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Naming All Your Babies

NAMING ALL YOUR BABIES
By Cody Goodfellow

I read once in a book on numerology that when Napoleon Bonaparte changed the spelling of his surname from Buonoparte, he changed his destiny, for the value of his revised name foretold his defeat. Alternately, my friend Jeromy is totally unlike any other Jeremy I’ve ever met, though his odd spelling was an accident caused by his Mom being really high when she filled out the birth certificate.

It almost always stops my writing dead, when I have to come up with a name for a character or, worse, a company. While I’ll have the names of my main characters firmly in mind, there’s always a host of supporting players who could be pegged in the outline as “the doctor” or “enigmatic night nurse who communicates only in coded enemas” (thanks, Quirk Generator!), but who now have to be endowed with that which identifies us as unique, and, arguably, shapes the nature of their lives.

Names are sacred; Adam didn’t do much of anything but name things, until he was forced to invent pants. With a name, you can do so much more than just apply for a fraudulent line of credit. You have insight into the named one’s life, and his or her parents’ hopes and dreams for them. Few of us were named in haste or indifference, and even traditionalist parents who stick to the apostolic table for all given names often try to spice up the birth certificate to give their precious snowflake a tiny gleam of extra specialness. I once worked with a guy named Rand John Montoya. He had seven brothers, all named for apostles, but on their middle names. Their first names were ALL Rand.

I bring this up because too often, the names I come across in reading fiction stop me as decisively as when I have to write them myself, but it’s too often because a careless or ill-fitting or just plain dumb name is like the loose thread in an otherwise well-woven lie.

Many parents have no imagination; sadly, it’s not a prerequisite for becoming a parent. But if they have any, or think they have any, they will often bring all of it to bear, as nowhere else, on the naming of their child. The world will use their children for good or ill, but to the extent that they can shape fate, they will try, by claiming some destiny for their offspring with a nifty handle.

At least they try. Somebody, once, thought Mildred a fetching name for a girl, and Seymour a fine name for a man. In naming a character, you’re reverse-engineering their lives, retroactively creating the pressure of living with an awkward name, or living up to a storied or evocative one. Even in America, where anyone can run a doomed campaign for president, no kid can be named Brad and not turn out loud and obnoxious, any more than a girl named Candy can escape the gravity of the stripper pole.

Too often, the names of peripheral or supporting––and even major––characters in an ill-christened story sound like roles in a movie. They can tell you too much, and they smack of second-hand reality, inhabited by types hatched out of central casting right before the action begins, and not people who have had to sign checks and permission slips and defend their name on the playground. If your hard-nosed private eye is named Harry Canyon or Bolt Upright, he probably had a real hard time in school, what with all the other junior gumshoes and dames scoring their first double-entendres off him. Perhaps, like many people unsatisfied with their numerological lot, he changed his name from Tim Weinersen.

This is a whole other tricky patch for some writers, especially in nicknames, and particularly especially with regard to underworld crime figure names. Guys like Scarface Al Capone or Ben “Bugsy” Siegel would defenestrate any douchebag who called them by their nicknames, which the cops often coined and spread to goad guys they couldn’t collar outright.

Even in a world where clueless underworld hacks learn how to carry themselves and conduct business by watching gangster movies, criminals, like artists, religious visionaries and everyone else, create new identities for themselves that they want to live in. And foreign names mean something: the syllables can’t be interchangeably slapped together to make something Italian-sounding or plausibly Chinese. And all of this goes DOUBLE for hillbilly and redneck names.

Even a plain, unassuming handle meant to help someone fit in will have some sense of a person having conceived it. Sure, most people’s names are rather plain, as are their lives.
For God’s sake, don’t write about those people.

I get by the naming stumbling block when I can by keeping a notepad where I jot down names and sundry other shit that sticks in my mind, but just as often, a good name will lurk for weeks or months until I need an appropriately eccentric yet believable handle. The right name does more than fit with a full-grown character’s life; it creates a history and a destiny, or the illusion of same. Sometimes, a trip through the phone book is needed. But it’s never something I take lightly, because the characters should be plausible enough lies to fool your mom, if they’re going to be any help with their part of the story you’re trying to tell.

Giving birth to all these people at once is a pain, and it would be nice if they named themselves, as they sometimes do, but if you make a habit of giving the peripheral names in your cast as thorough a vetting as your principals, you’ll be able to do it, as I hope to one day, without the crutch of Jeromy’s mom’s old epidural.

Related posts:

1. Festival of Fear (of babies!)
2. The Naming of Names
3. The Gonquin Table: Naming Names
4. Dead Babies
5. THOMAS SULLIVAN: “MAMAS, DON’T LET YOUR BABIES GROW UP TO BE WRITERS…”

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