We’ve had a mashup of two shows idly streaming in our house, lately: In the Dark, a noir-ish dramedy about a visually challenged femme fatal and her pack of best friend/co-workers drawn into a life of crime; and then the ever buoyant, chatty Gilmore Girls…complete with a few dark corners and long narrative arcs.
In the first, the main character, Murphy, sinks into a big murder-and-drug mess with her buddies: Jess, Max and Dean.
In the second, Lorelai and Rory chase romance, small town life and the Ivy Leagues, among their crew: Dean. Max. Jess.
Dean, Dean. Max, Max. Jess, Jess.
Rory is fighting with Jess, Murphy is arguing with Jess, both Deans seems so upstanding until they aren’t. Max is a love interest, edgy, smart and surprisingly ready for commitment, until she does him wrong, if only she could trust herself more…which “she”? Which Max? Doesn’t matter, because then Max is gone while safe, devoted Dean is on a bender…
There are other supporting characters, but this set of names bounces around between the shows like a kit. They’re lovely names, individually. I love people with these names! As a set, they start to feel a little table/lamp/chair.
What do these names mean to the writers who reached for them?
I think they might be just edgy enough…without overstepping an invisible line we’ve collectively crafted. Perhaps? I’m guessing. Thoughts?
I switched over to a movie, Luckiest Girl Alive, where I learned that:
Fiction, of course, always has to feel more real that nonfiction, and the bigger the fantasy, the more consistent, acceptable and believable the details need to be, to build the world.
People are named all kinds of wild things in real life, but in fiction there’s a taming element.
Apparently, the Puritans granted themselves a wide range—almost something akin to freedom? —when it came to names. “Abuse-Not,” for a newborn, is an act of inspiration and perhaps desperation, a parent’s concerns about human nature. “Donation,” though…yikes. My gawd.
In fiction, if a name is too heavy-handed or burdened with symbolism, too tied to history or religion or other references…writers tend to back away. We don’t want names to become distracting or give a reader reason to pause. Corporate publishing has a history of supporting a kind of middle class, white, dominant culture, often reducing names that indicate an existence outside of those parameters to the roles of supporting characters. Indigenous names in particular have, too often, been mischaracterized, as though existing beyond the range of humanity, used as cheap comedy by colonizing culture, instead of seen in their full light and legitimacy, welcoming the richness of being, ways of living, now and in the past, and into the future.
Names, in writing, can come to serve as no more than an extension of generic labels, merely a way of keeping track. Some stories, like some of Raymond Carver’s, barely use names. We have a first-person and his wife. Hemingway wrote stories about things like “The American” and “the girl.”
With dialogue tags or attribution, there’s an inclination toward employing the least distracting delivery: He said, she said. The basic rule is to eliminate any words that call attention to themselves, like, “He said, queryingly,” or “She ejaculated!” (If you’ve ever been a fan of the old Nancy Drew series, as a kid, these are throughout those books…Somebody is always querying and ejaculating!)
Is it possible that we hem each other in a little too much, policing any potential misstep, leaning toward a bland delivery?
In the National Book Award-winning novel, Spartina, for better or worse, the author John Casey has a primary character named Dick Pierce. When asked about the name, I remember him saying, “It’s a good, Scandanavian name!” That’s a fine answer, though perhaps a little hilariously—memorably—disingenuous.
The sci-fi author Philip K Dick once named a character Horselover Fat, in his novel Valis, while naming another character Phil, after himself. He put forward his complicated reasons, citing the Gnostics and his own religious conversion, and a mix of Greek and German roots and a rough translation…Making Horselover Fat both a reference to himself and a religious name of his own devising. The whole package is daring. That’s the part which draws me in—a writer’s willingness to take big risks…
And the “K” in Philip K. Dick? That is, of course, Kindred, a name that the Puritans would’ve loved, given to a man who traveled through time and space and alternate realities, at least in his writing and perhaps in his mind; beyond that, I make no claims. The name, Kindred, is so readily symbolic, particularly knowing that he was one of a set of twins, the other, a girl who passed away at six weeks old. PKD was forever Kindred, to her, his lost sister, and to us, to humanity.
Philip Kindred Dick was born at the tail end of 1928. Most of his writing came out between 1952-1982.
Incidentally, in 1979 Octavia Butler published one of her breakout novels, Kindred, about time travel, slave narratives, interracial marriages and power dynamics, among other things (now set to be a Hulu series, after so many decades and after her death, which came too soon…)
How do you name characters, in your work? Are the names simple tags, to tell one from another? Are we all Jess, Dean and Max, table, lamp and chair, now? Are we supposed to be?
Do names carry meaning? Are they gentle social signifiers? Do they have a relationship to the gender continuum, in terms of finer points on that line, manly names and high fem names and everything in between? Do you have apprehensions, around granting a character a name? Do characters even need names?
Hope you’re writing, reading, enjoying the world of ideas. We build this world together. Literature has a place in defining the parameters, telling the story of who we, humans, are. What do we allow ourselves? Who do we see? How do we avoid allowing the stories of our existence to narrow down our range of acceptable human experience, rather than moving forward into new freedom and levels of understanding?
Just thoughts.
I’m glad you’re here!
Yrs, JessMaxDean,
xo
What’s more memorable -- a striking name or a catchy nickname?
Also, I think having variations and abbreviations of a characters name, or nickname, can help in making it memorable. The character of Mark Renton from Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’ for example. He’s often referred to by his surname as opposed to his first, but he’s also referred to as Rent, Rents, and Rent boy.
I enjoyed the names in "Clown Girl". The clown names themselves stood out to me. Crack, Matey, Sniffles, and Rex. I also enjoyed the different times when the main character's clown name and real name were used to show that character's relation to the other characters.
In Thom Jones military centric short stories I enjoyed the use of use of the character last names like Ondine in "Break on Through" and Jorgeson in "The Pugilist at Rest". Elements like that really spoke to me as a military veteran. I still remember people's last names like Rexroad, Bettancourt, Tapia, and Cedergreen from when I served.
To me the setting and/or subject of the story has an impact on the names that are used. In my cosplay story I refer to some people by the costume they are wearing because the main character doesn't know their names. I like to see all the different ways that writers use names to construct their stories. It helps me in my own writing to see what other people do given the subject or tone of the writing.
Do you approach every story differently or the same when you come up with the character names?
The use of Baloneytown in "Clown Girl" was pretty ingenious.