Writing names, by Deborah Jenkins
How do you choose names for the towns, roads and shops where your characters spend their time? It may not seem an important exercise but in my opinion, to make our work authentic, it's important to get them right.
I said to my daughter-in-law recently that I think she and my son have moved to a 'posh-sounding' road. She asked me to explain. I said that Oakwood Drive has a definite ring to it, oak and wood conjuring up images of ancient woodland crowned with towering trees. As for Drive, this sounded somehow smarter than Road or Close, and more imposing than Crescent. So the combined effect, for me, conjures up images of detached houses in a leafy road with little traffic. I am, in fact, partly right. But the point is. the name made an impression, giving me a mental picture of the place before I'd even seen it. The names we choose in our writing can do the same.
As a 'nature person', always aware of my environment, always looking out of windows for trees or a scrap of sky, I like to describe settings, so it's important to me to have a sensory picture of the place I'm writing about. So far, I've always set stories in places I know. The problem with my latest one is that I wanted to change things about the town to suit the plot. My publisher said this wasn't a problem but I felt uncomfortable knowing people who live there might read it and think, 'That's not right. How dare she tamper with our town!'' It might put them off, distract them from the story. I don't want that for my readers, so I decided to change the road and place names so the town was in effect, imaginary. This was harder than I thought. I felt I would be losing faith with my setting if I didn't somehow remain true to the original names. So I thought hard about each one and tried to make the new versions chime with the old.
Oldfield Road became Newbarn Road, Priory Road changed to Abbey Road, Linden Road to Laurel Road. People who know the setting won't be taken in, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that I could make other changes - a large green in the centre, some waste ground - with impunity. More importantly, I have peace of mind about them. There are enough things to feel nervous about when a book is published. It's worth minimising concerns when we can.
When we visited our daughter in south London, we were fascinated by some shop names. The Divine Diner, Heaven Estate Agents, The Grill Father all caught our attention. As did the Shekinah Glory Unisex Hair Salon. Great name. My least favourite was Ape's Go Vinyl (because of the misplaced apostrophe).
Those names could have come straight from a book. But what I want is for the names in my book to come straight from real life. Or at least, seem to.
How do you write names?
Deborah Jenkins is the author of textbooks, educational articles and a novella, The Evenness of Things, available in paperback and as a kindle e-book.
I use real places which makes it both easier and harder.
ReplyDeleteWendy, totally agree!
DeleteAll my locations have been invented (though one at least, in France, is based on a real place, with what I hope is a convincing name.) I sometimes look at a map for inspiration, changing names by a syllable or a vowel, or combining parts of words, in the hope of sounding authentic.(I once entertained myself on a car journey noting place names and changing syllables around.)And others just appear in my mind by some kind of magic! You are right that when choosing names in stories, whether of a town, a road, a person or anything else, it's important to get it right.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great idea - to look at maps etc and change parts of names. I used the London A-Z at some point and did something similar, merging the front of one name with the back of another. Haha re the car journey thing! I will remember that. I get so bored on long journeys. That's genius!!
DeleteI agree completely about names - and especially characters' names. I can give up on a book very easily if the writer has got the names painfully wrong. It's easily done if someone is writing about a country they don't know well (as a Scot I cringe so often over totally unsuitable names chosen by non-Scots for their Scottish characters!). And non-Brits seem not to be aware of the sharply differentiated social contexts of names especially in England. For example servants in Regency England have very different names from the landed gentry but so often American Regency novels use lower-class names for their heroes and upper-class names for their kitchen maids! For my historical novels, I trawled the census for people with similar occupations and ages to my characters and chose from a shortlist of those names. Gloriously procrastinating!
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely! It could almost be a full-time job! That's very interesting what you say about Scottish names. I must remember to check with a Scottish person if I ever put characters from Scotland in a book. Which I would love to, as I could listen to an imaginary (or even better, real) Scottish accent for hours!
DeleteIn my memoir, I used real street names as I made it obvious that it was set in Warwick as that's where I also am set! But I did make up the name of the school just to protect the guilty. In my novel - the current WIP - I've made up the names of the streets even though it's clearly still based in Warwickshire. I did wonder about that, though - whether to just anonymise the place completely. Tricky!
ReplyDeleteI agonised for a long time about that. I was intrigued that my publisher didn't think a real place with imaginary features was a problem. But I couldn't bear to think of people rolling their eyes about the setting and therefore mentally dismissing the rest of it. Not easy is it?
DeleteYes, names are important, and they certainly include giving 'social signals'. For example, yesterdayI was changing some names and I gave a character the name 'Rupert'. Immediately I knew - as would the reader- that the woman who'd been married to him was, at least by implication, 'higher status' than her present spouse - though all are 'middle class'. I pondered that. I let it go: the step-son is at private school, so... History is important too - I've been up-dating the names in some short stories I wrote in the 1990s - for these, a baby-name site can be useful in giving children & teens appropriate names, and avoiding ones that are out of fashion... I l ove the road-name changes you made, Deborah, working on what was there in reality and being subtle!
ReplyDeleteThank you Clare! And I so agree about thinking the name thing through carefully. Yes those baby name sites are great aren't they? I sometimes think of the age of my character, work out when he/she would have been born, and put 'popular names for boys born in 1960' into google. Very handy!
DeleteOne reason I like to write fantasy is that I can invent everything! However, even my crime novels are set in imaginary places - though with suggested connections to real places, so that they have some grounding in the real world.
ReplyDeleteIn my 'Local' series I was careful never to mention the name of the imaginary town in which all the main action happens, though some surrounding villages have (made up) names. That needed a bit of careful wording at times, but so far I've managed to keep it anonymous. The reason being that I didn't want anyone to try and identify the place. However, this didn't stop some US readers thinking it was set in London!
Over the course of the books I've had to come up with more and more names for different streets and different parts of my imaginary town, which has grown quite detailed in my head. In one of them it became particularly important as street names provided a crucial clue for my MC.
Yes, I guess that's why some authors have whole maps in the front of their books. Perhaps this helps them as much as the readers. I have never thought of writing fantasy but I can certainly see the advantage re inventing everything!
DeleteHey! I totally understand your words 'always looking out of windows for trees or a scrap of sky'. Agree that names are very important. I was once advised by an agent to change the name Mrs Ayres to something else, in order to avoid having to write Mrs Ayres' cat, for example, or, the person said, should it be Mrs Ayres's cat? The thing is, Mrs Ayres didn't want to change her name and she became very resentful. The agent never did place the book.
ReplyDeleteLoved this. And a Drive does sound much posher than a Road or a Close. A Rise can be quite lah-de-dah too. I don't use many place names in Isabella, although I scatter real Suffolk ones in there. I had a make up a village pub for book 2. We have the Unruly Pig near us which I changed to the Greedy Pig. There is also a little village in North Suffolk called Metfield so I just plonked "Parva" on the end of it and the job was a good 'un.
DeleteVeronica, I'm glad you are a fellow window-seeker! That's fascinating re Mrs Ayres and your agent. And I so know what you mean re resisting name changes. I wrote my whole book with street names from the actual town I lived in and then decided at the last minute to change them all. It actually hurt!!
DeleteRuth, I LOVE the Unruly Pig as a name! I never thought of a Rise. Yes, that definitely has connotations. Metfield Parva is a genius place name!!
DeleteI totally agree with the idea of using real names of places, streets, towns, etc in our writing to make it authentic. I remember how I felt reading a book that had the names and areas of a city I knew so well and I immediately bonded with the story! Lovely post Deborah!
ReplyDeleteThank you Sophia!
DeleteThank you Sophia!
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