What’s in a Name?
Crafting Magical Monikers and Truthy Pseuds
Did anyone else see the movie Your Name (2016)? Great movie. Hard to talk about.
H: So there’s this new movie coming out called Your Name.
C: It’s called Catherine?
H: No, Your Name.
C: . . . Catherine?
—Conversation I actually had with H, circa 2017
To begin, a brief thought exercise:
Approximately how old is a woman named Mildred?
What about a woman named Tiffany?
Before reading on, picture both women in your mind.
If you’re anything like me, you pictured a little old lady with wrinkles, spectacles, and white hair; and then you pictured a much younger woman, possibly with feathered bangs. You may be hearing distant strains of “I Think We’re Alone Now.” That’s an auditory hallucination. You should get that checked out.
Mildred had a resurgence of popularity in the 1920s, so many of us remember knowing an aging Mildred or two during the last 30 years. A perfectly appropriate name for a beautiful young woman . . . in the 1940s. Today, the name screams “elderly lady.”
Tiffany, on the other hand, got big in the 1980s. A lot of my cohort have this name. It’s a classic eighties name, redolent of neon colors, cassette tapes, Electric Youth (the song or the perfume), and Air Jordans. Tiffany is a person that Mr T would take on a date to Bennigan’s.
The Tiffany Problem
In reality, Mildred and Tiffany are contemporaries—both names are from the Middle Ages. But while Mildred feels medieval, Tiffany feels anything but. Author Jo Walton calls this the “Tiffany Problem”: the discrepancy between historical reality and what we believe or feel about history.
What if the lead character in your epic Anglo-Saxon historical war chronicle fells their arch nemesis in battle only to tear off their helmet and—behold!—it’s Mildred! Hopefully your reader is surprised that this hardened warrior was a woman the whole time but they are probably not shocked that her name is Mildred.
Could you name your disguised heroine Tiffany instead? Probably not. It’s a real name from the time period but it feels anachronistic. She’s clad in 100 pounds of iron armor and she stinks from her exertions on the field of valor as she stands over her fallen enemy and removes her helmet and THE BEATING OF OUR HEARTS IS THE ONLY SOUND—. You can’t. The readership will not accept it.
Who Is Your Character?
So you don’t want to give your character the wrong name. But how to pick the right one? A lot goes into choosing a person’s name, but a person’s name also impacts their development, their life experience, the opportunities they have, and even how they perceive themself.
Let’s say your character is a thirty-year-old, White, Irish American, Catholic woman deeply embedded in the Irish American community in Boston. Let’s say you call her Megan Malone.
A Meg for All Seasons
What’s in that name? Well, first of all, it feels Irish-y (although Megan is a Welsh name). The forename and surname match ethnically. Moreover, Megan was a top-ten baby name for girls in the 1990s. Megan Malone knows plenty of other Megans in her community. She does not grow up feeling her name is unique or special; she may even resent her name for being so common. Conversely, it could instill a sense of belonging.
Does she use a nickname? If she does, it is Meg. She doesn’t have the rich nickname potential of her friends Margaret and Clementine.
It’s an easy name to say for a child who is learning to speak; the phonemes are simple. It’s easy to spell for a child who is learning to write. There are no silent letters to trip her up. It’s alliterative, which makes it memorable and fun to say. Four syllables, two feet—a trochee and an iamb. A metric mirror. Balanced.
I have already put more thought into this throwaway character's name than some people put into naming their actual children but okay. Continuing.
Rewind the tape. We have a thirty-year-old, White, Irish American, Catholic woman deeply embedded in the Irish American community in Boston. But this time you name her Zarathustra Jones.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Will this throw your reader out of the story? If we’re in Boston in 1750? Yes. Megan Malone may have lived in 18th-century Boston but Zarathustra Jones definitely did not. For the sake of this exercise, though, we’re in 2020 (Megan was born in 1990 and so was Zarathustra).
So what’s in this name? The surname is Welsh but the christian name is Iranian. We’ve established that she is White and Catholic, so we know she is not Middle Eastern or Muslim. If I had to guess, one or both of her parents are Nietzsche nerds and thought the name sounded cool.
Dollars to donuts, she goes by Zara. She doesn't know any other Zaras growing up. She feels no kinship to Sara and Sarah. She goes through at least one phase where she resents her name and wants to be called anything else. People call her Zee because her name is too long to bother with; she low-key hates this.
The Z sound is hard to say and so is the TH digraph. She has four syllables to manage in her first name, that’s tremendous for a kiddo. A nightmare to write. Eleven letters, though the A appears three times and the R twice. (Megan only had to write five.) It’s a mouthful and a handful. Her earliest experiences speaking and writing her name are challenges.
Her extravagant first name, combined with her simple last name, sound dramatic when spoken aloud. Professors calling roll do a double take when they get to her. Later, hiring managers throw her resume in the trash without reading it.
In addition to all of the above, I am 100 percent certain that—although she struggles as a young person saddled with an overabundance of name—she will eventually reach an understanding of, and come to terms with, being Zarathustra. And since this is a fictional character and she’s 30 at the start of the story, she will achieve that acceptance around the same time that she conquers whoever, or whatever, the plot has pitted against her.
For what it’s worth, I’m way more invested in Zarathustra Jones than I am in Megan Malone.
The Name of the Game
So to know your character, you have to know their name. And to know their name, you have to know your character. Consider:
When was the character born?
Where was the character born?
What is their racial and ethnic background?
How about their parents’ religious background?
Based on that assembly of facts, you can do some research and calculate some names for a character with that background. Then: you decide whether to throw them in the garbage or not. Maybe you want your character to feel a bit like an everywoman, so she gets one of the names from the shortlist. Maybe you want her to be an outsider, a loner, unusual, mysterious—so you pick something completely opposite to anything on the shortlist.
There are other ways for a name to affect your character’s upbringing or outlook. Living in Cali, I worked with a gentleman by the name of . . . well, let’s just say Matthew McConaughey. Is Matthew an unusual given name? No. Is McConaughey an unusual surname? Not especially. Is it weird to work for Matthew McConaughey? In Los Angeles? But it’s not actually Matthew McConaughey?
Dude. Yes.
Being around the same age as the other Mr McConaughey, this wouldn’t have affected my boss’s early childhood—but he has been hearing people shout alright alright alright at him for at least 25 years and he is tired of it.
An Accurate Alias
The last thing about names I would like to touch upon is pseudonyms. I’m working on a creative nonfiction project, and it involves coming up with pseudonyms to help disguise characters based on real people. So does developing a pseudonym differ from creating a character name from scratch? And, if so, how?
For people’s real names, all of the above information still applies. If someone has a traditional name for their age group and life situation, then you should consider choosing a similar name. It has affected the way that person grew up, and thus influences the way they think and act. Think about the sounds, the rhythm of speaking the name, how unusual or how common it is. You might also consider the name’s meaning.
Catherine, for example, is of Greek extraction and means “pure.” Some other women’s names with the same meaning include Bianca (Italian), Gwendolyn (Welsh), and Virginia (Latin). I’d love to be a Bianca, but Gwendolyn and Virginia are closer matches. A Bianca is a little more fun-loving while a Gwendolyn, like a Catherine, is more straightlaced. And Virginia may hate the nickname Ginny as much as I hate Cathy (to wit, a lot).
If you were developing a pseudonym for me, Virginia Burnett would be solid. The last name is vaguely English/Scottish, like Forrest. It has an unnecessary double letter, so Virginia is always spelling it out to make sure people get both Ts. She receives mail addressed to Virginia Burns. Virginia is way too weighty a name for a child but by the time she’s establishing her career she’ll be grateful for it. In college she quietly appreciates the connection to Virginia Woolf.
At the same time, it’s not a dead giveaway. I wouldn’t see it and immediately realize I was being characterized as I might if you went with, for example, Christine Woods. That is a lazy writer’s pseudonym. Don’t make it painfully obvious. Don’t caricature someone’s name.
A final word: All of the advice herein applies to realistic fiction and nonfiction. Stories that take place in the real world, or somewhere like it. If you’re writing SF/F, you may have a very different challenge ahead. More on this topic to come in the near future.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.