The
Naming of Names
by Tim Waggoner
In Ursula LeGuin’s
Earthsea books, magic is accomplished when wizards learn
the true names of things. Discover the true name of fire,
and it is yours to command. In fairy tales, if you learn
Rumplestilskin’s name, the evil sprite is banished.
Speak of the Devil, though, and he shall appear.
Names have
power, especially in fiction. Use the right names, and the
characters and places you write about assume added depth
and resonance. Use the wrong ones, and your story at best
will be forgettable, at worst, laughable.
While choosing
the right names is never easy for writers of any stripe,
authors of science fiction, fantasy (and to a lesser degree,
horror) have an especially tough time of it. Mainstream
writers can use the names of friends, relatives and co-workers.
They can set their stories in their hometown and use the
names of its diner, high school, laundromat, altered only
slightly, if at all. But where can writers of speculative
fiction go to find names for the characters and places which
make up their more exotic dreamscapes?
You can start
the same place many expectant parents do -- baby name books.
Sure, they’re full of ordinary names, but they also
contain not-so-ordinary ones. A glance through one of my
favorites, Beyond Jennifer and Jason by Linda Rosenkrantz
and Pamela Redmond Satran, turned up the following: Adria,
Amyas, Diantha, Doria, Garson, Kai, Merce, Sekka, Tamar
and Zaraawar. All suitable for a science fiction or fantasy
story.
There are
other naming resources geared specifically for writers.
The Writer’s Digest Character Naming Sourcebook
by Sherrilyn Kenyon contains, as the cover copy says, "20,000
first and last names and their meanings from around the
world." The name lists are separated into categories
such as Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, German, etc. I often choose
character names by scanning the corresponding meanings.
Want your fantasy warrior’s name to mean brave?
Try Cathasach. Want your villain’s name to mean dark?
How does Duvessa sound? Horror author Yvonne Navarro has
complied a volume called The Reverse Name Dictionary
which makes this process even easier.
Another resource
that I sometimes use to come up with names is the phone
book. Uncommon surnames, when used as first names, often
have an archaic or fantastical feel to them. Choosing at
random for this article, I found Hython, Krabill, Maddala,
Norrod, Uffner . . . I could go on and on.
Of course,
these names don’t work only for individual characters.
They could just as easily be the names of alien races, or
countries in a fantasy land.
Foreign language
dictionaries can be of great help. If I’m writing a
medieval fantasy and I don’t feel like using the tired
term wizard for my magic workers, I might turn to
my Latin dictionary and find magus and veneficus.
Neither floats my boat, so I start free-associating. What
do magicians do? They perform tricks. I look up trick
and one of the words I find next to it is artificium.
With a little tweak, that becomes Artificer. And
now I have a term that not only sounds good, it’s more
original.
A thesaurus
works well for this too. For example, in my (as yet unpublished)
novel, The Harmony Society, I wrote a sequence which
took place in a nightmarish hospital. I went to my Roget’s,
looked up hospital, and eventually came across the
old-fashioned term fever house. Fever House -- what
better name could there be for a place of madness and death?.
And then
there are those happy accidents when names just come to
you. While I was in the process of plotting The Harmony
Society, I was listening to the car radio and heard
the singer refer to "Brother Nothing." Hot
damn, what a great name! I thought enviously. But the
next time the refrain came around, I realized I had misheard.
Brother Nothing wasn’t a name; the singer was actually
saying, "Brother, nothing you can do will stop me,"
or somesuch. Thanks to the perversity of my own subconscious,
I had a name for my novel’s main antagonist.
Lest you
become too self-conscious about choosing names, I’ll
let you in on a secret. Even such inevitable-seeming names
such as Sherlock Holmes and Luke Skywalker seem that way
only after the fact. It’s a bit of folklore that children
will grow to fit their names. It might not be true for real
people, but it certainly is for fictional ones. As long
as your characters’ names aren’t strings of unpronounceable
consonants or inspired by Saturday morning cartoons -- "Look
out, Commander Galaxy! Hear come the Sinistars!" --
you should be all right.
Besides,
I thought Luke Skywalker sounded pretty stupid the
first time I heard it. And I hear the kid’s gone on
to do all right for himself.
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