Clamouring to become visible...

This is adapted from an article that appeared on the Write Anything website on February 10, 2008. The original text can be found here.

What's in a name?

I visited the Chelsea Physic Garden on Saturday, the oldest botanical garden in London, and a garden where Karl von Linné (known as Linnaeus) spent some time after developing the binomial system for naming plants. In the centre of the garden are the Systematic Beds, where plants are laid out by family. Of course, with the advent of DNA and cladistic analysis, the original Linnaean idea of determining plant families purely by studying their sexual parts has been abandoned, but the binomial system of genus and species name remains.

Names are hugely important in the botanical world. A rose by any other name would only smell as sweet if all botanists agreed to call it by the same other name. Through correct naming, everyone can be certain that they are dealing with the same plant, or the same family of plant, an important consideration when you are aiming to synthesise a chemical compound for using in pharmaceuticals, or when you need to know which plants are poisonous and which aren’t (onions and daffodil bulbs look the same, but daffodil bulbs can kill if eaten!).

Botanists are incredibly careful about naming plants - are you as careful when coming up with character names?

How do you come up with a character’s name? Is it one of the first things you decide about them, or the final thing? Does the name determine the personality and attitude of the character? Or is it a mere tag to identify them in the text?

Speaking for myself, many names I use are simply afterthoughts, especially in my Fiction Friday entries. I need a name, any name, and will randomly assign one, often the name of someone I have recently been talking to or dealing with in life.

For other fiction though, I’m more careful. Whereas Fiction Friday is five minutes of writing and a few short paragraphs, longer works of fiction stay with you. The name really needs to fit the character, and fit them well. So sometimes a name becomes a struggle to find. Cardinal Mancini was Mancini from a very early stage, but was originally Vincent, not Joseph as he is now. Gideon Strangechild has always been called that, a case of nominative determinism. Al and Lex are short forms of their full character names, and those names are poorly translated Latin versions of short phrases that sum up their characters.

Over time, each character allowed me to discover what their name was. Of course you can take an easy route and write about existing characters that others have named. Throughout the story various angels, demons and historical figures crop up, and so I didn’t need to worry about names for them. The character of Raguel for instance, is an archangel according to Rabbinic lore.

So, when coming up with a character in your writing, do names matter? Do you spend time searching for just the right name? Or does a character by any other name still smell as sweet?