JAN BROGAN _ Since Barbara Hambly's first published fantasy in 1982 – The Time of the Dark – she has touched most bases in genre fiction: her most recent vampire novel is The Magistrates of Hell (Severn House, 2012) and her most recent historical whodunnit, Ran Away, continues the well-reviewed Benjamin January series. She also writes historical mysteries as Barbara Hamilton (The Ninth Daughter, and its sequels A Marked Man and Sup With the Devil). In addition – when she can – she writes short fiction about the further adventures of characters from her fantasy novels of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
NAMING NAMES
How
is it that the villain’s evil henchmen are always named things like Ugmush and
Weevil?
Did
Mr. and Mrs. Orc, gazing adoringly upon their little hatchling, exclaim, “How
cute he is! How dimpled and sweet! Let’s call him Ugmush!”
Or
is “Ugmush” Orcish for “Bright Hope”?
(How
would you tell?)
I’m
as guilty as anyone else in this department. I spend a lot of time over the
names of my characters, trying on one after another, as if the names were
reflections of – and clues to – their personalities.
Villains
are easy. You can tell Charles Dickens had a lot of fun in that department:
names like Skimpole and Krook, Bumble and Scrooge and Dedlock, all reek of
petty viciousness. Dickens had a beautiful knack for making extremely
English-sounding names that were sly digs at those who labored under them. I
try to do the same, with occasional (I think) success. In the Benjamin January
series, I generally thumb through my well-worn glossary of archaic colonial
English, to find words for vile things which I then make the names of
slave-dealers in the stories, names like Gleet (a genital sore caused by
venereal disease) or Mulm (the disgusting green amalgam of algae and fish-poo
that develops at the bottom of an aquarium if you don’t clean it often enough).
Heroes, sidekicks, and secondary characters (whom I persist in thinking of as “guest stars” thanks to WAY too much television as a child) require a different combination of euphony and likelihood. Though in Real Life people generally receive their names completely at random, in a novel, a hero has to sound like a hero… or at least not sound trivial. For whatever reason, and I’m not sure why, some names sound stronger than others. Not many people would take seriously a spy named Clarence Bond. Or Ted Bond. It could be done, but the writer of the book had better be damn good to carry it off. Yet Clarence, or Theodore, are perfectly good English names (along with such other rejects as Evelyn, Wilf, Howard, and Alfred). And in fact they’d be fine for a secondary character – a cab-driver, or the friendly shlub that the villain kills in Chapter Two just to prove what a rotter he is.
But
not for the hero.
I have a whole shelf of name-the-baby books for this purpose, the best of which is Peoples’ Names, by Holly Ingraham (MacFarland Press), which was written for role-players and divides them up by nationality, gender, and, wonderfully, time-period. In the Middle Ages, nearly everybody was named Henry or Matilda. I’ll admit I’m a perfectionist, but nothing drops me out of a romance quicker than twelfth-century heroines named Brittany. When writing about that time-period, one has to work with a fairly small list of female names, though after the Protestant Reformation you get a slew of Biblicals and with the Renaissance you acquire all sorts of classical Greek and Roman options.
The
book also has typical last names (for those eras that used such things), but
often I’ll either comb through research books for the names of contributers or
archivists (Guillenormand sounds, for some reason, a lot
more authentically French than the usual fallbacks like LaSalle and Dumonde),
or I’ll do what Georgette Heyer did, and look for place-names in an atlas. How
much more English can you get than Marden or Kinver? Some people simply use
telephone directories. I am frequently reminded of that scene in The Mighty Aphrodite, where Woody Allen
and Helena Bonham Carter are trying to come up with a name for their adopted
infant: Eric? Groucho? Phileas? Phileas
is a guy who forecloses on a mortgage…
It’s
a comfort to me to know that Dickens occasionally did what I do, and named all
the major characters in the book names which start with the same letter (my
editors are always getting on me for that): Smallweed, Snagsby, Summerson,
Skimpole in the same tale. I catch myself doing that and then I have to fumfer
around looking for another name that has the same “ring”. (My current project,
one of the “guest stars” has gone through about seven different names. Either
they just don’t sound quite right, or they’re too similar to somebody else’s in
the same story.) (Or else I discover – with the same sort of “unconscious
plagiarism” suffered by George Harrison when he wrote “My Sweet Lord” to a tune
that turned out to be the old Chiffons hit, “He’s So Fine” – that the name that
sounds so right, sounds so right because I’ve heard it someplace else, like
Robert Morley or Thomas Wyatt or, famously, Ford Prefect. That’s where a quick
pass through Google really helps).
And
of course, once you get into fantasy, all bets are off. Though I will say that
random name-generators that simply mash letters, more often than not produce
things that don’t sound like names.
One can’t – or at least I can’t –
imagine anyone’s friends really saying, “Hi, Mrsquipx, how’s it going?” Anyone
who hangs out long enough on World of Warcraft is familiar with this
phenomenon. Again, it’ll work occasionally for cab-drivers but not for the
hero. And anyway, the last time I was putting together ideas for a fantasy, an
editor told me that people seem to prefer those sort of almost-English names
(like Bilbo, Frodo, Pippin and John Stark) that are easier to remember, rather
than Azathoth and Frasticarion.
Are
other writers as OCD about their characters’ names as I am?
Do
other people fret and fuss and try them on and off like sweaters, trying to get
them just right? (Margaret Mitchell called her heroine Pansy O’Hara all the way
up to the final draft of Gone With the Wind…
PANSY???)
Often
when I’m putting together a new story, the first day consists of just writing
lists of names: Who ARE these people?
Pansy
O’Hara, meet Wilfred “Skippy” Bond…
*
Where
do you get your character names from? How important are names, anyway?
Barbara's short fiction can be purchased via download from her website, www.barbarahambly.com. She teaches History part-time, and if you’re interested in her views on the weather, her cats, World of Warcraft, and sometimes writing, you can read her blog at barbara_hambly@ livejournal.com. She also does Twitter. Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.
