Skip to main content

I’ll See your Copperfield and Raise you a Fezziwig




Cue Juliet:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet is saying names don’t matter. If we called this plant a dung bucket instead of a rose, it wouldn’t change anything. It would still look and smell pretty. What we call something is unimportant.

 Juliet was wrong.

Names are important. Names are often the first thing we learn of someone. They can help to convey an initial emotional attachment. Look at some of the names that Dickens chose for his characters: Chuzzlewit, Cratchit, Fagin, Fezziwig, Grimwig, Honeythunder, Pardiggle, Pecksniff, Scrooge, Tulkinghorn. Without knowing anything about these characters, you can get some sort of feeling about them just from their names.  One can overdo this of course, it is not good to get overly descriptive with the names unless you are aiming for farce. But names should be carefully considered. They should add to, or at least not detract from the narrative.

When I am writing a story, when I am in the thick of it, I don’t necessarily want to stop and come up with a name for this new character I just introduced. One trick that I sometimes use is to use a temporary filler name like “Ffff” for a female character or “Mmmm” for a male character. After some time has passed and I have calmed down from a manic writing state, I can give some thought to what would work best for a name, what fits the character, what emotional pull do I want it to have. If I decide that the perfect name for her is Katarina, then I can just use the Find and Replace tool to substitute “Katarina” for “Ffff”.

I also tend to like relatively short, relatively simple names. First because it is easier to write “Mae” than it is to write Magdaleniana. Of course, I could use my substitute trick above and substitute it in without having to write it every time. But I have another reason for liking shorter, simpler names. I have pity on my readers. See, I am a reader first, a writer second. Sometimes I come across a name in a story that I don’t know how to pronounce or it is just so long that my brain gives up trying to pronounce it and I produce a brain mumble. I can do this unconsciously. I can find myself well into the story and realize I don’t know who anybody is. You need to be able to pronounce the name in your head if you are going to make an association with that character. If I find myself brain mumbling, I try to stop and actually sound it out (if the story is worth it). The genre that I usually write in is speculative fiction (fantasy and/or science fiction). I also like to read speculative fiction where this name issue can be a problem. See, if you are on an alien world or a far-flung future, or a magical kingdom, there are no rules for names. You can go crazy and name your character “Kthzhfrllpyxms” if you want. But you are making it hard on your reader, and if you have more than one character named like that, no one is ever going to be able to keep them straight.

I sometimes have the same problem with foreign names. I have read a fair amount of Russian literature and I can find myself tripped up by names that sound unfamiliar to my American ear. And on top of that, in a Russian story, a character could be referred to by his first name, his last name or a combination with his patronym (a patronym tell lineage: Ivanovich = son of Ivan or Ivanovna = daughter of Ivan). In Crime and Punishment, the main character is sometimes referred to as Rodion Raskolnikov or other times as Rodion Romanovich. If I am reading a good novel like Crime and Punishment, it is worth my time to stop and sort out the pronunciations and figure out the patronym rules. Then the story can come alive. And it is not Dostoevsky’s fault that I am not Russian.

But when I am writing, I don’t want to take my readers out of the story by assigning an unpronounceable name. I try to follow the same rule for place names too. Again, in fantasy or science fiction I could call a place anything I want, but if I want my readers to become acquainted with a place, I need to make the name accessible. Keeping a name simple and pronounceable does not mean it has to be bland. “Mordor” is a simple name invented by Tolkien, but it works well as a place of evil.

You should take time and thought when coming up with names, whether it is for a story, a song, or the name of your child. So, sweet Juliet, names are important. What’s in a name? A whole world.

(My science fiction novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).


Link to Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Child of the . . .

  What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school.   It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bureaucrats

  I am one of those nameless, faceless bureaucrats. Yes, that is my job. Though I actually have a name; I even am rumored to have a face. Bureau is the French word for desk, so you could say bureaucrats are “desk people.” In short, I work for the government. I sometimes have to deliver unpleasant news to a taxpayer. I sometimes have to tell them that the deed they recorded won’t work and they will have to record another one with corrections. Or we can’t process their deed until they pay their taxes. I can understand why some of these things upset people. The thing is, we don’t decide these things. It is not the bureaucrats that make the laws. The legislature writes the laws. We are required to follow the law.   If you are going to get mad at someone, get mad at the legislature. Or maybe get mad at the voters who voted the legislature in (That’s you, by the way). The same thing happens when the voters vote in a new district, or vote for a bond, or a new operating levy for an ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Telephonicus domesticus

Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone from 1877 bears about as much similarity to the modern smart phone as an abacus bears to a PC or Mac. There are just about as many leaps in technology in both cases. It’s funny how a major jump in technology happens (like the actual invention of the phone). Then there are some refinements over a few years or decades until it gets to a useful stable form. Then it stays virtually the same for many years with only minor innovations. The telephone was virtually unchanged from sometime before I was born until I was about forty. Push-buttons were replacing the rotary dial, but that was about it. (Isn’t it interesting though that when we call someone, we still call it “dialing?” I have never seen a dial on a cell phone.) Cell phones were introduced and (once they became cheap enough) they changed the way we phone each other. New advancements followed soon after, texting and then smart phones. Personal computers were also becoming commonplace and wer...
Post a Comment
Read more