On reading, what Konnie wrote last week, I got to thinking
some myself about characters and the names we give them. I have given some of
my characters some unusual names, but generally not uniquely spelled unless I
had a source outside of Spell Check for it.
Yeah, that’s right. Unless my source come from somewhere
outside of Spell Check, I spell it the way my computer says it should be
spelled. And I’ve yet to use the names of Bryon
(or even Brian), Konnie (or Connie), and Bonnie.
That’s not to say I haven’t used some of our siblings names.
I have. Two, in fact. The youngest two. I haven’t even used our oldest sisters
name, but that’s because I’m positive I couldn’t spell that moniker in full
without using a newspaper headline any more than our mother could the day our
sister was born.
Way back in high school, I had one teacher try to tell me I
was dropping an ‘e’ on my middle name. I looked him right in the eye and said, “Would
you like to see my birth certificate?”
He conceded.
Around the same time as that incident, I got into a conversation with another girl at school and well, I can’t remember why it came
up, but I mentioned my middle name was spelled unusual. She asked what it was,
I told her, and she said, “Oh, so it’s spelled L-E-I-G-H instead of L-E-E.”
I replied, “Neither.”
Whereupon she said, she’d have guessed “Li” except there is
clearly no Asian ancestry in me.
“Yeah, well, that’s not right either.”
And another teacher complained about my own atrocious
spelling. (Thank God for Spell Check!) And I smiled at him and pointed out how
my middle name is spelled, how Konnie’s first and middle is spelled, and how
the oldest of our brother’s first name is spelled, then I informed him that our
big sister’s name was spelled correctly because our mother got it from the paper’s
headlines that day. Then I told him, “I think it’s in my genes!”
But Konnie does have a point, not all of us feel the same
way about our names, but have we ever considered how our characters feel about
their names?
What’s the story behind your main character’s name? Does it
have some effect on the character?
I do have one character where there is a rather detailed
story behind her name, and it goes back to her very existence. It does have a
bearing on the story, and on her. Have you ever had a character like that?
Or have you ever had a character who was sensitive in some
way about their name? Or maybe hated their name? Sometimes kids don’t like the
names their parents saddled them with. How does that make the character feel?
How do they react to it?
Or how about a story with a sort “A Boy Named Sue” scenario?
How does the fellow feel about that? And what does he do?
Then too, the reverse can occur. Does the fact that your
female character has a masculine sounding name effect who they are? Or do they
take it in stride?
Names do mean something in real life, they should mean
something for characters, and affect them the same way.
