or Warwicks. The only problem with the last name I've given the family, which did not occur to me when I picked it out, is that there appear to be few enough Wanzacks so that if I get the novel finished and out, or any of them come to this site--it could go either way: I could be joyously adopted by them or I could be subjected to a lawsuit.

The fellow that Sidonie's Aunt Zandra married, Dennis Kroginold--his last name is quite shamelessly stolen from Zenna Henderson, whom I used to read all the time when I was a kid.

The series I've started now takes place in a small town in South Louisiana, and it's easy enough to get names for them--I lived in Louisiana for 16 years, and at any rate, I never threw out my Lake Charles phone book.

Ayn Rand was quite aware of the "meaningfulness" of names, quite apart from their actual meanings or origins. She tended to give her male characters names that were short and sharp and clean sounding--the most important ones, anyway. You know--like Howard Roark and John Galt. The exception, of course, is Francisco D'Anconia; a highborn Spanish name is probably going to be somewhat long and sonorous-sounding anyway. Her baddies tended to have kind of yucky sounding, unattractive names--Ellsworth Toohey, Balph Eubank; there were others in that vein, but I'm too lazy to dig up my copy of Atlas Shrugged and look.

Then there was the matter of her own name. Even before she arrived in Hollywood, where she worked as a script doctor and screenwriter for years, she had concluded that her birth name, which I think was Alice+some Russian Jewish name, was no kind of name under which to write the stuff she ended up writing, and she was probably right. She got the "Rand" from the typewriter she was using and she'd always just liked the name Ayn. Too bad nobody's really quite clear how you say it.

Her disciple and paramour Nathaniel Branden, started out as Nathan Rosenbaum or Rosenbloom or something like that--something, in fact, quite similar to Ayn's own former last name. Nora Ephron suggested that the name Branden could be an anagram of ben Rand--the Hebraic form of "son or Rand". Rand and Branden said that Nora Ephron was talking out her ass, but considering the literary and working relationship between them, I think it's a case of Ephron seeing more than either of them cared to admit. You get that with writers, as the little dust-up in the Same Sex Experimentation thread abundantly proved.

I'll bet nobody reads this--that tends to happen when I get all lengthy and pedantic. However, I had fun writing this, so it's all good.
 
Giving character's "cute" names that match their personality went out with Dickens. Mainly because no one since has been able to approach his ability.

I'm piddling around on an incest/slut stroke story in which the protag seduces her brother, step-father, and a female cousin. Just for the hell of it, I've named her, Randi Deuitt.

Most of the time, the best you can do with a name is be sure it fits the character in term of time, place and ethnic background. It's also a good idea to make sure the name is appropriate to the character's role. For instance, there's no reason a real-life action/adventure hero couldn't be named "Hubert" but readers would never buy that name. They expect something like Dirk, Chuck, or Jack.

My favorite "naming" story involves "Gone With the Wind." At the very last minute, some know-it-all editor is supposed to have browbeaten Mictchell into changing her heroine's named to "Scarlett." It had been "Pansy."

Rumple Foreskin :cool:
 
I'm trying to remember the name W. C. Fields used in some of his movies. His last name was "Souse" and his first name, it seems to me, started with E, like Elbert or Elmer or something like that. The character pronounced ihis namelike it rhymed with "goose" but everybody else pronounced it, correctly, to rhyme with house.:)
 
Character names are very important to me. I don't have any consistent way of finding them. Sometimes I use names of people I know. I've tried the phone book, with limited success. Generally, I just think about the character until a meaningful name comes to me.
 
I usually write a story first, and end up changing the names after I'm through with the story. I guess their character's suggest their own names to me somehow.

And, usually, but not all the time, it's people I know, who's character sorta fits with the one I've written.
 
Hola, Rumply. I think I know what you meant, but please don't call Dickens'ezz (see apostrophe thread) names "cute". Panimayetye?

Perdita :)

(Panimayetye = "Understand me?" in Russian; got back into Russkii tonight.)
 
His last name was "Souse" and his first name, it seems to me, started with E, like Elbert or Elmer or something like that.

Box, when my husband gets home from work I'll ask him.
 
Perdiat, Cloudy, KenJames, Boxlicker, and Slick,

Perdita: Shame on you for throwing the Russian on me. You know dang well I'm doing good just to get by in redneck American. :)

--

Cloudy: I'm glad no-names works for you, but that worn't work for me. In fact, it kind of makes me nvervous. I'm not above changing a name, but I've got to have one, especially for main characters.

--

KenJames: I've found there's no way I can use the names of "real" folks, not even if the character bears no resemblence to that person. What I know about them begins to alter the fictional character's personality.

--

Boclickher: Another similar W.C. Fields name was Harold Bissonette in It's a Gift. I found a site with a review of "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break." Here are some of the names from that epic.

edited to add: I think SOUSSE (SIOUX-SAY) was in "The Bank Dick." Mabye Slick's husband will know for sure.

--

Slick,

I read every word. So when am I going to get to read some of your south Louisiana stuff, cher?

Rumple Foreskin :cool:
 
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I have once or twice looked up names online for their meaning but mostly the names just come to me as the characters themselves do.

Alot are simply myself and my husband (Vicky and Kev) if not then it really is just whatever name jumps to mind as i think about the characters.
 
Rumple Foreskin said:
KenJames: I've found there's no way I can use the names of "real" folks, not even if the character bears no resemblence to that person. What I know about them begins to alter the fictional character's personality.
When I use a real person's name, it's generally because I have the hots for that person with no chance of actually having sex with him or her.

Ginger, from the "Ginger" stories and Jose from the "Trespassers" series are two examples.

What I know about the real person doesn't seem to affect the character's personality, which is always significantly different from the real person's.
 
I read every word. So when am I going to get to read some of your south Louisiana stuff, cher?

Why, thank you kindly, Rumple. This isn't the right thread for this, but "If You Choose Not to Decide Ch. 1" is in the tweaking stage and will probably be posted within a few days.
 
SlickTony said:
Why, thank you kindly, Rumple. This isn't the right thread for this, but "If You Choose Not to Decide Ch. 1" is in the tweaking stage and will probably be posted within a few days.
I'll keep checking but if you remember, let me know when it's accepted.

RF
 
Boxlicker101 said:
I'm trying to remember the name W. C. Fields used in some of his movies. His last name was "Souse" and his first name, it seems to me, started with E, like Elbert or Elmer or something like that. The character pronounced ihis namelike it rhymed with "goose" but everybody else pronounced it, correctly, to rhyme with house.:)

The name is Egbert Souse, pronounced soo-SAY, “accent grahve over the ‘E’”

I love Fields’ names. He was a notorious tightwad who hid his money in bank accounts all over the country under different aliases, such as Mahatma K. Jeeves and Sneed Hearn, the latter of which is, I think, one of my favorite names ever: nasty, brutish, and short.

---dr.M.
 
I remember a bit where Fields' character was introduced to some young milquetoast; his daughter's fiance, I think:

"'Og Ogglesby'...Sounds like bubbles in a bathtub."

--------

Edited to add: Speaking of "Bubbles," I sometimes wonder if the power of names limits, or even directs, the futures of people in real life. I'm certain that no one with more than two syllables in his surname can be elected to high office anymore. But what about the man I know whose name is "Buddy" - it's not a nickname, it's his given name. Could he ever have considered becoming a neurosurgeon, or was sales the only realistic option? Would Condoleeza Rice have been taken seriously if she'd been Candy Rice?

And what about titles? When you're filling out forms that ask for your title - Mr., Ms., Dr. - do you ever check "Dr." just to see if they'll be nicer to you at the front desk?

Me neither. That would be wrong.

In the SRP forum, I nearly always give my characters the name of a typeface. Candy Helvetica, Grace Palatino. It reminds me that they aren't real.
 
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