January Experiment: Name All the Things (Patreon)

Say My Name, Say My Name: Naming People, Places and Things

Greetings, Laboratory Folk! It is just the most garbage part of winter here in Maine. Everything is alternately shrouded in ice or dripping with goo, and it’s grey, and it’s mushy, and it’s depressing, and it’s cold. The crisp picture-postcard fresh-snow Christmas moment is over, and that stupid groundhog is being a dick again, and spring seems very far away, especially far away in New England, when between the snow and the flowers we have nearly an entire season of straight-up mud to look forward to. This is the Complaining Season. Winter’s charm has worn off, and people are just ready for it to be over, but it so isn’t over. Fun! 

As I’ve started a couple of new projects this month, necessitating one of my more irritating writerly rituals, I thought we might talk about one of my obsessions: NAMES. 

I am often asked in interviews what comes first in a given novel—character, setting, first line, idea? As though a book is clearly either a chicken or an egg, and the answer binary, obvious, satisfying. I tell the truth, which is that it fully depends on the novel in question: Palimpsest began with an idea, Radiance with a setting, Deathless with a fairy tale girl, and so on and so forth. But the fact is, whatever the little baby grape of an idea at the core of any given novel or short story, I cannot begin writing until I’ve named almost everyone in it. It is my first stop shop, and let me tell you, I can get stuck there for awhile. Sometimes, even, the name comes before I even know what story will be attached it, as in the case of The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild. I’m obsessed with names, with their meaning and their weight, their sound, their needfulness. Names are destiny, in life and in fiction. A person named Joanne will of necessity grow up to be a different human than one called Galadriel.

Some of this very likely comes from having been dissatisfied with my birth name almost since the onset of sentience, some of it simply an extension of being in love with words, with names being such terribly personal, oft-used words, words signifying a whole world of self. I am well aware that some people won’t care about this stuff as much as I do, or find it half as fun, but it’s my essay so you have to listen mwa ha ha. And anyway, be happy! Most people only get to name a handful of pets and a couple of children in their lifetimes. Maybe a car or two. But as a writer you get to be Adam in the poorly-weeded Garden, putting a name to everything, not only people but animals and places and objects. 

Now, before we really get into it, I want to stress that just because you’re writing fantasy or science fiction doesn’t mean you have to rename everything in the universe. Sometimes it’s okay to call coffee coffee and the ocean the ocean. Readers have a limited tolerance for weird names for common things, and it’s very easy to irritate. Save your painstakingly invented linguistics for objects that have no proper name in your own language. Most of us are not Tolkien, creating complete dialects for our books, anyway, and the flavor you might add by calling simple bread t’klingo is not usually balanced out by the level to which you will be annoying the shit out of your audience. Don’t make them learn new words in alien tongues unless they’re necessary new words. Allow me to personally empower you to call tea by the exotic name of “tea.” It is all right. We will all survive.

That said, a passing familiarity with linguistics will do you a heap of favors here. Listen, kids, it’s a different world now. You used to be able to call a murky wood Mirkwood and misty mountains the Misty Mountains, call it a day, and rake in the accolades for your sophisticated worldbuilding. Hell, you used to be able to just shrug and call the western part of your world Westeros and no one would ever say a thing about it. But people expect a little more flair these days, the ungrateful bastards. They at the very least want you to take the time to shift the first letter of Dragon one spot down the alphabet, all artistic-like. So let’s do it like they do on the Public Broadcasting Station and break this down into the 4 C’s of Naming Stuff: Creativity, Consistency, Culture, and Corruption.

Creativity is easy. It’s what I’ve been talking about so far. Basically, just put your back into it a little. There’s really no need to go around naming everyone John and Sarah. WE CAN DO BETTER. WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY. Especially since those are Biblical names. If you’re writing secondary world fantasy or science fiction, by god I don’t want to see a biblical name anywhere near your shit, because by definition, a secondary world won’t have the first idea about our Bible. Unless extremely pressed, don’t name a character anything that, should a friend of yours name your child that, you would feel sorry for the little tyke, because they’ll have to use an initial in their class to differentiate them from all the other little tykes named Hatshepsut. The fact that the protagonist of the Fairyland novels is named September kind of sort of sells the book all on its own, and that’s partially set in the real world. Like any “rule” this one is obviously there for the breaking if you think it’s stupid. It’s not that common, everyday names are forbidden, but use them sparingly, and with intent. for example, in the fourth Fairyland book, the main character is named Thomas. That is not the most spectacular name, and it kind of hurt me to do it. (I’ve even named a character John, but in my defense, it was Prester John, so it’s not like I had a choice.) But Tom I named him, because he is a troll changeling and had to have a plain human name to illustrate how confined he is by our world, and because of Thomas the Rhymer, a famous folktale that mirrors his story. If you have a really good reason, go ahead and call your boy Bob, but make sure you did it because it resonated. You can, of course, go too far, and have a book full of people called Lady Raveneyes Frostfire O’Heartsbane, and that is terrible. Just try to invest names with meaning and interest, because they will convey meaning whether you intend them to or not, because…

Names convey culture. Naming traditions are an incredible way to shine a light on the cultures of your book. Names come from deep tradition—and the desire to break with it. They come from the hopes and dreams of parents for their children and kings for their kingdoms and inventors for their inventions. They come from the history, literature, science, and religion of a culture. They are a terrifically effective worldbuilding tool. I made fun of Westeros before, but a great example of this is the naming of bastards after the geographical features of the regions in which they were born in Game of Thrones. That tells us that bastardy is something that must be singled out, probably meaning they can’t inherit in that culture, that the kingdom itself is topologically diverse but culturally less so, since that tradition seems to hold nearly everywhere, and implies that children born out of wedlock are in some sense the offspring of the earth, suggesting an earlier animistic religion. It’s simple and brilliant and all those things are conveyed without any real explanation. Consider what each name (and surname) says about the culture that person or thing comes from. Is it unique, common, named after someone else, does the family name come first or second, or does it even exist at all, are there middle names, nicknames, titles? Consider the naming traditions of real world cultures—look at the Romans. A Roman name is formulated like so: Gaius Julius Caesar. There were only a dozen or so first names available to use and people did not venture outside of them: Gaius, Marcus, Lucius, that sort of thing, almost always ending in -us for men and -a for women. (Mark Antony wasn’t, he was Marcus Antonius. Thank Shakespeare for that.) The Julius part is the family name, it comes in the middle. There were tons of Julians. (But note that when we, a non-Roman culture, refer to Caesar, we say Julius Caesar, which is not remotely his name, and treat his family name as a first name and his nickname as a surname. How outsiders mangle your fictional culture should be a part of your thought process—more on that in a moment.) Caesar itself is actually what’s called a cognomen—a kind of generationally passed-down nickname, meaning, in this case, a full head of hair. (Caesar himself was pretty bald, which was a source of easy comedy back in the day.) Some of those cognomens were hilarious and not terribly respectful, such as Porcius (Piggy). You could also by your own deeds earn a fourth name that was just your own to mark conquests or other achievements, as Caesar did when he conquered Gaul. Look at all the information baked into three little words. Every name and position of name carries meaning. That is how people and culture works. Your people and culture should also work this way, because the whole idea is for it to feel authentic. Nothing is more personal (and political) than these words people use to specify the humans closest to them. And it conveys worldbuilding extremely efficiently, with very little verbiage wasted.

Consistency is a simple but complex concept. Names like to come in groups. They like to match. It’s best not to have a tribe with names sourced from a dozen different real-world languages just because they all sound cool, because the history and environment that created the name Paula has very little to do with the one that created the name Paliuli, even if they have similar consonant-vowel combinations. If you draw from real human languages and cultures, and it’s (mostly) fine if you do, try to do it because there is resonance between the source and the story you’re telling, not just because it sounds neat. Do your research. Care. Pay attention to how words are shaped—the endings of -us and -a in Latin are there because those are the available masculine and feminine noun endings. Is that how your society structures language? Or is it more of a free for all like modern English? Maybe all names begin or end or both in o because the circle is a sacred shape, and therefore it is the letter closest to God. These are the kind of interesting patterns you can create if you take the time to bake your civilization into your naming traditions, the way every human culture does. 

You have to also take the sensibilities of your audience into consideration. Those dastardly audiences and their deep-seeded assumptions! I think of this as the Tiffany Problem. You see, Tiffany, and indeed, Alison, are perfectly cromulent medieval English names. But they don’t feel that way to modern readers. They feel like the 80s, and you will not remove that feeling by insisting on panels that plenty of girls were called Tiffany in the 1300s. They don’t care. It feels wrong. So even being precisely culturally, temporally, and linguistically correct can in the end be wrong if it flies in the face of your audience’s preconcieved notions. There is only so far you can push those notions before readers reject you. 

Tiffany is too far. 

Corruption, in some sense, is the most delightful and organic part of all of this. It’s why very few places in the real world are actually called the Misty Mountains these days. Oh, they 100% used to be called that. But, literally, fuck it. You see, people are terribly lazy creatures. Lazy and sloppy. Lazy and sloppy and oh-so-easily pissed off. If something is any kind of effort to say, they’ll shorten it, slur it, cram it together, mispronounce it, contract it, give it cute nickname, abbreviate it, or just straight up call it something else because the original was too hard. By the time Socrates rolled around, the Ancient Greeks had decided writing the letter i at any point in the word besides the first letter was just too fucking much, and starting making a half-assed dot underneath the letter that came before it because ain’t nobody got time for i, I guess. That’s not a joke and I’m not making it up, it’s call the iota subscript, and it is peak laziness. But we do it all the time. Londinium becomes London, Mikhail becomes Misha, more than half the places in the United States become total bastardizations of the indigenous names of those places because pronouncing things is too hard. That’s how we get so many place names all over the place—slurrings of words for hill or valley or swamp crammed together with the name of some dead lord or other and shoved in a blender set to liquefy. Linguistic corruption is fascinating, and creates a lot of the markers that sound like real, evolved language to us. The Misty Mountains, in a couple of hundred years, would probably be the Mistins or the Misties or something like that. This is also a sly way to indicate class, because the shortenings and new slang terms usually rise up from the lower classes and are adopted last by the ruling caste, who will stop calling them the Misty Mountains approximately around the time the sun burns out, you peasant. Say your names out loud. Try to imagine whether they would be irritating to say a couple of million times over the course of a life, and how you might mangle it to make less work for your mouth. Welcome to evolutionary linguistics. 

So, keeping all this in mind, how do you actually create names that sound great and work as anything that feels organic and authentic and not a goofy genre name unless you’re into that sort of thing?

The usual advice is a baby name book. And they’re fine and I totally have one. I almost exclusively use it for minor characters, because most baby name books don’t offer up much beyond, well, names human beings might actually want to give to a human child. That’s useful sometimes! But I’m usually after something more. I love noun names—obviously, September, Saturday, A-Through-L, Oubliette, Seven, Naganya, which stems from the Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle, as the character is mostly a gun— once I even named a character Shit. Each of those names is deeply meaningful to the character’s life and experience, though, even Shit. Often times, especially when writing middle grade, I will look through terminology appropriate to the character’s favorite things or childhood experiences. (I’m unreasonably proud of having named a friend’s D&D character, a plague doctor, Yersinia, in about thirty seconds, Yersinia Pestis being the bacteria that causes bubonic plague.) This can get cutesy, but in moderation, it works very well, especially more obscure nouns, Latin words, and the like. you can find wonderful names in other languages (keeping what I said about cultural consistency above in mind). Frank Herbert named nearly everyone in dune after a character from Greek myth or a Latin or Greek noun, verb, or adjective. For example, Moneo, one of Paul’s advisors in the second book, is Latin for “I advise.” HA HA FUNNY JOKE. But. Moneo is a beautiful and interesting name as well as being a reference to classical culture, from which springs everything in Dune that is not part of classical Islamic culture or giant psychic worms, so it works beautifully. Moneo sounds good. It flows off the tongue. It’s believable as a name people would actually use. It’s not so annoying to say that everyone obviously calls him Mo. And it’s a nice Easter Egg for former classicists who really love Dune. 

And the fact is, all names that we really use in the real world are words and phrases in various languages. They are not random sounds. So choose wisely and well.

Now, I love a naming scheme. I wrote a book called Space Opera recently, which was inspired by Eurovision. I wanted to subtly reference that inspiration without scribbling IT’S EUROVISION GET IT all over every page. So every alien species, planet, and every proper name of a non-human character is a word from the languages of the countries that have participated in Eurovision over the years. This turned out incredibly well, in part because it was an homage, I wouldn’t do that with a non-comedy, because of that whole thing about not just picking things because they sound cool. This was very deliberate, to acknowledge the book’s debt. And I’ll tell you, I could have done the whole thing using just the Ugaric languages (Finnish and Hungarian) because they are amazing. Learn languages other than English, invest in some linguistic theory know-how. I’ve got another book going in which all the available surnames for the culture are prepositions. Consider what parents name their children—often after beautiful or strong things in their immediate environment: flowers, trees, natural formations, legends, relatives, or concepts, such as virtues or positive emotions like Hope and Joy, or philosophical ideas. It’s rare for people who have just had a baby to name it something negative—but if they did, why? What does that say about the character? Look at unusual naming traditions like the Puritan colonists, who thought nothing of naming people Deliverance and Whomst-Obeys-God. Consider the nitty-gritty, such as double vowel and consonant combinations that tend to look unique to speakers of your language. Play with language, but always invest it with meaning, meaning that you understand, even if you never explain in the text that little Yoppul’s name refers to a particular flower of immortality from the foundational myth of her culture. You should know it, even if no one else ever does.

And finally, a note on apostrophes. Don’t. I mean, yes, rules are meant to be broken and damn the man and everything, but generally, don’t. Sticking an apostrophe halfway through an alien name just to make it look more alien is trite and overdone. And consider—why the fuck is there an apostrophe there? Is it a contraction? A rough breathing mark? (In Greek, there is no letter H, only an apostrophe where the rough breathing, the H sound, should go. It’s there for a reason, not because lol aliens have apostrophes.) Is a part of the name being shortened? Is it punctuation? Does it indicate a familial relationship or a marriage? If you can’t tell me without hesitation what the apostrophe means, chuck it, because it serves no purpose and doesn’t even look that alien. Doesn’t has an apostrophe. Do you think of a bug-eyed monster when you see that name? No. 

Names are beautiful. Names are ugly. Names are interesting. Names are fun. Names are destiny. And names can pull a great deal of expositionary load for you. Take some time and work on a few name sets with various inspirations. See what doors that opens in your mind, and in your world.