Dr. StrangeName, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the BabyName Bloggers (part 2)

When I am writing stories set in the real, contemporary world, the names the characters have are much more familiar to our ears. That’s why the heroine of my first book is named Amy, and her friends have names like Lydia, Brandon, George, Jenny, Malcolm, Josh, and James. She has friends with more unusual names (like Harun and Odile), to be sure, but then again, so do “normal” named people in real life. Most of my writer friends have names like Carrie, Sarah, Jennifer, Julie, Erica, Heather, etc., but I also know writers named Richelle and Varian and Lavinia.

Parents have all sorts of reasons to justify their name choices. They name children to honor family members or friends, living or dead, or to invoke qualities or feelings or to “borrow” the qualities and feelings they might attribute to saints, celebrities, or other well-known bearers of said name. They name children things that sound “unique” to indicate how special their child is to them, or go the other way and give their child a name they know (or think they know) that everyone will easily be able to spell and pronounce.

When parents name their children, they are making a statement about that child. When a writer names a character, she is doing the same thing. The fortunate thing is that, when naming a character, I can cheat. I already know that I’m naming the villain, so I can pretend that years ago, his mother looked at his precious little infant face and went, “He just looks like a Lucifer Evilius Blackheart McNasty to me.”

And sometimes, what that character’s parents are like really informs the name they are given. Take, for example, Poe, whose real name is James Timshel Orcutt. With Poe, I got to have the best of both worlds. He got his Evil von Villainous society name (it doesn’t get much more nefarious and intimidating than Poe), and the name that sounds like it was given to him by the people we later learn are his parents. He also gets a far softer nickname, Jamie, that takes both Amy and the reader by surprise when they learn it — a calculating moment in the text.

Another name which says as much about the character’s parents as the character is Astrid. Astrid hates her own name, because it’s a symbol of everything her mother wants her to be — a warrior with a long family legacy. If Astrid had her druthers, her name would probably be Jessica or Katie or Amanda. But if you know Astrid’s mother, you’d know that would never be an option.

With fiction, the author can also control everything that ever happens to that character as a result of their name. You can name a character Richard and pretend that no one ever made Dick jokes at his expense. (Or, if your character is Astrid, and you’re as cruel to her as I am, you can make sure the reader knows exactly how many jokes she suffered.) It should come as no surprise that I was much more concerned about the ridicule my actual child might receive on behalf of the name I gave her than what any book reviewer says about my character names. Astrid is pretend. She won’t be scarred for life if you make fun of her name.

My kid is a real person, and when I named her, I had to imagine saying that name a hundred times a day for the rest of both of our lives. I had to picture her writing it at the top of every form she ever received. I had to picture it being a name that suited her when she was a baby, when she was a child, when she was a teenager, an adult, an old woman. I had to imagine it suiting her if she decided to become an actress or a physicist or a pilot or a politician. One of the best pieces of advice I got when I was naming my child is to practice the name. Go out and order a coffee at Starbucks using that name. Use it in a dozen sentences. “Diana, go clean your room.” “I have to go pick up Amy from preschool.” “I’m sorry, Astrid can’t come to the phone right now.” “Elliot, you get inside right this very minute!” “Hello, this is Philippa speaking, how can I help you?”

By the end of my pregnancy, Sailor Boy was going nuts. He’d thought we’d narrowed the name list down ages ago, but I kept coming up with new options. (poor man. It’s one of the hazards of living with a writer. And, to be fair, we decided on Rio’s name super quickly.)

And if you’re a big name nerd, like I realized I was when I discovered all these name blogs, and an author, you’re in real luck. Because I’m not going to have as many kids as names I’d love to use, and there are all kinds of names I wouldn’t give an actual child (or that I’d never be able to convince Sailor Boy to use) that I can bestow on my fictional children. Names like Malou (a nickname for Mary-Louise), that I used on the main character in one of the stories I have coming out this year. I have enough names to last a whole career, now. And no, they aren’t all “weird” either. Like I said in the comments section of yesterday’s post, I have another short story coming out in April where the protagonist’s name is Andrew.

Yes, he’s a guy.