So today I sat down and worked out what everyone’s name is going to be — at least in the first draft.
I dislike thinking up character names: get them wrong and the character mutates and becomes someone else. Get the names right and a curious alchemy takes place; they come alive and start talking and doing stuff you hadn’t expected, thereby doing half your job for you.
(This aspect of the process is still a mystery to me, and in some respects it’s a little creepy; sometimes it feels more like you’re inviting these people in, rather than making them up.)
To find the right names, I used to do all the usual things — buy baby name books, collect good names from newspaper articles. All that.
These days, the on-line Spam folder is quite a good source, assuming you want your novel to sound like it was written by Iris Murdoch. Today, for example, the following people have tried to sell me a larger penis:
Herschel Solis, Morris Romano and Leta Cornelius
Leta Cornelius? Come on; there’s room for a Leta Cornelius in fiction somewhere, surely?
Another place was movie credits — for example, I just had a look at IMDB, where I note the Ocean’s 11 crew included both Bonnie Clevering and Fionagh Cush. Both are great names…
…so it’s a shame I can’t use them in exactly that form, just in case.
People can get awfully (and lawfully) upset if they reckon a character may be based on them — and intentionally using the name of a living person can be a short-cut to this. Two examples that spring to mind are Graham Greene and more recently Terry McMillan, both of whom found themselves in legal trouble, accused of basing a fictional character on a real one, maligning them in the process. Neither was really at fault.
Quin Savory was a minor Greene character — and this is in the days when Spam came in tins — whom J.B. Priestley took to be a defamatory likeness. It almost certainly wasn’t, given the character is “a popular novelists in the manner of Dickens”, bearing no conspicuous resemblance to Priestley. But there you go. People are funny. Twenty pages of Greene’s Stamboul Train had to be reprinted, and the author had to deal with the cost.
What you can do in relative safety is be inspired by these names, play around with them — I’d never heard the surname Clevering, for instance. It’s great.
But mostly when I’m stuck, I use a random name generator. There are dozens, hundreds even, freely available on-line.
It’s pleasantly zen, scrolling through huge batches of randomly generated names, seeing if any latches on to the character you have in mind:
Vickie Marchese
Bernadette Gaskill
Rosemarie Eichhorn
Mabel Raper
Erika Schutt
Tamara Marchand
I already knew my main character was going to be called Tom Barnaby. (Full disclosure: contradicting the rest of this post, “Tom Barnaby” is a name that popped into my head apparently at random. I have no idea why, except to say that for cryptic reasons the surname “Barnaby” evoked a beefy, blonde-haired man in a butterscotch Macintosh.)
Now his wife is called Corinne and his daughter is called Megan. All perfectly normal names, but the right normal names.
For the moment.
All this might change. So might the names of Sweetie and Mouse, who will feature large from the first pages. But for now, all my leading characters, or all the leading characters I know of, have names. Which means they’ve taken on an additional level of reality: I can feel them growing impatient to step into the light and become real, to begin moving in their own direction, talking in their own voices.
(Many of them hang around long after their work’s done, trying hard to cast themselves in forthcoming books. Sometimes it feels like a talented psychic would able to see them swarming round my head like ectoplasmic tadpoles.)
But this all means…that’s the last job done before I roll up my sleeves and actually begin.
