When I start a story, I typically have no idea what my character’s names will end up being. As proof, I offer the working title of a novel I’m currently editing. The file name in Scrivener is Smith One.
This book started with two primary characters. Smith and Hart. For the sake of simplicity, I used John Smith and Jessica Hart. Why Jessica and John? For some strange reason when I need to come up with first names quickly, they always begin with the letter J.
After getting a few chapters into the story I changed Smith to Adler, so my protagonist (at the time) was now John Adler. Still lame, but better. He was starting to come to life. Unfortunately, the female character was not. My plan was for her to be Robin to Adler’s Batman, or maybe Watson to Adler’s Holmes, but it wasn’t happening. Did she need a better name?
Scrivener has a first name generator, but it didn’t help. I kept changing her name, but she kept shaking her head no.
Let me describe this character for you. She’s a 5’7″ ball of energy with long, nearly uncontrollable red hair. A former military police officer, she left the army after six years and turned into a corporate security drone. Then something happened that flipped her life completely upside down. She’s a strong woman, and she wasn’t going any further until she had a valid name.
Here’s where the story completely stalled out for me. Could a character’s name really be this important during this early stage of the writing process?
I pondered this for an hour or so, then I remembered a conversation I had with Peter Leonard earlier in the year. He shared some advice he received from his well know father, Elmore, about character names.
According to Peter, he and his father were having dinner one night, a few months before Elmore passed, and Peter mentioned his work in process, UNKNOWN REMAINS. (Scheduled for release in 2015.)
“Who’s your bad guy in the book,” Elmore asked, after hearing a summary of the story.
“I have two of them,” Peter said, “Ruben Diaz and Dale Pollard.”
“Dale Pollard isn’t a bad guy name,” Elmore said. (I wanted to use the tag “Elmore replied” here, but I couldn’t do it when quoting him. See number three of Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules .)
Peter told me he chuckled at the comment, and the conversation moved on, but he thought about what his father, the acknowledged master of crime fiction, had told him.
The next time the two of them had dinner together he told his father he agreed with him. Dale Pollard was not the right name for a bad guy. He asked Elmore how he liked the name Dwayne Cobb.
“Now that’s a bad guy’s name!” Elmore said.
Peter continued his story, explaining what a huge difference the name change had made in his novel. Suddenly the character was real to him.
So Peter Leonard became a firm believer in getting the names right, from the beginning.
Hey, this is second-hand advice from Elmore Leonard given through his son, who’s a successful author of crime fiction himself. I may be a slow learner, but I am teachable. I took the advice.
I forced myself to work through the alphabet, coming up with at least four names for each letter until I hit the Rs, and that’s when it hit me. Reno. Reno Hart.
Peter’s advice got my butt back in the writing chair. Reno became so real to me that she took over the story. My original protagonist, Marcus Adler, took a supporting character role in both the novel, and in a series of short stories I’m writing about Reno.
So what’s in a name? For me, a new series. Smith One was intended to be a 10,000 word short story, but once Reno Hart stepped onto the stage, she changed those plans. The working title of the novel is now Reno’s Debt.
You can check out the publication schedule for the Reno Hart series here.
If you’re curious about what those dinners between Elmore and Peter Leonard might have looked like, check out this marvelous CNN article, Grit on wry: A dinner with Elmore and Peter Leonard.
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