The Power of Names

Discussion among some of my colleagues arose a little while ago regarding naming practices in fiction. I must admit I was a little appalled at some of their responses. One writer chose to take an ordinary name and spell it backward to give it a funky, other-world sound, thus David would become Divad, or Susan become Nasus.

Another writer chose to give places people names, and people place names, so that David became a country, and Arnprior became the man who lived there, and Susan would be the village where Arnprior meets Peterborough.

Confused yet? I was. All I could think was: what happened to the Rule of 30? Of keeping your reader engaged, interested, in preventing at every mark of 30 — 30 words, 30 lines, 30 seconds, 30 minutes — your reader closing the book, permanently. By stepping too far out of the known you, as a writer, risk losing your reader to any of a myriad of other distractions.

Even more, I wondered what happened to the concept of the power of names, of a name fitting a place or character, of speaking to the fundamental, instinctive part of our natures?

Words, and names, are filled with nuances, subtleties. For instance take the word horse. Now, you could have a horse, but you could also have a pony, or a stallion, a mare or a foal, a gelding, a plug, a dray, a roan, a bay. You could have a charger, a thoroughbred, a palomino, an Arabian. And with the use of each of these words you create an entire mood, an expectation on the part of the reader. Certainly you wouldn’t have a plug under a knight, and if you did you’d have someone called Don Quixote, another whole flavour of knight.

Aware of these nuances, when I come to name the characters in my novels, I choose names carefully, even researching the meaning of the name. Perhaps that’s as silly as spelling a name backward, but I’ll lay you odds not.

For instance, in the novel From Mountains of Ice, which is to be released September 1, one of my characters is Maponos O Leannain. The given name is from Celtic origin and means Divine Son, or god of youth and music. Given this character has a reputation as a singer, it was fitting. The surname means little cloak, which figures prominently in the clothing worn by the cucullati in the novel. Equally, one of the prominent female characters in the novel is Aletta, who is a strega (Italian for witch), but in this culture strega means a truthsayer. Aletta, a name that harks back to ancient Greece and Rome, means truth.

It is perhaps unnecessary to go to the lengths I do in order to name your characters, but I do think a little more attention should be given to the nuances and connotations of names. If you’re going to spend time choosing just the right word in your writing, then shouldn’t equal consideration be given to names? I think so.