{"id":575,"date":"2022-03-12T18:25:49","date_gmt":"2022-03-12T18:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/?p=575"},"modified":"2022-03-12T18:25:49","modified_gmt":"2022-03-12T18:25:49","slug":"practice-and-theory-of-naming-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/?p=575","title":{"rendered":"Practice and Theory of Naming Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Most stories start small for me and then accrete, like a pearl in a clam. The story I\u2019m working on now has grown to 8,000 words, and I\u2019m still writing the last scene. My challenge is that it\u2019s a teaching story with a large cast: the teacher, a student teacher, a janitor and twenty-four students. I\u2019m working at portraying a class environment. As the story stands now, I\u2019ve named ten of the twenty-four students (and a couple parents).That\u2019s a lot of balls to keep in the air!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is the impact of those names. At what point would readers toss up their hands and say, \u201cI can\u2019t keep the characters straight,\u201d or would readers realize there are quite a few names, but only the characters who keep popping up rise to importance while the others settle into the background?Either reaction is possible. I believe any writing challenge can be overcome with the right collaboration between a careful writer and competent reader. That\u2019s one of writing\u2019s joys: anything is possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I write the last scene, though, I\u2019m deciding which characters to use. Not all of them will appear, and I realized over the course of the couple weeks I\u2019ve been working on this piece that I\u2019ve lost touch myself of everyone in the story, so I inventoried them. Here\u2019s the list I created with the first page the character appears and then how many times total I mentioned the name:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Milspaugh pg.1\u201473 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew Tyndale pg. 1\u201453 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jed Rote pg.2\u201440 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dove Klein pg. 2\u201438 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dennis Cho pg. 12\u20146 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cassie-Lasila Arms pg. 13\u20148 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paisley Lopez-Sang pg. 14\u20147 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Len and Amelia Tyndale pg. 14\u20141 mention<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lisa Fromme pg. 15\u20141 mention<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby Gwinn pg. 17\u20141 mention<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harmony Dlamini pg. 19\u20145 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jim John pg. 22\u20143 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sharon Hann pg. 23\u20144 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ryan Bigelow pg. 24\u20143 mentions<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hot damn! That\u2019s a big list. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A closer look at number of mentions reveals my cast centers on the top four characters: the teacher who is my protagonist, Ms. Milspaugh, her student teacher, Jed Rote, and two students, Andrew Tyndale and Dove Klein.The rest are supporting cast. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tried to pick names that reflected different origins to show Ms. Milspaugh\u2019s class, like many real-world classes, comes from diverse backgrounds (my default when I don\u2019t think about it is almost always north-western European). I also didn\u2019t want the names to be visually similar. Different first letters help with this, as do names with different shapes. At first glance, Dennis Cho doesn\u2019t look like Ryan Bigelow, so the eye cues help to differentiate them. I notice I have two names that are hyphenated, which might make them hard to distinguish. I\u2019ll give that more thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did choose a few names from my life. \u201cMilspaugh\u201d was the name of one of my junior high teachers who was memorable. I knew a pair of sisters in high school named \u201cKlein.\u201d One of my sisters is a \u201cSharon.\u201d\u201cJed Rote\u201d was chosen because of the meaning of his last name in the same spirit as the naming of Han Solo, Truman Burbank, and Willy Loman. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"List<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I love how Charles Dickens created characters. Part of his genius was in giving them cool names: Seth Pecksniff, Mrs. Jellyby, Samuel Pickwick, Uriah Heep and many others. I\u2019m not doing cool naming the same way he did in my story, although I do like the names I\u2019ve chosen. A classroom of characters all named the way Dickens named characters would be awesome, though. What I do want to borrow from him, is his really well-done pocket characterizations. He could create a character in just a sentence or two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Ayresleigh<\/strong> (Pickwick Papers<\/em>) “A middle aged man in a very old suit of black, who looked pale and haggard, and paced up and down the room incessantly: stopping now and then to look with great anxiety out of the window as if he expected somebody, and then resuming his walk.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miss Barbary <\/strong>(Bleak House<\/em>) “She was a good, good woman! She went to church three times every Sunday, and to morning prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, and to lectures whenever there were lectures; and never missed. She was handsome; and if she had ever smiled, would have been (I used to think) like an angel–but she never smiled. She was always grave and strict. She was so very good herself, I thought, that the badness of other people made her frown all her life.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ned Beadwood<\/strong> (David Copperfield<\/em>) “It won’t do to be like long Ned Beadwood, when they took him to church “to marry him to somebody”, as he says, and left the bride behind. Ha! ha! ha! A wicked rascal, Ned, but droll!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a quick dive into Dickens\u2019 characterizations and also a revelation in how many characters he created.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At any rate, this longish post came from me pausing to create the list of characters in my current project and got me thinking about names and characters. I\u2019m not looking for advice about this ill-advised story problem I\u2019ve written myself into. Writing into story problems is half the fun of creating fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most stories start small for me and then accrete, like a pearl in a clam. The story I\u2019m working on now has grown to 8,000 words, and I\u2019m still writing the last scene. My challenge is that it\u2019s a teaching story with a large cast: the teacher, a student teacher, a janitor and twenty-four students. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,20,6,3,41],"tags":[28,12,9,7,10],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-characterization","category-craft","category-short-stories","category-writing","category-writing-advice","tag-characterization","tag-craft","tag-short-stories","tag-writing","tag-writing-advice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":576,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions\/576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}